The Politics of Invisibility: the Emergence of India’s Many Green Parties

While climate policy demands have recently begun figuring in the election manifestos of India’s dominant political parties, no ‘Green party’ in India currently occupies an electorally competitive position. This paper studies the rapid emergence of new Green parties in India over the short span of the last few years. Focusing on two parties registered with the Election Commission of India (ECI)— the Indian National Green Party, which explicitly chooses to lobby over standing for elections, and the India Greens Party, which stood for the 2020 Delhi state elections unsuccessfully, this paper attempts to uncover the politics of their emergence and their legal status, and their location within an international network of Green parties. In India’s party-dominated, multi-party democracy, these new Green Parties are electorally insignificant. However, I contend that analysing them as they freshly begin to politically organise offers a unique perspective into not just party politics in the Indian polity, but the politics of environmental networks in India. Returning to the performative turn in the social sciences, the paper looks at processes and performances of ‘claim-making’ by these parties, to frame a sociological reading of green and green-adjacent parties in India. How and why do these green parties set themselves apart from other green organisations in India? The paper draws from the qualitative and interpretative analyses of the parties’ manifestoes, websites, social media, and press and media reports, in addition to interviews conducted by the author with the founders and members of both selected green parties to answer this question. In doing this, the paper brings together two fields very rarely in conversation with each other in the Indian context: scholarship on green politics and the scholarship on political parties. It contextualises the overlap and the tensions between the ‘green’ and the ‘party’ elements in an Indian ‘green party’. It argues that contextualising Indian green parties simultaneously in green politics and in the history of Indian party politics allows us to see the ways in which the category of the ‘green party’ in India needs to be understood differently from the green parties of the Global North. Through this, the paper makes an intervention in the field of environmental politics and also contributes to the broader scholarship around what kind of legal or organisation entity the political party is within a nation-state.