The Chipko Saga

Writing history, especially contemporary history, is always a challenge on account of the multiple versions of the same occurrences. Even the dates are contested. But, in general, the ‘printed word’ takes precedence over oral accounts, and Google reinforces popular perceptions by creating graphics to mark important milestones.

This is how 26 March has come to be accepted as the anniversary of the Chipko movement — because a ‘doodle’ marking its 45th anniversary appeared on this date in 2018.

Netizens were informed that this was an ‘eco-feminist movement’ in which women formed the nucleus, as they were most directly affected by the lack of firewood and drinking water caused by deforestation. This popular characterisation is true, but only partially.

While acknowledging the central role of women, it is equally important to understand the sequence of events that led Chipko activist Gaura Devi to march with the women and girls of Reni village to the nearby forest on 26 March 1974. Their goal was to stop lumbermen from Symonds Sports Company from cutting the trees allotted to them by the Forest Department — but that’s not where the movement started.

Rise of Chipko

Fortunately for us, the Chipko movement has its own James Boswell in Shekhar Pathak, who has not only been an active participant in the movement, but is also a professionally trained historian, researcher, chronicler, intrepid traveller, folklorist, geographer, geologist, photographer, and a powerful speaker who backs his assertions with empirical evidence.

The English translation of his book Hari Bhari Ummeed — The Chipko Movement: A People’s History — places all available facts in perspective, captures the context of the times, and examines the role of the principal actors, including the Union and state governments, as well as the forest and revenue departments. It also discusses the long-term implications and the current status of the movement. Owing to its success, Chipko has spawned a multiplicity of organisations, ecological movements, legislations, and public awards. No wonder, then, that the book received the 2022 Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay Award from the New India Foundation.

But this column is not about the book. It is about the events leading up to the Chipko moment, and its key ideological proponents — Chandi Prasad Bhatt of the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Sangh; Sunderlal Bahuguna, who undertook a 5,000 km journey from Jammu & Kashmir to Arunachal between 1980 and 1982; and Vandana Shiva, who has brought her own eco-feminist perspective to the movement. Fortunately, the three of them have refrained from being openly critical of each other. Each has set up their own distinct organisation and received accolades and recognition from both governmental and non-governmental bodies.

Let me also state upfront that my views are more aligned with those of Chandi Prasad Bhatt, whom I have known personally since 1987. That year, a group of us — then probationers in the IAS — were inspired by his lecture at LBSNAA and decided to travel to Chamoli to visit the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Sangh. We wanted to see for ourselves the site of the Gandhian struggle where Gaura Devi and the 24 women from her hamlet of Reni had stopped the lumbermen of Symonds Company from felling trees they had been officially authorised to cut by the Forest Department.

So, in a very small way, I’ve been a witness to the angalwaltha (the Garhwali word for ‘embrace’) movement in the Garhwal Himalayas, whereby protestors protected trees by surrounding them and linking hands, physically preventing the loggers from touching the plants.

However, the Hindi word ‘Chipko’, which has now become synonymous with the movement, meaning “to stick” or “to hug”, actually owes its origin not to the lofty Himalayan ranges, but to the desert dunes of Rajasthan.

Roots

Back in 1730, a group of 363 Bishnois from 84 villages, led by Amrita Devi, laid down their lives to protect a grove of khejri trees that were to be cut down on the orders of the Maharaja of Jodhpur, who wanted timber for his new palace. However, when the Maharaja got to know of this savage act ordered by his minister, he banned tree-cutting in Jodhpur for perpetuity.

But across India, trees have continued to occupy a fraught space in the development story. Although some colonial-era forestry laws were relaxed in the aftermath of the Kumaon and Garhwal peasant movements of the 1920s, forestry was not topmost on the agenda of governance in the then undivided Uttar Pradesh(UP), even though its first chief minister Govind Ballabh Pant was from Kumaon.

Instead, the state’s main focus was on zamindari abolition and land reform, buttressed by the pan-India padayatra of Acharya Vinoba Bhave, Gandhi’s favourite disciple. Bhave toured the country on foot for the eradication of untouchability, the redistribution of land, and the promotion of village industries based on local raw materials.

