For sixteen years, from 1977 to 1993, The Coca-Cola Company had forsaken business in India rather than concede to the postcolonial socialist state's regulations on multinational corporations. But executives of The Coca-Cola Company continued to avidly eye India as “one of the world's largest potential soft drink markets.”Footnote 1 Its future, the company had long believed, lay in reaching developing markets and their growing populations of consumers. And in India the per capita consumption of carbonated drinks was a tiny fraction of that in the United States, with the possibility for the growth in profit demanded by the company's shareholders just as it had begun to slow in its developed western markets.Footnote 2 In 1993, The Coca-Cola Company got its chance, dramatically reentering India as the nation underwent economic liberalization. The history of Coca-Cola in India—its exile under state socialism in the 1970s, its high profile return in the free market 1990s, and its challenge from a peasant environmental movement in the 2000s—makes it helpful for thinking through the transformations and conflicts of the last quarter century. For those living it, The Coca-Cola Company's reentry made it a highly visible manifestation of Indian neoliberalism and thus the target of popular frustration with its failings.
With the sudden, almost ubiquitous presence of Coca-Cola in India at the moment of liberalization, it became both a sign of aspirational global consumer-citizenship for India's urban middle class and of corporate enclosure for those dispossessed of resources to fuel this consumption. Village communities around several of Coca-Cola's rural plants—most notably in Plachimada in the southern state of Kerala and in Mehdiganj in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the latter the focus hereFootnote 3—organized against the company's operations, which they accused of exploiting and polluting common groundwater in the production of bottled drinks as an increasing expanse of the country fell into a crisis of water scarcity. This movement has articulated a powerful critique of corporate globalization and privatization, illuminating the exploitation of the resources of the rural poor for the consumption of those on the other side of an increasingly widening economic divide in the vaunted new free marketplace of India. India's rural poor have also catalyzed an impressive local, national, and transnational social movement, linking their struggles with others through Coca-Cola's world system of capital, commodities, and culture that resulted in the creation of multinational pressure on the multinational corporation.Footnote 4 In the 2000s, as The Coca-Cola Company was localizing its image in Indian culture and society, Indian activists organizing around Coca-Cola plants were globalizing their resistance.
Socialism's Out, the Free Market—and Coca-Cola—Are In
While economic liberalization did not happen overnight, major changes came quickly in the 90s. In 1991 the Indian government found itself with rising external debt and declining foreign exchange reserves, threatening its ability to both pay back its debts and purchase foreign technology and materials perceived necessary for the country's development. The newly elected Congress Party and its finance minister Manmohan Singh set out to make the Indian marketplace attractive to foreign investors and corporations. In agreement with this new Indian economic program, the International Monetary Fund intervened in the crisis with loans conditional on economic reforms: fiscal austerity to curb government spending, privatization of state-owned industries, and deregulation of the Indian marketplace. With India's membership in the World Trade Organization, the country overturned its abstruse regulatory “license raj”, reduced tariffs on imports, eased restrictions on multinational corporations doing business in India (including a law prohibiting multinationals from selling products under internationally-known trademarks), and encouraged foreign direct investment. In this context, global brands—Coca-Cola among the most prominent—became symbolic of India's economic liberalization, as in articles with titles like “A Revolution Transforms India: Socialism's Out, Free Market In,” which led with the narrative of Coca-Cola's 1970s departure and 1990s return.Footnote 5 Coca-Cola's vice president (and future CEO), E. Neville Isdell, unambiguously celebrated the company's reentry as “a concrete expression of our confidence in the Government of India's measures to liberalize the Indian economy and welcome foreign investment.”Footnote 6 And with more than a billion dollars spent on its Indian operations in its first ten years in the country, Coca-Cola was “one of the country's top international investors.”Footnote 7
Unlike the international commodity chains from production to consumption of many global commodities, Coca-Cola's products are typically sold in the same geographic areas where they are bottled by plants owned by a financially related, but legally separate regional bottling corporation, shielding The Coca-Cola Company from the risks of direct ownership. Thus rather than import Cokes and the company's other proprietary drinks into India from other locations, The Coca-Cola Company sought to establish a system of bottlers within the country. After several years of effort, it bought out the brands and bottling network of the largest Indian soft drink company, Parle. In the meantime, Coca-Cola launched an Indian subsidiary, Coca-Cola India Pvt., Ltd., to produce concentrate and market its line of beverages.Footnote 8 But its efforts to organize a separate, consolidated bottler corporation ran into resistance from the independent bottlers who refused to merge or sell out to others.Footnote 9 Coca-Cola thus decided to exert direct control over production, owning and managing about half of its Indian bottling operations itself through