Paying a meaningful tribute to Bahuguna
On Friday, India lost one of its best known environmental activists, Sunderlal Bahuguna, to Covid-19. In 1974, he pioneered the Chipko movement, a non-violent agitation aimed at protecting trees, which sparked the collective mobilisation of women to preserve forests. Between 1981 and 1983, he led a march across the Himalayas, ending with a meeting with the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, who then passed legislation to protect some areas of the Himalayan forests from tree-felling. Bahuguna was also a leader of the movement to oppose the Tehri dam project. All of his work stemmed from his fundamental conviction that a stable ecology meant a stable economy and society.
When the news of Bahuguna’s death became public, I called up Anil Joshi, Padma Bhushan-awardee, and founder of the Himalayan Environmental Studies and Conservation Organization. Though Joshi, 65, did not directly work with Bahuguna, they shared a deep relationship, based on their common goals. “I did not see the Mahatma, but I saw Gandhi in him; His Gandhian values — in his behaviour, sartorial and eating habits — were intact till the last day,” Joshi told me. What is unfortunate, Joshi added, is that Bahuguna, who devoted his life to saving the environment, was taken away by the coronavirus pandemic, which, in so many ways, is also a symptom of our disregard for biodiversity.
Bahuguna was a ceaseless communicator. He would never pass up an invitation to speak, irrespective of who invited him, the eminence of other speakers or the number of listeners. He would always tell his fellow travellers that they must grab every chance to explain to the people, politicians, and administrators the importance of maintaining the delicate relationship that exists between human beings and nature. “He spoke in simple language. He had a commonsensical approach to the preservation of ecology,” said lawyer Sanjay Parikh, who fought the Tehri dam case.
But even as tributes pour in (including critical assessments that the timber ban weakened the rights of people over their forests), the fact remains that neither India nor Uttarakhand listened to his wise counsel. Successive governments in the state have built dams and roads, demolished mountains, and deforested the region. Such manic development, which doesn’t take into account the fragile mountain ecosystem, has led to natural disasters, the drying up of mountain springs, and sparked distress migration.
The impact of such insensitive development planning was evident this year. In February, a glacial burst near Chamoli’s Raini village, the cradle of the Chipko movement, proved that disrespecting the ecosystem and building dams in an ecologically risk-prone area can lead to devastation and loss of critical infrastructure.
Unplanned development is not just Uttarakhand’s story. The assault on our natural resource base across India is unprecedented. Last week, as this newspaper reported, the Centre eased forest clearance for infra projects in extremism-affected and border areas, including ancient and diverse central Indian forests and the Himalayan region. These “callous land-use changes,” according to Kanchi Kohli, a legal researcher at the Centre for Policy Research, can even put the investments into public infrastructure and defence facilities at risk. “Probably we, the naturedefenders, are to blame for not being to send the right message to the system about what Bahuguna-ji stood for…It is our collective failure,” said Joshi.
Bahuguna was an eternal optimist and had faith in the movement he pioneered. Responding to a question after the devastating 2013 Kedarnath floods, he said that while governments must learn a lesson, it would be wrong to say that the Chipko movement did not lead to environmental consciousness. “It did give birth to other movements that have been pushing for a local resource-based economy, protecting eco-sensitive zones and our rivers,” he explained.
Now that Bahuguna is gone, what would be the best way to acknowledge his massive contribution to India’s environmental movement? “His message of forest and river conservation must be respected both by Uttarakhand and the Centre by putting an immediate halt and independent review of destructive projects such as Char Dham road widening and construction of high dams,” said former Indian Forest Service official, Manoj Misra.
That would, indeed, be a fitting and gracious tribute to Sunderlal Bahuguna and his vision.