This was the context in which Chandi Prasad Bhatt established the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandal in 1964 (now Dasholi Gram Swaraj Sangh, or Dasholi Society for Village Self-Rule), with an aim to set up small industries using the resources of the forest. Their first project was a small workshop making farm tools for local use.

Much to their chagrin, they faced restrictive forest policies — a hangover from the colonial era still as well as the ‘contractor system’, in which forest land was ‘commodified’ and ‘auctioned’ to big contractors, usually from the plains. These contractors brought along their own logging equipment and skilled and semi-skilled workers, thereby depriving the highlanders of any livelihood options.

In popular perception, this wanton destruction of the forest was responsible for the devastation caused by the flooding of the Alaknanda in July 1970. A landslide blocked the river and affected an area starting from Hanuman Chatti near Badrinath, to 320 kilometres (200 miles) downstream till Haridwar. Washed away were numerous villages, bridges, and roads, leaving in their trail untold misery and deprivation. Thereafter, incidents of landslides and land subsidence became common in an area experiencing a rapid increase in civil engineering projects.

Meanwhile, over the next two years, the DGSS workers held a demonstration in Gopeshwar to protest against the policies of the Forest Department. But the last straw that broke the camel’s back was when the Forest Department turned down the Sangh’s annual request for ten ash trees for its farm tools workshop, but awarded a contract for 300 trees to Symonds, a sporting goods manufacturer in distant Allahabad (now Prayagraj), to make tennis racquets.

In March 1973, the lumbermen arrived at Gopeshwar, but they were confronted at the village of Mandal on 24 April, where about a hundred villagers and DGSS workers were beating drums and shouting slogans, thus forcing the contractors and their henchmen to retreat. Many, therefore, regard this as the first real success of the movement, as the contract was cancelled in light of public pressure. Chipko had begun.

Women Fighters

A few months later, in March 1974, the Forest Department — under the guise of providing compensation for land acquired in 1963 for border infrastructure after the Chinese invasion — invited Bhatt and his colleagues to Gopeshwar for discussions. The contractors were informed that the men had left and only women and children remained in the village.

It was thus, in the absence of their menfolk, that the women of Reni village, led by Gaura Devi — who, as Shekhar Pathak says, “were as unaware of Marx and Lenin as they were of the philosophy of Sarvodaya” — confronted the lumbermen, who had not expected any resistance.

The bold and determined stand taken by Gaura Devi and her companions on 26 March — holding off the contractors until the men returned — became the iconic image of Chipko. Although they came to leadership by default, by the time our group visited Dasholi in 1987, they were certainly at par with the men, if not ahead. They led discussions on proposed development interventions and debated whether the village needed a pucca road or a bridle path.

Ripple Effects

It was perhaps fortuitous that the Chief Minister of UP at the time, HN Bahuguna, was also from Garhwal. He immediately appointed a committee to look into the matter and agreed with the villagers’ demands. Imagine the counterfactual: what if the CM had not been a highlander, and the confrontation had taken an uglier turn? Rarely has credit been given to Bahuguna for adopting the approach of conciliation over confrontation.

A ten-year ban was imposed on cutting trees in and around Reni’s forests. As the movement spread to other districts and garnered popular support, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced a complete ban on the felling of trees in the Himalayan region, as well as on limestone quarrying, in 1980. An Eco Task Force was established to restore the ecological balance, and the hills of Mussoorie got a green cover again.

New Chapter

Two months after Gaura Devi and the women of Reni halted the lumbermen, a new chapter of Chipko began — the first of the decadal Askot–Arakot padayatras, or foot marches. Its purpose was to understand the socio-cultural and geographical–botanical diversity of the Uttarakhand region, from its eastern to western corners. It was Chipko going beyond Reni and deeper into the villages and ecological issues of Uttarakhand.

The march began on 25 May 1974 from Askot, near the Nepal border, and ended seven weeks and 750 kilometres later in Arakot on the Himachal border. Its purpose was to draw attention to Himalayan ecology and the rights of forest dwellers and landless workers to land and livelihood — four young men, Kunwar Prasoon, Pratap Shikhar, Shamsher Bisht and Shekhar Pathak undertook this march. One of them, Shekhar Pathak, would later write the book Hari Bhari Ummeed, translated into English as The Chipko Movement: A People’s History.

