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Magazine
A Gandhian in Garhwal
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RAMACHANDRA GUHA rounds off his portrait of Chandi Prasad Bhatt, one of the country's greatest and inadequately honoured environmentalists, by recollecting his personal memories of him. The conclusion of a two-part article.
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I WROTE last week of the life and work of Chandi Prasad Bhatt, one of India's greatest and — it must be said — insufficiently honoured environmentalists. I shall round off my portrait with some personal memories.
Let me return, then, to that bus and taxi journey of 20 years ago, where we met the shepherd boy who spoke, or rather shouted, for H.N. Bahuguna. Later the same evening I reached Gopeshwar. After depositing my bags in a sarkari guest house I made for the office of the Dashauli Gram Swarajya Mandal (DGSM). I had just begun work on a social history of the Himalayan forests, a project in which Bhatt's work would naturally figure rather heavily. I hoped over the course of the next few days to interview him at length about Chipko and, with luck, to be able to scrutinise the files of the DGSM as well.
That evening, however, someone else had got there before me. This was a doctoral student from the University of Roorkee, who had come to consult Bhatt about his project. He wished to choose 20 villages, 10 sited more or less on a motor road, 10 located more than five kilometres away from the road. In these villages he would administer a questionnaire on the availability of various goods and services, to test the hypothesis that access to roads was crucial to rural upliftment.
The Roorke economist wanted to survey 20 villages in all: but which 20? He had never been to Garhwal before, and no reliable maps juxtaposing villages and roads existed. Thus his sample came to be constituted by Chandi Prasad Bhatt. Bhatt spoke in chaste Hindi, accented here and there by his native tongue (soft s's, as in "pasupalan", and the occasional substitution of vowels, as in "kohte hain" for "kehte hain"). From the storehouse of his memory he drew out the names of 20 villages; 10 right by the road, 10 distant from it. But that was not enough: he had also to provide the economist directions, and useful contacts. So he would say, for example: "Take the bus to Chopta. Get down at Hanumangarhi. Walk on for a kilometre, past an oak forest, and then take the path leading up the hill to the left. This leads to the village of Bemru, which I am sure is more than five kilometres from the road-head. Ask for the school-master: his name is Pran Nath. Tell him I have sent you. He will help you with the questionnaire."
It was a command performance, extending over an hour, and conducted for an audience of two. This fellow, I thought, must have trekked across every hill and every valley in upper Garhwal, and very nearly talked to every man, woman and child too. As I walked back to my room that night I was reminded of an episode from the Mahabharata. Bhatt, I felt, was Krishna, and the Roorkee boy and I, Duryodhana and Arjuna respectively. I would have to wait until the next day to get what I wanted from him: his work with forests and Chipko. I trusted I would put that to more creative use, for, as I saw it, my rival's project seemed rather to trivialise Bhatt's awesome knowledge of the geography of Garhwal.
Over the next week, with the economist safely away in his villages, I talked at length to Bhatt and went over the documents he showed me. These I later juxtaposed with interviews conducted and documents read elsewhere in the hills. What I finally learnt about Chandi Prasad Bhatt the Chipko leader is narrated in my book The Unquiet Woods. But here, let me stick with the man. He was, and indeed still is, very handsome: of medium height, but erect and beautifully proportioned, an oval face clothed in a neat beard, dark bright eyes looking directly at you. In his native heath he exudes a quiet confidence and dignity, not, however, always outside it. Thus in October 1983 I saw him in the Kumaun town of Pithoragarh, releasing the first issue of a research annual on the Himalaya. Inside a fairly large conference room, this pioneer of Chipko could not comfortably face the crowd.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt (standing, extreme right) in the Rann of Kutch after the earthquake of 2001.
He clutched the microphone hard with both hands, for assurance, when a practised speaker would have stood away from it. The next day, however, he spoke more naturally in the open; at the village of Chandak-Sikhrana, at the time being battered badly by magnesite mining.
In September last year I heard Chandi Prasad Bhatt speak in Mussoorie, in honour of P. Srinivas, the brave forest officer who was killed in the search for Veerappan. He still spoke softly, and with a shy sincerity, but he seemed more at ease now with the appurtenances of modern technology: with the mike, and with slides and a slide projector besides. With their aid he took an audience of aspiring civil servants through a magisterial ecological history of the Himalaya: the glaciers, the rivers, the forests, the fields. The slides came from his own travels, and the language he used to gloss them was exquisitely clear: as clear, indeed, as his description of a free flowing hill river; "shishe jaise chamakta hua jal: water as shiningly transparent as a pane of glass".
He documented the degradation caused by humans, but also their potential for ameliorative action. Responsible environmentalism, he said, could be of the P. Srinivas kind or of the Chipko kind. It could come from upright officials or from concerned citizens, or, better still, from the two working in combination. The first question from the audience dealt not with the Himalaya but the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NEA).
The questioner claimed that the NBA was motivated by foreign agents who wished to hold up India's development. Bhatt gently reminded him of the historical experience of displaced people in India. As he said, "doob shetra wale log ko chinti ke bina samjha jata hai: the oustees of dams are treated worse than ants." Characteristically, he moved on from criticism to construction. An estimated 47,000 hectares were to be irrigated by the Sardar Sarovar dam. Why shouldn't 10 per cent of this be allotted to those displaced by the project? He had spoken of this when he visited Gujarat after the earthquake of January 2001, and thought also that this was a solution the NBA could fruitfully pursue.
Those who know Chandi Prasad Bhatt and his work have long felt that — from the English language press at any rate — he has never got his just deserts. For the Chipko movement that he and his colleagues started was a definitive moment in the history of environmentalism. Before Chipko, it was thought that the poor were too poor to be green. After Chipko, indeed through Chipko, it was demonstrated that peasants and tribals had a greater stake in the responsible management of nature than did aesthetically-minded city-dwellers. Then again, it was Bhatt who first taught Indian environmentalists that it was not enough to righteously protest at destruction of one kind or another: they must also set about the process of reconstruction. Seeking always to improve the lives of the poor, Bhatt has sought to humanise modern science rather than reject it, to democratise the bureaucracy rather than too quickly demonise it.
I have memories of talking with Chandi Prasad Bhatt and of listening to him talk. But let me end with a memory of, as it were, simply passing him on the road. One evening in Delhi I was driving past a row of truly high-voltage institutions: the Indian International Centre (IIC), the World Wildlife Fund, the Ford Foundation, the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme. There, on this road, I passed two middle-aged men clad in khadi, talking. I turned into a side lane and watched them for a while. They were Bhatt and Anupam Mishra, a fellow Green Gandhian of integrity and achievement, an early chronicler of Chipko and the author of masterly surveys (in Hindi) of water management in Rajasthan. They continued talking, till a bus came along and they hopped into it, and were lost to me.
Then, and now, I speculated as to where the two men were coming from. From a meeting at the WWF perhaps? In that case, there should have been other people around. Or else some of these other people had gone to the IIC for a drink, still others to the World Bank pool for a swim. Even were they to have had the necessary memberships I cannot imagine Chandi Prasad Bhatt or Anupam Mishra exercising either option. In them lives a spirit, of quiet service, that once existed freely in our politics and our activism, a spirit that has been completely excised from one sphere and remains gravely threatened in the other.
(Concluded)
The first part of this article appeared in the Sunday Magazine, The Hindu, edition dated June 2, 2002.
Ramachandra Guha's books include Savaging the Civilized and Environmentalism: A Global History. E-mail: ramguha@vsnl.com
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