August 5, 2004
Wonderful article by Hiranmay Kelkar about the rapine of the hills. I have seen the same sort of thing on a smaller scale in Kerala, as plainspeople have attacked the Western Ghats, plundered and pillaged them. This continues apace with lots of land-grabbing especially by Christians with the complete support of the Church. Recently, it was reported that in the scenic area of Wagamon, out of some 4,000 land deeds, more than half were fraudulent. But these 'owners' have already constructed houses, and of course over time they will ensure that they are not evicted.
As a result of the destruction of the rainforests, rainfall has diminished, yet flooding has increased. The marginal farmers (eg in Wayanad district, the target of land-grab in the last decade) are committing suicide -- at least 77 in Wayanad alone -- as the denuded former rainforest, with its nutrients washed away, is no longer able to support intensive cultivation.
And along with all this destruction, entire species of medicinal plants as well as animals are disappearing. The Western Ghats, like the Himalayas, are a bio-reserve with yet to be discovered species. For instance, a few months ago someone discovered an entirely new frog species.
Attitudes have changed dramatically. We are no longer bound by the old values of preservation. We used to have untouched areas of virgin forest, eg 'sarpa-kavus', serpent-groves, in Kerala, and sacred groves in the Khasi hills of Meghalaya. These helped keep the entire forest from being destroyed. Today, uncontrolled destruction of forest and its replacement by monoculture like tea, coffee, or rubber are creating a monstrosity.
The land happens to be India's greatest natural inheritance: we have some of the best arable land on the planet. The old Hindu/Buddhist traditions helped preserve it because these are forest religions. But the Semitic traditions are hostile to the land, because they are desert religions, and the desert is hostile. The lack of respect for the environment is also a result of the Semiticization of the Indian mind.
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- The rape of Himalaya
Hiranmay Karlekar
For centuries, the mountains, the Himalaya and the Vindhya, and the rivers Ganga, Yamuna, Sindhu, Krishna, Mahanadi and Cauvery, have been the cradles of India's civilisation. They have given it the mosaic of its diversity and provided its deep, enduring spiritual strands. Of these again, the Himalaya has, over millennia, commanded a special reverence.
It is the abode of the gods, home to the great pilgrim centres of Amarnath, Kedar, Badrinath, Mount Kailash and Manas Sarovar. It has been a forbidding barrier deterring invaders through the ages and, in its snow-capped heights, abiding reminders of Nature's majesty. Ganga, Yamuna, Sindhu and that other great river of northern India, Brahmaputra, emerge from its folds. The sensitive return from its slopes chastened and humbled, aware of the forces that-far more powerful than them-control the elements.
The Brits were the first to bring modernity to Himalaya through which ran the border with Afghanistan-where they played the great game with the Russians-Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. They established garrison towns, summer capitals-Shimla, Darjeeling-and tea and coffee plantations. Viceregal and gubernatorial lodges, and residences for lesser eminences of the Raj rose in architectural harmony with the hills. So did buildings housing essential offices.
With all this came modern administration and administrators-Commissioners, Deputy commissioners, Inspectors-generals, Deputy Inspectors-Generals and District Superintendents of Police, engineers, doctors, accountants, judges, lawyers and, of course, the ubiquitous Babu. Came roads, bridges and the telegraph.
Brits loved Himalaya for the respite it provided from the heat of the plains and for its climate which reminded them of Home. Curious, they explored its forests-recording its flora and fauna to the last detail-folklore, customs and history, chronicling exhaustively. They set up exquisite private estates choosing, with an unerring eye, the spots that provided the best views. If they received much from the hills, they also gave much and, among other things, introduced apple, peach, plum and apricot orchards. Plunderers and exploiters-though much less so than other colonialists-elsewhere, they were preservers and builders in the hills where their writ ran until Independence in 1947.
Understandably, their presence declined after that. The hills now hosted their successors in Authority and the usual migratory homo sapiens-the tourists-who confined themselves to the known hill stations-Shimla, Mussourie, Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Shillong and so on. Things began to change roughly from the 1980s when the Great Indian Middle Class began its inroads with the Self-Aggrandising Plains People (SAPP) at the van. Not for its members the magic realism that the monsoon brings to the hills, restoring to the air its transparence by removing the summer's filter of dust, bringing to life the pristine smoke-blue of the hills, the steam-gray of the mists, the parrot green of the terraced rice and maize fields, and the bottle green of the forests.