This was a path no politician, bureaucrat, or tourist had ever traversed. They were joined at various stretches by college students, activists, Gandhians, Marxists, and Sarvodaya workers from time to time—besides, of course, peasants and women, who were in the forefront of the movement. The marchers traversed the region’s major rivers, touching altitudes of up to 16,000 feet, spreading the hard-hitting message of Chipko’s bard, Ghanshyam Sailani:

Van sampada par pehla haq vanvasiyon ka, gramvasiyon ka

Gaon gaon ki ek pukar — Panchayat lo van adhikar

Vanvasiyon ka adhikar — van sampada se rozgar

(Forest dwellers and villagers have the first right over forest wealth

The call of every village — forest rights for the panchayat

The right of the forest dweller — employment through forest produce)

It led to outcomes both anticipated and unforeseen.

The long echo of Chipko

Travelling through the remote villages, the four young men were exposed to all aspects of life in the region — the lack of roads, communication, schools, and hospitals; the travails of farming, cattle rearing, and forest labour; the condition of women and children; and the migration of men. They understood what no book in the prescribed syllabi could teach: the pulse of the people.

They learned of the interdependence between human communities and nature—how intricately human lives were intertwined with forests, rivers, and the wilderness. They also became aware of the inequity and inequality faced by Dalits in these villages. At the time, Dalit landholdings were practically non-existent, and many were denied access to village temples.

Another small but significant milestone was the opposition to the Birla family’s ‘offer’ to replace the traditional wooden structure of the Vaishnav-style Badrinath Temple with a modern construction built on the lines of the Birla Mandir in New Delhi. According to Pathak’s book, the people of the district, led by Chipko activists — including Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Gaura Devi — demanded that the “restoration and rebuilding of the temple should be undertaken only after consultation with, and the concurrence of, the local people, and on the advice of professional archaeologists and geologists”. The message was loud and clear — both tangible and intangible heritage had to be protected.

However, while Chipko was able to assert itself in matters of forests and livelihoods, the movement against the construction of the Tehri Dam — a mega-project with an outlay of Rs 9,000 crore and potentially devastating consequences due to submergence, tree-felling, displacement, and seismic vulnerability — was unsuccessful.

This was despite Chipko movement leader Sunderlal Bahuguna undertaking some of the longest fasts in post-Independence India: 45 days during the tenure of PV Narasimha Rao, and 74 days during that of HD Deve Gowda. Both fasts ended with assurances of review, which were undertaken but were more in the nature of bidding for more time.

What these reviews did achieve, however, was a manifold increase in the quantum of compensation. All those who lost land were provided housing in the planned township of New Tehri, or given land for homestead in the foothills, along with other rehabilitation benefits.

In fact, another fallout of the agitation was the enactment of a more liberal land acquisition law to replace its colonial-era predecessor. Be that as it may, the power of pelf — compensation, jobs, bank loans, education, healthcare, and the infrastructure of a modern township — was far stronger than Gandhian satyagraha.

Bahuguna and many of his colleagues also tried the judicial route. But the government argued that India needed electricity, and the national capital, Delhi (over 300 kilometres away) needed water. The movement petered out as more and more of the affected people accepted the compensation.

Author George Alfred James in his book Ecology is Permanent Economy: The Activism and Environmental Philosophy of Sunderlal Bahuguna — a title inspired by Bahuguna’s famous aphorism — writes that his engagement with the Chipko Movement involved two central themes.

The first was the establishment of community organisations to support sustainable, economically independent villages, and the second was the improvement of the forests on which these local economies and households depended.

Bahuguna wanted an end to the ‘money order’ economy, where able-bodied men left the hills to seek employment in the plains. As a Gandhian and Sarvodaya worker, he was also concerned about alcoholism in the hills and the empowerment of Dalits. He went on to establish an ashram for Dalits, particularly women.

Legacy and Challenges

What happens when a local movement gains national and global currency?

