Dr Saji Verghese
The second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic that struck our nation has reduced much of our population to just tolls. However, there are at least a few who stand out in the tolls for their unforgettable contribution to environment protection, music, and for upholding cultural and moral values. Sunderlal Bahuguna, the man who gave a proper direction to the move to preserve trees in the Himalayas influenced innumerable movements across the globe. The Chipko movement as the world knows it, received its popularity at the hands of this Messiah of environmental enlightenment.
While there are biological reasons for stopping deforestration, there are undoubtedly aesthetic and cultural reasons too, for, some of the trees have withstood the test of time, being witnesses to the degeneration and regeneration of many civilisations . Among the living beings in the animal kingdom, which could be a means to explaining ‘evolution’is Coelacanth, with a history going back 420 million years ago, it is referred to as the “four legged fossil fish” and is alive and thriving in the Indian Ocean too. The enthusiasm in protecting and preserving such living beings is far too visible all around the globe and is gaining momentum. Deep ecology in the 19th century had more of its emphasis on the preservation of endangered species of the living class of animals. However, in the case of Bahuguna, true to what the name literally stands for, there are immense qualities which led to the shaping of a movement for protecting the environment .
He was born in 1927 near Tehri which is now in Uttarakhand . Bahuguna lived a life motivated by the spirit of ‘praxis’ a socialist’s concept of theory being ingrained in activity. Inspired by non-violence and the Satyagraha Movement of Mahatma Gandhi, he is credited for spearheading the Chipko Movement which spread across the Garhwal region, to protest against the felling of trees. People associated with the movement embraced the trees to prevent them from being axed. A passive revolution of a kind, non-violent, ideally permitted in a democracy of our kind .The practice of hugging a tree is more in the form of how we show respect to the great grandparents, or elders who may be just in their 90’s,but who have witnessed the cultural traditions for generations together which sometimes have been christened in one’s own culture.
Our sacred groves bear and demonstrate, in great measure the concern of such kind. Sensing that the rural economy is mainly dependent on having a strong environment, he tried to increase ecological awareness among the women and the marginalised in the rural villages. He used the slogan, “Ecology is the permanent economy.” This influenced the women folk as they were dependent on the nearby forests for a number of their day-to-day requirements. The deforestation would be a stumbling block to these activities. Women were the backbone of such a movement in India because they were directly affected by the rampant deforestation, which led to the lack of firewood and fodder as well as water for drinking and irrigation. Above all, it stirred up the existing civil society in India, which began to address the issues of tribal and marginalized people. He was offered the Padma Shri in 1981 but he was so committed to the cause, as there were felling of trees in large scales in the Himalayas that he refused to accept the award. In his report to the United Nations, he included the devastation of the environment caused in the name of the so called developmental projects such as Dams and energy generation projects. He was imprisoned for spearheading a movement against the construction of Dams at Tehri. In 1987, the Chipko movement was awarded the Right Livelihood Award ‘for its dedication to the conservation, restoration and ecologically-sound use of India’s natural resources’. Bahuguna was then awarded India’s second-highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan, in 2009.
Ekta Parishad is another social movement which is similar to the Chipko Andolan. It is inspired by Mahatma Gandhi’s concept of Sarvodaya which is working for the upliftment of the Dalits and other marginalized groups and societies. The Garhwal of Himalayas remained a major site of rising ecological awareness of how reckless deforestation had denuded much of the forest cover, resulting in the devastating Alaknanda River floods of July 1970. The incidents of landslides and land subsidence became common in an area which was experiencing a rapid increase in projects of such kind. The organised small groups in the villages began to ventilate their grievances taking them to the local authorities against commercial logging operations that threatened their livelihoods.
In 1971, the Sangha workers held a demonstration in Gopeshwar to protest against the policies of the Forest Department. Such protests continued in the following year. In March 1973, the small success that was attained by the villagers was after their protest in the form of beating drums and shouting slogans, which forced the contractors and their team to retreat. The contract was thus cancelled and was handed to the Sangh to carry out the project, not compromising with the integrity of the environment. This became a turning point in the history of eco-development struggles in the region and around the world.
The success stories followed in the 1980s where they undertook movements to stop limestone mining in the Doon Valley. The quarrying activity was causing large scale deforestation of its forest cover, leading to heavy loss of flora and fauna. The United Nations Environment Programme report mentioned that Chipko activists started “working a socio-economic revolution by winning control of their forest resources from the hands of a distant bureaucracy which is only concerned with the selling of forestland for making urban-oriented products”.
The Chipko movement became a benchmark for socio-ecological movements in other forest areas of Himachal Pradesh, Rajasthan and Bihar and later throughout India and was influential in generating environmental protection awareness in different continents acrossthe globe. Every living tree and thick forests of our country is a standing testimony to this Warrior who succumbed to the present Pandemic.
“Among the living beings in the animal kingdom, which could be a means to explaining ‘evolution’is Coelacanth, with a history going back 420 million years ago, it is referred to as the “four legged fossil fish” and is alive and thriving in the Indian Ocean too.”
(The writer is Associate Professor, Lady Keane College, Shillong)