another subsidiary, Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Pvt., including bottling plants in Mehdiganj, Uttar Pradesh; Kala Dera, Rajasthan; and Plachimada, Kerala. The Indian government agreed to this arrangement with the stipulation that The Coca-Cola Company would divest forty-nine percent ownership of Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages to Indian shareholders by 2002—a demand that never came to pass as just ten percent is currently Indian-owned.Footnote 10 With greater control over its Indian operations, Coca-Cola set out to double its production capacity through expansion and modernization of its bottling system, which grew to twenty-five plants owned by the company and another twenty-five by franchisees.Footnote 11 The company also invested heavily in broadening its “drink portfolio” in India by introducing its global brands and marketing others specific to South Asian markets, as well as a product poignantly representative of the commodification of common resources: bottled water. In India, as in many global south countries where governments have not provided safe drinking water, bottled water companies are exploiting common water resources to cash in on the willingness of the middle and upper classes to choose the market option of paying significant sums for private drinking water rather than making demands on the state for investment in public water infrastructure. Before liberalization, the bottled water market in India had been miniscule with sales less than two million cases a year. But by 2005, Coca-Cola and several other bottled water manufacturers, led in sales by the Indian company Bisleri, were doing a business of eighty-two million cases per year.Footnote 12
Thanda (Cold Drink) Comes To Mean Coca-Cola
While the material production of Coca-Cola in India became more international with the US-based corporation's control of the bottling business, Coca-Cola advertising conversely attempted to adapt the representational production of the brand to local culture, or “glocalize” it, as advertising executives claimed. This was a departure from Coca-Cola's recent global advertising campaigns with their standardized appeals to assumed universals declaring it was “Always Coca-Cola” everywhere in the world.Footnote 13 The slick “Life Ho To Aisi” advertising campaign, meaning “Life As It Should Be” in evocative Hinglish, placed Coca-Cola in India's global cities and the lives of its aspiring consumer world citizens. The commercials featured the likes of Bollywood star Aishwarya Rai singing out from her penthouse apartment to the sleek cityscape all around her, hailing the urban middle class with a celebration of both Coca-Cola and their opportunity to freely consume their way into the global “good life” in the new marketplace of international brands within India.Footnote 14
But to grow profits more dramatically, The Coca-Cola Company sought to connect more deeply with “Indianness” and a broader swath of the Indian population by “speak[ing] the … language” of the “rural masses as well as the lower socio economic classes”Footnote 15 who comprised the majority of the nation, but with little disposable income were infrequent consumers of the company's products. Because, in India, “refreshment was real, earthy and unaffected by global trends,” in marketing-speak, and Coca-Cola wanted to be seen as a central part of it.Footnote 16 In a massive advertising campaign that saturated media spaces from television to facades of buildings, the company mined popular rural and working class culture to construct the localness of its product for its primarily middle and upper class consumers with the repeated tagline “Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola” or “Cold Drink Means Coca-Cola.” The ads called on the immense popularity of Bollywood star Aamir Khan as he played up “mass sensibilities … [and] local lingo,” comically portraying various stereotypical regional Indian common men and their love of Coca-Cola.Footnote 17
But the “Thanda Matlab Coca-Cola” campaign went even further, making the commonplace of Indian daily life and culture proprietarily Coca-Cola's. The advertising aimed to impress upon the audience that the popular Hindi word “thanda”—and its rural colloquial usage meaning “cold drink” for all kinds of beverages like water, soda, lassi, or nimbu pani—was “generic for Coca-Cola”; when someone asks for “thanda” they really “mean Coca-Cola,” as the tagline says.Footnote 18
Toward this goal, the television commercials progressively asserted thanda's resignification as Coca-Cola. In the first ad, Aamir Khan's Mumbai street-tough character asserts the association of Coca-Cola with thanda by explaining that when he orders a thanda he really means a Coke. In the second, Khan's Hyderabadi shopkeeper instructs customers to ask for thanda to get Coca-Cola. And by the third, when three attractive urban girls on a road trip through the countryside thirstily stop to ask Khan's Punjabi farmer for a thanda expecting water, he pulls the bucket up from his well to magically reveal glistening, cold Cokes.Footnote 19,Footnote 20 This last commercial unconsciously articulated the hierarchy of rural/extraction and urban/consumption characteristic of the Coca-Cola commodity chain in neoliberal India. In proclaiming that “Thanda Means Coca-Cola,” The Coca-Cola Company enclosed a whole symbolic commons of communication and drinking culture for its own—what once had meant water now “means” Coke—privatizing this collectively understood term for the Coca-Cola brand; it “made the almost universal rural word (thanda) … a hot catchphrase.”Footnote 21 But as these commercials went to air, Indian villagers were actively organizing against these symbolic and material enclosures of the system of rural/extraction and urban/consumption of the Coca-Cola commodity, protesting the dispossession of their communities' water by neighboring Coca-Cola plants.
