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.
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The early heroes
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.
Also Read: Chipko inspired the world. Not all its outcomes were positive
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.
This is the final installment of a three-part series on the Chipko movement.
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. He tweets @ChopraSanjeev. Views are personal.