The transformation of the Chipko movement into a national, and even international, case study inspired people elsewhere — from the Swedish environmental movement in 1987 to forest protection efforts on Mt Takao in Japan in 2008. It also influenced socio-ecological movements in Himachal, Rajasthan, Bihar, and the Appiko campaign in Karnataka. The Kalpavriksh movement by DU students to prevent the cutting of trees in the Ridge area, as well as citizen action groups in Barasat and Mumbai against tree-felling, were also inspired by it.

The movement was part of a longstanding struggle against rampant commercial deforestation for gain by outsiders. People in the region were angry, both at contractors from outside bringing in migrant labour to fell trees, and at the damage left behind. It was, therefore, both a labour movement and an ecological movement. The shift to describing it only as an ‘environmental’, and later an ‘eco-feminist’, movement highlighted just one aspect.

But there were negative repercussions as well. The national attention that the Chipko movement received led to the government tightening control. While contractors from outside the region became less of a problem, the loss of livelihoods for people within the region was severe. Therefore, even though the movement received the Right Livelihood Award in 1987, it has done little to address the challenge of local jobs, except for a few eco-tourism projects.

Ironically, the very demonstration of people’s attachment to their local ecology was used by centralised decision-makers to alienate them from it. This was because Indian forest laws — like the logging practices — were based on colonial-era legislation that was indifferent to the concerns of local residents.

For example, the creation of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve came with such restrictive rules that local residents could no longer collect herbs and mushrooms from the area. The absence of these inputs for traditional medicine has affected the livelihoods of vaidyas, besides negating the possibility of applying traditional knowledge to many health-related issues — both preventive and curative.

In the absence of forest-related employment and livelihood opportunities, migration from the villages continues unabated. According to the 2011 Census, the district-wise count of ghost villages includes 73 in Bageshwar, 76 in Chamoli, and 60 in Pithoragarh, along with many others in Almora and Pauri, where more than 80 per cent of the population has left for better opportunities in the district headquarters or the plains.

Simultaneously, over three decades, the Chipko Movement travelled from a quiet Garhwal village to the corridors of power, and eventually even helped shape the demand for a separate Uttarakhand state.

Chipko and its adherents won several accolades. Chandi Prasad Bhatt received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 1982, the Padma Shri in 1986, the Right Livelihood Award in 1987 (jointly with Sunderlal Bahuguna, Ghanshyam Sailani and Doom Singh Negi), the Padma Bhushan in 2005, the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2015, and the Sathya Sai Award in 2016. Bahuguna received the Jamnalal Bajaj Award in 1986 and an honorary doctorate from IIT Roorkee in 1989. Although he refused the Padma Shri in 1981, he went on to accept the Padma Vibhushan in 2009.

Meanwhile, Vandana Shiva — though she was not directly involved in the movement — became globally recognised for her theoretical construct of ‘ecofeminism’. She won a series of awards from UNEP and FAO, the Sydney, Calgary, and Fukuoka peace prizes, and wrote extensively on ecofeminism, the violence of the Green Revolution, biopiracy, and issues connected with water, soil health, and fossil fuels. In fact, she has become a global icon in environmental discourse, with a dedicated fan following and lecture invitations to the Ivy Leagues.

But for some movement leaders, recognition came too late.

The irony of the situation is this: Gaura Devi, whose action spurred the movement, started receiving recognition only after Uttarakhand was formed — nine years after she passed away in 1991.

She had never seen a school, was widowed early, and made a precarious living ploughing her small plot of land. She nonetheless found the time and energy to start a Mahila Mangal Dal in her village in 1965, and nine years later, on 26 March 1974, led what is perhaps the most iconic of all the Chipko protests in the history of the Himalayan region. She wrote no books and did not have an outreach team to interact with the media.

Writing about her in his autobiography Gentle Resistance, Bhatt says: “Her steely courage was combined with a deep compassion… it is impossible for me to forget the grace within her that compelled her to say, soon after she and her companions had stopped the felling of trees near Reni, that despite the boorish behaviour of the woodsmen I should not speak ill of them to the authorities lest they lose their livelihood.”

Fortuitously, a scheme for the education of women has now been named after her by the Uttarakhand government — the Gaura Devi Kanya Dhan Yojana.

