Research for this article was made possible, In pan, by a fellowship from
the Panos Institute, London . The views expressed here are the writer's own.
Curtsy : Himal, Nepal
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Chipko is not a movement, it 'was'one. Its energies
sapped by excessive adulation, the movpmeit
wound up too quickly. For a while, though,
Chipko came tantalisingly close to providing .
for a corner of South Asia , socio economic development through a paradigm it that was self-developed
by manish aryal
The world knows it as the Chipko movement —- the most successful environmental mass action of the South, in which simple hill villagers fought big business. There was feminist romance in mountain women hugging trees to save them from the plainsman's axe, daring him, "chop me before you chop my tree." The Leftist nirvana of idealistic little-folk fighting rapacious capital also seemed to have been attained, as did the Gandhian's vision of non violence, self sufficiency and khadi. The overall package was good enough to bring awards to the leaders on the Chipko front, grist for academic papers and books, and raw stock for journalists from far and wide.
Yet, the movement was much more than what has been written about it, and also much less. For a while, from early to the late 1970s, Chipko brought unprecedented energy and direction to Uttarakhand — the Kumaun and Garhwal poor-cousin hill districts of Uttar Pradesh state. Hill peasants saw possibilities of cooperative action, uniting against timber merchants and political bosses, and exploring the employment potentials in the hills. Certainly, Chipko was more than an absolutist environmental wave that was only concerned with trees.
However, the strengths of the movement were exaggerated, while at the same time its facets were watered down for easy, consumption in South Asia , Europe andNorth America . Complex relationships in the mouffisil were presented by writers only as heroic stand-offs between good village men/ women and big, bad business/government. Soon after Chipko got name recognition, scholars and journalists ascended Uttarakhand — a convenient bus ride away from Delhi — and helped some Chipko leaders define their message and their image.
Historically, more than other parts of the Himalaya , the Uttarakhand hills have been oriented towards village-based activism. The villages of Kumaun and Garhwal have been Te source-poor, but rich in savants and sages, and have provided leadership for India at the national level. On the flip side, however, Uttarakhand continues to export meni al labour to the Indian plains. Unlike the economy of neighbouring Himachal Pradesh, Uttara- khand's economy remains a lowly extension of the plains. Totalling just eight districts of Lfttar Pradesh's 62 districts, there is also little political incentive for the state and central politicians and bureaucrats to try and appease the hill men and women, however demanding they may be.
For all that it might have developed into, Chipko as a definable movement got wound up tooquickly,itsenergies sapped by excessive adulation. While study of the movement has become de rigueur in universities in India and abroad, within Utlarakhand itself Chipko is spoken of in the past tense. Before it collapsed into itself, Chipko came tantalisingly close to providing, for a corner of South Asia at least, socio-economic development through a paradigm that was self-developed.
One reason that Chipko disappeared quickly might have been because it was so diffuse, meaning different things to different constituencies. Some of the lost momentum is obviously due to the egos of the key personalities, inflated to bursting point and made super-sensitive by reporters, academics and urban environmentalists. No movement can sustain its spirit at the level of internecine anger and jealousy that has been present in Nainital, Almora, Chamoli, Tehri,Uttarkashi, Dehradun and Delhi .
Learn from Chipko
For whatever it was and was not, Chipko did provide a momentum and legitimacy to environmental and social activism for al! of India , The real and perceived heroics of the hill people of Uttarakhand provided energy to others. While the conditions specific to Uttarakhand hills, obviously, are not to be repeated elsewhere, it finds a certain kind of revival in the Appiko movement in Western Ghats, the Narmada Bachao Andolan of MadhyaPradesh and Gujarat, and in the Chilka lake in Grissa.
Chipko has, however, singularly failed to provide a catalytic charge in other parts of the Himalaya . The forest dwellersof the Indian Northeast, the much coddled state of Sikfcim, resource rich Himachal, violence prone
Darjeeling district and war torn Kashmir , all have distinct cultural, historical, economic and political underpinnings that have given rise to different brands of protest. None, however, has been able to nurture a Chipko- like grassroots effort.
Perhaps it is in the adjacent hills ofNepal, east of Uttarakhand -- where grassroots activism is most remarkable for its absence — that Chipko's legacy can be best applied.
Centuries of Rana autocracy having dovetailed into three decades of an unrepresentative Panchayat regime, Nepali society'spolentialforgrassroots activism was never tried in the modern era. With democracy's arrival in 1990, the country immediately got embroiled in party politics all the way to the rural level. The last three years have seen the attention and energy of village based leaders diverted and sapped by the demands of the party political machines. Rural Nepal , which contains the largest chunk of the populated anddestitutemidhillsoftheHimalayanregion, has still to learn to look away from donor organisations, international agencies, government bureaucracy andpolitical parties, and into ways of developing from within. And Chipko, certainly, has some lessons.