Essential Ingredient: Corporate Expropriation of the Water Commons
To access reserves of water as well as cheap labor, The Coca-Cola Company located much of its production in rural communities outside of larger metropolitan areas, as is the case of Mehdiganj outside of the city of Varanasi. This was in line with the Indian government's shift from state- to market-led forces to fuel the economic development of rural India, as it disavowed previous rural economic and social welfare policies and overlooked the lack of environmental regulations. In this context, state and local governments compete to attract corporations like Coca-Cola by creating industrial areas, Special Economic Zones, and financial incentives like tax exemptions to encourage industries to invest in “underdeveloped” or “backward” areas.Footnote 22 Here the majority of residents are poor farmers or landless agricultural workers who are under extreme economic and environmental stress, part of what has been called an agrarian crisis in India.Footnote 23 The roots of this crisis are deep: Beginning in the 1960s the agricultural development of the “Green Revolution” fed India's large population and reduced its vulnerability to famine but also over-exploited water and land with intensive irrigation and agrochemical application. Liberalization has since compounded this environmental toll on rural India, exacerbating disparities in economic and cultural power with the shift from statist development's focus on poverty alleviation in rural India, to a market-directed consumerist paradigm catering to the growth of the middle and upper classes.Footnote 24 Its unrestrained and uneven industrial growth with weak environmental and social protections has wrought “environmental degradation and social dislocation” that have disproportionately affected marginalized groups: Dalits and “backward classes” (lower caste peoples); Adivasis (indigenous peoples), the landless, rural, and urban poor.Footnote 25 Higher costs for electricity (to run water pumps), seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides needed to cultivate environmentally degrading land, and the deregulation of the banking sector and subsequent credit crunch for farmers seeking loans to pay for these inputs, has led to extreme indebtedness.Footnote 26 Environmentalists predict severe droughts and floods as monsoons become more erratic with climate change. Changes to the environment, especially those that affect water—a season without monsoon, a corporate neighbor draining groundwater reserves, degrading water quality, or a flood of industrial effluents on farmland—can put a farmer into crisis.
In Uttar Pradesh ninety percent of landholding farmers are considered “small and marginal,” having on average only a little more than an acre, while over forty percent, or 6.92 million households, in the state are in debt.Footnote 27 At the same time, the second source of livelihood in the villages, the sari weaving industry for which the renowned Benarsi (Varanasi) silk saris are named, has declined as economic liberalization fills the textile market with cheaper, mass-produced, modern clothing. In Mehdiganj, farmers have cultivated more water intensive rice paddy in their search for economically viable crops. With infrequent electricity to the area, farmers run their water pumps, or rent time on neighbors' pumps, to flood their lands with as much water as possible while the power lasts. As the primary use of land in areas like Mehdiganj, agriculture is still the largest use of water, and Coca-Cola executives have argued that the farmers are sucking their own wells dry. But industrialization and urbanization, in every place they occur, bring with them increased water use and the introduction of a heavy industrial water user like Coca-Cola throws off an already insecure system in agricultural areas.Footnote 28 And while many areas of the state of Uttar Pradesh have experienced water shortages due to lack of monsoon—forcing farmers to rely more on the existing groundwater reserves that go without recharging rains—residents of Mehdiganj claim their problems began earlier with water levels dropping precipitously with the arrival of the plant. The community organization Lok Samiti reports that the number of wells that have dried since 2000 has increased fivefold compared to the decade before Coca-Cola's arrival and nearly half of the wells they surveyed in the villages around the plant are dry.Footnote 29
The Coca-Cola Company uses roughly three liters of water to produce each liter of soft drink or bottled water it sells. From 100-meter-deep borewells, each plant extracts hundreds of thousands of liters of groundwater a day to be processed, packaged, and sold as bottled water and soft drinks. During the heavy summer production months, which are also when farmers' lands and wells become parched, a day's extraction can be far higher.Footnote 30 Villagers and activists say these practices of The Coca-Cola Company constitute “water mining.” Coca-Cola bottlers draw groundwater with little regulation, and at virtually no cost. An archaic Indian law gives landowners private property rights not only to their land but whatever groundwater lies underneath.Footnote 31 Few states have enacted and implemented water resource legislation, even though national and state water policy statements acknowledge ever-increasing water scarcity and disparity in water resources and specify that drinking water and irrigation are higher priorities than hydropower or industrial uses in the planning of water resource management.Footnote 32 Thus, The Coca-Cola Company was not required to provide assessments of the potential environmental impact on water resources of their proposed plants, and the company's proprietary internal studies were focused solely “on ensuring a sustained supply of water for business operations.”Footnote 33 The company needed only to receive permissions from the panchayat (elected village council), who were often eager to see Coca-Cola's version of development, associated jobs, and additional tax revenues from a local plant. Rarely do agreements exist between Coca-Cola and a local panchayat with respect to limitations on their use of groundwater.Footnote 34 While a cess is collected on water consumed by industry, the charges are so miniscule that heavy water users like Coca-Cola can draw groundwater virtually for free—for example, the Mehdiganj plant pays around $700 for an entire year's water consumption.Footnote 35
The aquifers that lie under the Coca-Cola plants as well as neighboring villagers' lands are a natural resource commons, essential to both the biology of life and to biopolitical production, collectively owned and shared as it spans and disregards property demarcations. Exploitation or pollution of this shared resource disproportionately affects the rural poor who rely on it for their lives—for drinking, cooking, bathing—and their livelihoods—for irrigating their crops. But this water is increasingly out of their reach as groundwater levels drop. To irrigate their fields, poor farmers rent time on the electric pumps in the deeper wells of the larger landowners, exacerbating class divisions.Footnote 36 Landless agricultural workers are the first to lose work from failed crops. Near the Coca-Cola plant in Mehdiganj, the Dalit Musahar community's access to water is limited to a single hand-pump.Footnote 37 Women in Mehdiganj frequently discussed the disproportionate effect water scarcity had on their domestic work in water retrieval and cooking, drinking, and washing. They spent more time traveling longer distances to fetch water, standing in long lines at wells and pumps, which wore down their patience and resulted in “short fuses and quarrels,” before they had to arduously carry the water back to their homes. It was even worse when there was not enough water to wash and bathe. Some women spoke frankly about how “not having access to adequate water was a source of humiliation” that required them to ask neighbors with private borewells for water. They were often refused and forced “to swallow their pride and keep going back, and plead for water.”Footnote 38
