Don't mention the coronation

India and decolonisation on steroids

Photo: Rashmee Roshan Lall

“Let’s drop the Charles reference,” advised the opinion editor of one of India’s largest papers as we discussed my next piece, a close look at the European debate over the economic paradigm of degrowth. We were speaking ahead of the May 6 coronation and I had suggested that little could be expected of King Charles III except possibly the status of Britain and the world’s first degrowth monarch. After all, Britain’s future king had long argued that “Nature, the biggest bank of all, could go bust”. Back in 2009, he was warning that the Earth can no longer support the demands of a growing “consumerist society” where growth is an end in itself. Much before degrowth became such a crucial and controversial subject in the Netherlands with farmers perturbed by the government’s nitrogen emissions rollback policies to reduce livestock, hadn’t Charles said that people must realize they are not “the masters of creation” but just one part of a fragile natural world?

“No, n…