The autumn sunset, setting floating rafts of clouds on fire on the crimson vastness of the dusk, does not render them breathless, nor does the winter fogs that lifts to reveal the snow-clad peaks only to return and blot them out. Nor do they rise early to see the scarlet of the Sun, splashed all over the sky at dawn, turn golden as morning approaches. They have little reason to love the mountains; nor are they fired by the spirit of inquiry.
They come because the Joneses do it or it provides a change of environs which relieves boredom, or to escape the stress of quotidian life or just have a good time as they understood it, totally unconcerned with what it does to the mountains and its inhabitants. Alien to their own great civilisational heritage, they seem not to have heard the message of the Chandogya Upanisad where the sage, Uddaloka Aruni, tells Svetaketu, that the essence of human beings and the Nyayagrodha tree-indeed of everything-was the same, or that of the Svetasvatara Upanisad which proclaimed that the Brahman or the Universal Consciousness was everything-fire, sun, air, the moon, the starry sky, water, man, woman, the thunder cloud, the seasons, the seas, the butterfly, the green parrot...
The only climbing they value is of the social variety. While they are entitled to have their version of a good time and play the great game of place-name dropping, their influx is playing havoc with the Himalaya. Time was when it was limited to the traditional tourist destinations. Having reduced these to urban slums, they are now venturing forth to interior areas. Holiday resorts and hotels, restaurants, bars and snack bars, video parlours and developers with their hideous housing projects, proliferate. Garbage piles, replete with empty mineral water bottles and plastic bags, are ubiquitous. Loud yells and guffaws, and transistors playing Bollywood songs shatter the silence of millennia that has spawned perennial wisdom. As if the seasonal visitations were not enough, one now has a growing number of SAPPs coming to stay for good.
Palatial structures, architectural monstrosities advertising the marriage of wealth and coarseness, and with total disharmony with their environs, mushroom. Mindless over-drawing, by gargantuan housing complexes, hotels and resorts, is causing water scarcity. With trees being felled indiscriminately to enable construction-both in the hills and them plains-the forest cover, already perilously thin, is becoming thinner. Wildlife is increasingly deprived of its habitat. One no longer sees leopards and bears where they were once numerous. The time-honoured practice of palm greasing removes all barriers and makes rules dispensable, which, in any case, they are for the powerful. Cars travel freely in areas where their entry is barred; poaching flourishes.
Rainfall, which depends on the density of vegetation, has become irregular. Increasingly rapid soil erosion, enhances rainwater runoff and the silt load of rivers which, deposited in the plains, raises the level of river beds, making them more and more incapable of carrying swollen monsoon flows. The result is severe floods every year. Vast numbers of ordinary people pay for the rapacity of SAPPs.
The SAPPs bring with them their grab culture. They undermine, by example, the intrinsic honesty, civility, and simplicity of the hill people that are already menaced by television soap and advertisements promoting the primacy of compulsive consumption over all else, and projecting the possession of consumer items as definers of worth. If one cannot earn the money to buy these through fair means, foul means are often adopted. The crime graph is rising. Thefts are frequent in places where one could earlier sleep with doors unlocked.
The timber and land mafia thrive in the hills. So does separatist insurgency and terrorism in the north-east and in Jammu & Kashmir in the north-west, thanks to a complex set of internal factors and active sponsorship by Pakistan and Bangladesh. It may soon be the turn of the central Himalaya, covering Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and the northern parts of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, to explode. Though they are quiet in varying degrees, discontent is simmering under the surface. Unemployment is growing frighteningly.
Money from sale of land to developers, hoteliers and resort-owners is frequently blown on consumer items. With land prices rising constantly, regret grows with time. If they had only held on for a few more years... Besides, proprietors of land are becoming, at best, blue-collar employees. The loss of status hurts. Meanwhile, advertisements, the cutting edge of the consumer culture, are constantly raising expectations. Failure to realise these is particularly galling when they see SAPPs doing it all the time.
It is an explosive mix. With the rape of Himalaya continuing, soon one would only need a spark. It may well fly from Nepal, where the Maoists are formidable. With the mountains exploding, it will be a matter of time before the plains below them do.
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