“Coca-Cola, Quit India”: Community Organizing against the Global Corporation
Within a decade of The Coca-Cola Company's reentry to India, and in some areas within a few years of the establishment of new plants, a half-dozen communities accused the company of depleting groundwater through excessive water extraction and polluting reserves and neighboring lands in its disposal of industrial byproduct “sludge” material and effluent water.Footnote 39 The first of these protest movements to gain public attention both in India and internationally emerged in the spring of 2002 when villagers in Plachimada, Kerala, began a permanent sit-in in front of the Coca-Cola plant that abuts their homes. Since it started production in 2000, the plant's surrounding community grew increasingly frustrated watching truck after truck take bottled drinks to be sold across the state, while their fields failed to yield, the water tables dropped in their wells, and the remaining water tasted salty, bitter, and hard. Farmers were forced to shift from their previous water-intensive crops like paddy and coconut, resulting in vulnerability for landless agricultural laborers working the fields. The Plachimada protesters marched and held dharnas (sit-in hunger strikes) demanding the closure of the plant. They built a hut across the street from the plant to shield them from sun and rain, so they could continue their protest every day as they have done now for nearly a decade. The Plachimada protests arose from landless and poor peasants, mostly Adivasis from the Eravalar and Malasar communities, who lived in the settlement directly adjacent to the plant's grounds. Their movement against The Coca-Cola Company had its roots in the decades-long struggles of Adivasis in Kerala for land and self-governance rights. By the spring of 2003, after garnering significant media attention, the villagers swayed the local political leadership to their cause, and the panchayat refused to renew Coca-Cola's license and a year later the plant eventually shut down production. The Coca-Cola Company legally challenged the panchayat's authority to limit the rights of private companies to extract local groundwater, and the case has made its way to the Indian Supreme Court. This first campaign inspired other villages in distant states like Uttar Pradesh to organize against their Coca-Cola plants to create multiple points of pressure against the company and demand a say in the nature of the development in their communities.
While Mehdiganj residents remember a sense of hope about the jobs and development that would come with the arrival of the bottling industry, the relationship between the plant and many segments of the community quickly soured. Almost immediately from its construction in 1996 while still a prospective Parle bottler, the plant encountered resistance from those living closest to its walls, slowing the start of production.Footnote 40 Residents alleged that the plant illegally occupied common land owned by the village, including a local road used by the Kumhar (potter caste) community who live just behind the plant, and the village panchayat sued. The Parle bottler purportedly settled the dispute with political and economic pressure on the village panchayat,Footnote 41 who accepted other land in trade.
Agitation emerged from inside the plant as well, as workers pressed for better wages, benefits, and job security, challenging the system of temporary work and labor contracting, and attempting to organize a union. Several months into the plant's operation a group of workers began to organize to demand minimum-wage pay and benefits, inspired by the union at the nearby biscuit factory and armed with the labor code from meetings with the labor office in Varanasi. They won small wage increases from the plant. But they were still dissatisfied with their temporary status and seasonal work, with the company avoiding direct labor costs by outsourcing employment to a labor contractor. The plant employs only around 40 permanent workers, while around 200 are short-term, working full-time during the summer months of high soft drink sales and without jobs during the winter, no more than 120 days a year, making them ineligible for the rights and benefits of permanent employees.Footnote 42 When workers began to formally organize a union, their registration was denied by the state, and Coca-Cola began firing those making demands. In response, in 2002 a multi-caste group of workers went on strike, effectively shutting down the plant for a week, going back into work when winning a demand from management, then going back out on strike a few months later when demands were not met and leaders laid off. The plant discharged nearly 100 workers and, according to interviews, used a new contractor to hire replacement workers overwhelmingly from a single caste, Patel, causing friction in the community and physical altercations between the laid-off workers and the new hires. Coca-Cola responded by hiring new security guards, and the protests became violent. Charges of assault and violating the peace against four of the union leaders are still in the Varanasi courts. Still without a union and subject to the precariousness of short-term work, workers continued to be paid only some 66 rupees a day (about $1.65)Footnote 43 for 120 days of work. Many of these wages leave Mehdiganj, according to residents who complain that the labor contractor replaced much of the original local workforce with people from outside the area.Footnote 44
Grassroots efforts around the Mehdiganj plant's environmental impact began around the same time, when farmers and neighboring residents challenged the plant's routine disposal of manufacturing effluent wastewater into a nearby canal. The plant's drainage pipe was disrupted by the construction of the Grand Trunk Road superhighway, a massive modernization project with funding from the World Bank to connect India's four largest cities in a “Golden Quadrilateral” that—conveniently for Coca-Cola trucks—runs alongside the plant. Backed up by the construction, the plant's drain flooded acres of surrounding farmland with wastewater. Many of the farmers' crops were destroyed and other residents complained of skin irritation from contaminated water. In response, they created the Gaon Bachao Sangharsh Samiti (Save the Village Struggle Committee). The group organized a dharna with over 50 people sitting in a hunger strike for eight days on the affected land, demanding compensation from the government for the damaged crops and closure of the plant.Footnote 45 Leading Gaon Bachao Sangharsh Samiti were farmers with small to medium-sized landholdings (at most a few acres) closest to the plant. Members of the Kumhar community (landless, potter caste) joined in the protest, claiming that the effluent water that had reached their village was the cause of an outbreak of skin problems. As the plant continued operation, a broader swath of the village community began to complain that the water in their wells had taken on a reddish-yellow hue and tasted badly and, even more distressing, that the water level was visibly dropping.
These more vulnerable members of the villages mobilized against the company on a larger scale through a local community organization, Lok Samiti, or People's Committee, which counts a few thousand active participants in the villages outside Varanasi and has taken on a variety of social and economic justice issues. The committee was founded in 1999 by a young community member, Nandlal Prasad,Footnote 46 who now works with a group of six full-time organizers to coordinate the group's social work and grassroots organizing from an ashram in Mehdiganj. In 1994 Prasad had returned to his family home near Mehdiganj when he was forced to leave school at the age of 16 for financial reasons, joining the ranks of the sari weavers in the local handloom industry. Older and with more formal schooling, Prasad started to teach literacy classes in the evenings to his fellow child weavers. With strong community demand, he expanded the educational programs with the organization that would become known as Lok Samiti growing to run two primary schools and several education centers for workers in the agricultural and weaving industries, in which the group's teachers and organizers have themselves studied and worked. Prasad developed strategies for community organizing by assisting Neeti Bhai, a Varanasi-based Catholic priest fighting for a “democratic secular society” and “social as well as structural change in favor of the poor and marginalized” of Varanasi through his community empowerment organization Lok Chetna Samiti.Footnote 47 Soon Lok Samiti took on a range of social projects from Dalit and women's empowerment groups, dowry-free marriage celebrations, community financial self-help societies, and inter-caste cultural programs addressing social issues like labor exploitation, political corruption, and gender-, caste-, and religion-based discrimination. The organization makes regular demands for transparency in local governance, for example, using the Right to Information Act to investigate political corruption and monitoring the rolls of the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) to guard against gender or caste favoritism.
Through this education and experience, Prasad and other organizers were deeply influenced by the thinking of Mohandas Gandhi, Gandhian Socialist Jayaprakash Narayan, and contemporary global-south environmentalisms. Gandhi's concept of gram swaraj, or village self-rule, inspired the group's commitment to promote self-governance, direct democracy, and bottom-up development in the village communities. In the 1970s Narayan would draw on this idea in calling for a “total revolution” of political, economic, and social orders through nonviolent class struggle, participatory democracy, and constructive work by villages through popular movements and committees of its people. Motivated by this ideal of a people's committee by and for the village, Prasad decided not to register Lok Samiti as an NGO with the government, he explains, so that its power would not be granted by the state, but instead be derived from the people to hold the state to account. While Prasad and many of the activists of Lok Samiti take inspiration from Gandhi's teachings, they also modify them for the current world of transnational economies and solidarities: While still emphasizing the importance of thinking about the welfare of local communities in an increasingly global economy, the organizers expressed the ideal of swadeshi, not as economic self-reliance through the privileging of national products, but as “a call to the consumer to be aware of the violence he is causing by supporting those industries that result in poverty, harm to workers and to humans and other creatures,”Footnote 48 and thus the valuing of less-exploitative production everywhere. Villagers are also quick to add, in response to The Coca-Cola Company's criticism that they are motivated solely by “anti-globalization” sentiments to target a multinational: “We would protest against any company who is misusing the water,” Indian or foreign.Footnote 49 Lok Samiti activists frequently quote Gandhi—“The earth provides enough to satisfy every man's need, but not any man's greed”—to communicate a materialist environmentalism focused on social justice. The movement in Mehdiganj, in its organizers' own words, rejects the way “water is seen as an asset and a commodity by the Indian government, the international institutions … and the multinational corporations.” Instead, residents assert that water is “an inalienable right which cannot be sold for profit” and requires the community's say in its “participatory development.”Footnote 50
National and Transnational Networks of Organizing Around the Global Commodity
The organizers of Lok Samiti developed this politics on the ground in Mehdiganj as well as through contact with similar struggles in India. Through their work in education and community organizing, its leaders became involved with the National Alliance of People's Movements (NAPM), an alliance of disparate grassroots struggles that retain their autonomous organization and their diverse Marxist, Gandhian, and AmbedkarianFootnote 51 politics while dedicated to cooperating toward an alternative and democratic “people based development” for India. This movement of movements of tribal, women's, Dalit, minority, workers, and peasant struggles arose in the immediate wake of India's economic reforms to make clear the connections between seemingly unrelated local struggles in experiences of national and international systems of privatization and liberalization:
villagers in different parts of India … trying to save their common natural resources like forests and pastures from privatization and exploitation for short-term profits … adivasis and other rural people … struggling to save their lands from submergence by dams or from being ravaged by large industrial projects … marginal farmers and landless labourers … fighting for land-rights and fair wages … traditional artisans whose livelihood has been undermined by the mechanized mass production of the modern economy … [those] toiling in the expanding metropolitan cities and living in sub-human conditions.Footnote 52
NAPM's central organizing principle, “the development of a people's democracy based on people's control over resources,” calls for participatory democracy and the decentralization of political and economic power to transform the nature of politics itself.Footnote 53 NAPM also critiqued the intensifying ethnic and religious communalism in Indian politics.Footnote 54 From its founding, NAPM expressed concern about the arrival of soft drink multinationals and their privatization of water. NAPM called for “A sustained and intense campaign against MNCs with the slogan ‘Not Pepsi/Coke—we want water.’ A vigorous campaign for Swadeshi [taking] actions like smearing the posters/hoardings [billboards] of Pepsi/Coke.”Footnote 55 When Plachimada residents began to protest against the company several years later, NAPM provided support—organizing marches, drawing media attention, and linking the local struggle with similar fights in other parts of India.
Through their involvement with NAPM, members of Lok Samiti connected their own problems of water scarcity and quality to the similar situation in Plachimada and developed a broader political analysis as well as critical language for challenging corporate water expropriation. Over the course of 2003, Mehdiganj residents, members of Lok Samiti and Gaon Bachao Sangharsh Samiti, and supporters from the NAPM and the Gandhian Socialist Samajwadi Jan Parishad (Socialist People's Council) organized a sit-in, a hunger strike, and a non-violent march that ended with baton wielding police arresting seventy-six protestors and wounding several. They dumped sacks full of Coca-Cola's byproduct sludge on pollution control regulators' desks demanding that the plant's license be revoked and that those affected by the pollution be compensated. In the same year NAPM launched a national march “against globalization and communalism” beginning from the Coca-Cola plant in Plachimada. Lok Samiti sent representatives to Plachimada and organized a protest outside their own plant, linking the two locales in distant parts of the country through their common opposition to Coca-Cola. In the following years Lok Samiti focused more of its work on advocacy for water rights: they compiled data on the number of dried wells in the area, held conferences on water privatization, dug a community pond in Mehdiganj for public water use, organized “water stops” to provide free water and information about the struggle in sites like the Varanasi train station where people might otherwise buy Coca-Cola products, and called on the government to provide safe drinking water to the public. The closure of the Plachimada plant in 2004 buoyed the organizing in Mehdiganj and an increasing number of other communities with Coca-Cola plants. Mehdiganj activists began working with residents angered by the water use of the Coca-Cola plants in their communities of Ballia, Uttar Pradesh, and Kala Dera, Rajasthan—the latter, where the water is so over-exploited that the company has been advised to truck water in from outside sources for its own bottling or close the plant entirelyFootnote 56—and began to enact a network of places, concerns, and communities connected through the capital and commodities of The Coca-Cola Company.
These connections through Coca-Cola capital and commodities were simultaneously local, national, and multinational, like the corporation itself, and activists began to mobilize them to increase the points of pressure on The Coca-Cola Company. When the persistent protests of grassroots committees of residents were met with inaction by the economic and political powers in their states as well as the distant nodes of power of the multinational corporation in Gurgaon, India (the corporate edge city outside Delhi), and Atlanta, Georgia, USA, the movement reached out to national and international allies and NGOs. Through participation in NAPM and the new international venues for social movement exchange like the World Social Forum, activists from Plachimada and Mehdiganj have enlisted support from activists and NGOs engaged in related struggles: labor and human rights organizations fighting for Coca-Cola workers' rights in Colombia (Colombian labor union Sinaltrainal and US-organizing group Campaign to Stop Killer Coke), North American environmental NGOs focusing on corporate water privatization (Corporate Accountability International and the Polaris Institute), international social justice groups amongst the South Asian diaspora (ASHA for Education), and United States-based alterglobalization activists concerned with corporate capitalism's effect on the environment in India (the India Resource Center). Two hundred Mehdiganj residents traveled with Lok Samiti to Mumbai in 2004 to participate in the World Social Forum, where many villagers credited their experience of meeting other activists and marching in the streets with animating them to take direct action against the plant back home.
Drawing on the multinational system of the corporation itself, the U.S.-based India Resource Center sought to create new points of pressure closer to the centers of power of the corporation otherwise out of the reach of activists in India. The founder of the web-based non-profit and its lone full-time employee, Amit Srivastava, had organized around environmental justice causes in the United States and was researching and publicizing corporations' environmental practices in international contexts for an NGO when he learned about the struggle in Plachimada in 2002.Footnote 57 Srivastava soon focused almost solely on the villagers' struggles, determined to garner them global attention as the movements grew. His India Resource Center constructed itself as the transnational “platform” for the communication and representation of the Indian movements' demands to international media and allies. It aimed “to mobilize a key constituency in the United States and around the world [to] take action in support of movements in India—by applying pressure in the home countries of the corporations where they are more susceptible to public pressure.”Footnote 58 This included a strategy of venue shifting, or “the presentation of image and the search for a more receptive political venue” for a distant movement or issue.Footnote 59 The India Resource Center epitomizes transnational advocacy networks, as described by Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, employing the tactics of: “information politics,” the quick and credible generation of information and testimony and the transferring of it to places where it will have a political impact; the mobilization of symbols, actions, or stories that provide a sense of a situation to audiences near and far as “symbolic politics”; “leverage politics,” calling powerful actors to take action to affect a situation where distant or weaker members of a network are unable to have influence; and the “accountability politics” of holding powerful actors to their stated policies or principles.Footnote 60 Maintaining frequent contact with the local groups and often in India himself, Srivastava represented the Indian movements on the organization's website, in major news sources, and in speaking tours to North American and European activist groups and colleges and universities.
Mobilized by the transnational advocacy against Coke, North American and European college and university students protested the corporation's practices in India and Colombia and challenged both the general sale of Coca-Cola products and Coca-Cola bottlers' significant financial contracts for provision of beverages on their campuses—high profile business for the company. As of 2007, students at some 200 colleges and universities in the United States, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Italy, and India had protested against Coke, with 45 schools ending exclusivity contracts with Coca-Cola on their campuses.Footnote 61
Arguably this international attention forced the company to begin to address public criticisms of its environmental practices through highly publicized corporate social responsibility initiatives. These initiatives include several water specific projects: reducing and recycling water used in the production process, installing rainwater recharging units in various area locations, and dispensing hand pumps so that residents can reach the dropping water table and drip irrigation systems to make farmers' own water practices more efficient. The company has even pledged to become “water neutral” in India—returning to nature as much water as it uses. While this corporate philanthropy has won over some members of the community, environmentalists and Mehdiganj activists are skeptical about the sustainability of the pledge. The environmental goal of water neutrality itself is suspect; unlike carbon neutrality, the science behind it is unproven at best (and exists through sponsorship and promotion by the likes of The Coca-Cola CompanyFootnote 62) and may not improve the conditions of residents near the plant—putting water in one watershed does nothing to help water scarcity in another. Even if these initiatives help ease problems of water scarcity, they do not solve systemic environmental destruction. Thus, as Lok Samiti works to promote participatory democracy and self-governance in the villages, it also struggles to ensure that winning concessions from the company does not result in community dependence on the corporation to provide private solutions to public problems.
Ongoing challenges exist for the organizing in Mehdiganj. Class and caste differences have been difficult to bridge, and many local elites have sided with the company. Many plant workers, especially those from outside the local villages, have not supported the organizing, which they view as a threat to their jobs. Some workers from the local villages express conflicted positions, needing employment at the plant but questioning the cost on their friends and families. Local workers frequently commented that they do not want their work at the plant to hurt their communities. In fact, many workers claim to not care whether the Coca-Cola plant closes: It only employs them for a part of the year, they say, so they have to rely on weaving or agricultural work regardless. They would prefer development that considers the villages' needs, with a local industry that is less water intensive. Villagers who have protested several times now express frustration with their inability to close the plant, breeding further suspicion of corruption amongst local elected officials. Many acknowledge that water problems are becoming widespread in India with heavy irrigation and chemical application in agriculture. If education and regulation are necessary to change agricultural use of water to make life in rural India sustainable, they concede, so too is a reconsideration of the location of a water-intensive industry like Coca-Cola that aggravates water scarcity.
Most of the people of Mehdiganj are not buying Coca-Cola's thanda at 10 rupees a bottle or the equivalent of a tenth of the average daily salary.Footnote 63 Instead, water is extracted out from their communities and sent to the cities where growing middle class consumerism and its thirst for brands like Coca-Cola is quenched by the natural resources of a rural India already strained by agricultural crisis. But the Coca-Cola commodity also inadvertently brought the environmental crisis directly to the consumer classes. In 2003, the Indian environmental NGO Centre for Science and the Environment (CSE) released reports revealing “a deadly cocktail” of pesticide residues in bottled water and soft drinks produced by The Coca-Cola Company, Pepsi, and others.Footnote 64 Tainted Cokes captured the attention of the media and the public, causing uproar throughout India's broad political spectrum. The Hindu nationalist right attacked Coca-Cola as a contaminating foreign influence on traditional Indian culture and bodies. The middle and upper classes that had embraced the opening market experienced a consumerist crisis of confidence in the imagined quality of the commodities produced by global corporations. The environmental and Marxist left criticized both the failures of the Indian state to address environmental degradation and exploitation by multinationals. The Indian Parliament prohibited the sale of soft drinks in its cafeteria, and several states launched bans and independent investigations of the products. Protestors ripped down Aamir Khan's film posters and Coca-Cola quickly enlisted the actor for a television commercial in which he donned a white lab coat and inspected a bottling plant to personally vouch for the safety of its products. The controversy made clear that the urban middle classes would be unable to completely buy their way out of environmental scarcity and pollution.Footnote 65 The pesticide scandal, although framed around consumer interests, drew wider national attention to the struggles of village communities against the company's use of water resources.