In the same book, Bhatt makes a special reference to his friend Murari Lal, who was born into a Dalit family in Gopeshwar. He was part of the leadership team of the local labour co-operative (Malla–Nagpur Shram Samvida Samiti), and later a member of the Dasholi Gram Swarajya Sangh (DGSS). As an activist for over half a century, he helped develop a Baanj–Buransh forest in the landslide-prone area of his hamlet, Paptyaana, just below Gopeshwar. He would accompany Bhatt in all his campaigns with his harmonium and sing the songs of the movement in his sonorous voice.

Political Undercurrents

We will now devote some space to Chipko leaders who were also part of the CPI, the Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini, and the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal. Although the communist movement has all but disappeared in the state, there was a time when its influence was quite strong. In fact, the CPI was perhaps the first political organisation to raise the forest question — as well as that of statehood.

From the sixties, communist party activists had raised the demand that vacant land in the forests should be leased to farmers for horticulture and that they be given wood for agricultural equipment and for building homesteads at concessional rates. They were the first to urge that the existing system of auctioning forest lots be replaced by community management of forests. The CPI legislator from Tehri, Govind Singh Negi, who was elected for three consecutive terms — in 1969, 1974 and 1977 — raised the issue in the UP Vidhan Sabha. In fact, the genesis of the Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand) Forest Corporation, as well as similar institutions in other states, can be traced to these debates.

Meanwhile, another important milestone was the constitution of the Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini (USV) on 25 May 1977, which drew its inspiration from the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini formed under the influence of Jayaprakash Narayan in Bihar. They decided to stay away from party politics and work intensively in the villages. The USV now pressured the government to cancel the extant contracts with contractors, take effective measures to address landslides, and rehabilitate those who lost their homesteads. Their mobilisation was so strong that in many places, there were no takers for forest auctions.

But after the ND Tiwari government resigned in April 1977 and gave way to that of Ram Naresh Yadav, the leaders in Lucknow made yet another attempt at auctioning forests in Nainital and Tehri — this time with the backing of the state police and the Provincial Armed Constabulary. The stage was set for confrontation with the UP government. The highlanders now got the impression that their voice was often muffled in the power corridors of Lucknow when the CM was not from Kumaon (GB Pant and ND Tiwari) or Garhwal (HN Bahuguna).

Yet, though the USV had raised political consciousness, it was not a political party. The first party to do so was the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (UKD), which was established in the last week of July 1979. The pioneers included journalist Dwarika Prasad Uniyal and DD Pant, a former vice chancellor. The movement really picked up steam after the Mulayam Singh government refused to exempt the hill districts of UP (which now make up Uttarakhand) from the 27 per cent reservation in education and employment —despite the OBC population in the hills being less than 3 per cent of the total.

Statehood and unfinished hopes

Starting in 1994, the techniques of Chipko — peaceful protest demonstrations (satyagraha), mass mobilisation, songs and street theatre, crowdfunding of resources, and most importantly, women to the fore — became the order of the day for the statehood demand as well. The UKD led the movement, but after some initial hesitation, both the Congress and the BJP realised that there was no point in resisting the formation of a state for the highlanders. Thus was born the new state, formed with bipartisan consensus (along with Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand) in November 2000.

The name chosen was ‘Uttaranchal’, but the UKD then led the movement to change it to ‘Uttarakhand’ — with which the Chipko activists identified. ND Tiwari changed the name on 1 January 2007. But not every demand has been met.

In his book The Chipko Movement: A People’s History, Shekhar Pathak refers to Dehradun as the ‘interim capital’. The long-standing demand to make Gairsain — at the junction of Garhwal and Kumaon — the capital has only been partially fulfilled by holding at least two sessions of the legislative assembly there each year.

The reaction of Shekhar Pathak to the formation of the new state also sums up the state of affairs with respect to the movement — it is neither a complete success, nor an abject failure. It is somewhere in between. “We are happy (khushi) to have our own state, we feel sadness (udasi) because all our hopes have not been fulfilled, we bear resentment (akrosh) because our demands were not respected,” Pathak told Ramachandra Guha in a conversation included in his book.

This perhaps is true of all movements. People aspire, assert forcefully, but end up making realistic adjustments.

(Sanjeev Chopra is a former IAS officer and Festival Director of Valley of Words. Until recently, he was director, Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration)