Gandhian tree hugger sparked andolans, and took conservation to the world
NEW DELHI/DEHRADUN: In early 1974, the state government announced the auctioning of 2,500 trees overlooking Alaknanda river in the upper reaches of what is now Uttarakhand. Lumberjacks arrived in Raini village to cut the trees. A local girl saw them, and informed the villagers. Women in large groups came out and stopped the lumbermen by hugging the trees. Three local women, Gaura Devi, Sudesha Devi, and Bachni Devi, championed the cause. Through the days that followed, the women refused to leave the trees. That marked the beginning of the Chipko (to hug) movement.
The movement was actually the brainchild of a Gandhian activist, Vimla Bahuguna.
On Friday, her husband and fellow Gandhian, Sunderlal Bahuguna -- they married with the clear understanding that they would live in the village in an ashram -- who took the Chipko movement to the world and lived a life of austerity, died in Rishikesh on Friday from Covid-19. He was 94.
Bahuguna transformed the spontaneous Chipko movement into a turning point in India’s forest conservation efforts by taking it to different parts of Uttarakhand forcing then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi to impose a 15-year ban on tree-cutting in the state. He was admitted to the Rishikeshbased AIIMS on May 8 after testing positive for Covid-19.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Uttarakhand chief minister Tirath Singh Rawat, and several environment activists expressed condolences.
Bahuguna was born in Tehri in 1927; by his teens he was a social activist. Then, inspired by Mohandas Gandhi, he was a nationalist and freedom fighter. He was a tireless protector of the hills, walking thousands of kilometres through them.
But it was the Chipko movement that brought him to national attention.
Historian and author Ramchandra Guha writes in “The Use And Abuse of Nature” that “Chipko was sparked by the government’s decision to allot a plot of hornbeam forest in the Alaknanda valley to Symonds, a sports goods company from faraway Allahabad. A few months before this, the Gandhian organisation in the forefront of the cooperative movement, the Dashauli Gram Swarajya Sangha, had been refused permission by the forest department to fell trees from the very same forest. The transparent favouritism provoked the villagers led by DGSS, to threaten to hug the trees and prevent them from being felled.