Environmentalism of the Poor and Dispossessed
Villagers' protests against Coca-Cola draw on a history of South Asian environmental politics based on social justice, or what Joan Martínez-Alier calls an “environmentalism of the poor,”Footnote 66 in which villagers and activists have fought against the extraction and degradation of land, forest, water and air resources.Footnote 67 These movements “powerfully foreground questions of production and distribution with human society … [organizing around] ‘the use of the environment and who should benefit from it,’” according to Indian environmental thinker Anil Agarwal.Footnote 68
This environmentalism is an act of the “‘victims of development,’ the poor peasants and tribals who have thus far had to unwillingly make way for the dams, steel mills, and highways that dispossess[ed] them … intensified social inequalities as well as devastated the natural environment.”Footnote 69 While over the last several decades these movements in India have challenged both state and private development plans (also frequently the combination of the two), the shift to the free market logic of the last twenty years has engendered protests against encroachments on the resources of village communities by transnational capital as well as the Indian “urban-industrial complex.”Footnote 70 Thus, the effects of neoliberalism have galvanized a movement that unites an awkward and even sometimes antagonisticFootnote 71 coalition of Indian Marxists and environmentalists to fight privatization, exploitation of resources, and pollution.
Mainstream media discourse may be dominated by middle-class conservationism as well as a post-materialist environmentalism exemplified by the promotion of “green” capitalism through consumerist lifestyle and market choices. But the activism of Mehdiganj villagers is part of a wave of environmental movements motivated by social and economic justice in both the global south and north, taking the forms of organizing against environmental racism, for the protection of environmental and occupational health, for native land rights, and against the export of environmental hazards to the developing world, to name a few. Unlike the “environmentalism of affluence” that focuses on enhancing the quality of life of the middle and upper classes, the environmentalism of the poor and dispossessed could be called an environmentalism of survival and livelihood and is “more radical in orientation, confronting structures of political-economic power that lie at the root of the ecological crisis.”Footnote 72 These movements highlight capitalism's imperative to expand its exploitation and its motivation to displace ecological externalities onto the least powerful members of society.Footnote 73 Thus, unlike organizations that focus on specific environmental problems separate from their social context, environmentalisms of the poor often identify these as the symptoms of the political-economic structure, broadening the critique to the system that produces those problems and inequality in the first place. At their best, then, these environmentalisms replace the “Not In My Backyard” orientation of middle class community organizing with “not in anyone's backyard.”Footnote 74
In the context of neoliberal globalization, then, “class-based and subaltern forms of environmental politics are becoming more relevant, not less so,” as sociologist Daniel Faber has argued.Footnote 75 Environmental justice activism that evolves out of movements for social and economic justice, like that of Lok Samiti, may be some of the most powerful and politically sustainable modes of resisting environmental exploitation in the production of global commodities. “In fact, in recent years some of the most impressive environmental victories at the local level have been achieved by economic justice organizations oriented around multiple issues.”Footnote 76 A deeper perspective on a community and commitment to a number of its issues also prevent a refetishizing of the global commodity as the primary animator of politics, which sometimes leads activists to overlook the complex dynamics contributing to a commodity's production as well as the local, unbranded, or non-consumer goods industries that might be as bad, if not worse, in their labor or environmental records. The environmental activism of economic justice organizations can channel the momentum from one issue campaign, around a global commodity for example, into other community struggles and move from a politics of critique to productive alternatives.
Reappropriating the Brand
Activists in Mehdiganj redeploy Coca-Cola's symbolic capital—its ubiquity, iconicity, and corporeality (as it is physically imbibed)—in various forms of cultural subversion to reappropriate the brand for new political meanings and hail prospective consumers to the struggle. At protests, a group of female members of Lok Samiti carry earthen water jugs that signify at a number of levels. They are a form of protest of the corporate dispossession and commodification of water—each one painted with a different slogan (“Water is yours and ours”; “Coca-Cola will not work in the country of curd and milk”; “We need water, not Coke”; “Coca-Cola Quit India”). Carrying them for miles, the women make visible both the gendered domestic labor around water and the particularly trying effect its scarcity has on them. But the water vessels also enact a sustaining alternative system—throughout the protest they provide public water to thirsty participants, asserting the centrality of this common resource to individual and community survival.Footnote 77
Lok Samiti's cultural team creates street theatre and songs to raise awareness of social issues. With musicians from Kala Dera, it produced a CD, “Jahar Ba” (“There is Poison”), with several renditions of familiar folk tunes with lyrics adapted to tell of the enclosure and pollution of their communities' water resources. The title song references the reports of pesticide-laden soft drinks as well as the relative unhealthiness of Coca-Cola in comparison to the traditional Indian drink culture that it is progressively dislodging. And finally, more metaphorically, the song suggests that Coca-Cola consumption exhausts and pollutes Indian resources, reasserting the social relations and global circuits of capital that knit Mehdiganj into the Coca-Cola world system. The video accompanying the song enacts a reversal of the Coca-Cola commercial where Aamir Khan's farmer happily provides the city girls with the thanda Coca-Cola from his well. Two village men sing the song to two modern-looking girls drinking sodas while directing the refrain to the entire community:
Over the last decade Mehdiganj activists have developed a powerful environmentalism of the poor in their local movement against the corporate dispossession of water resources while globalizing their resistance through transnational advocacy networks. The company's own globalization and localization efforts both enabled and demanded this activist reappropriative claim on the symbolic as well as the material commons being privatized by Coke. Thanda may have come to mean Coca-Cola through these efforts, but for those in the struggle for community livelihood and communal resources, as graffiti painted on the side of a Mehdiganj farmhouse neighboring the plant shouts to those who pass by, “Thanda means toilet cleaner.”Footnote 79
