Bharat Dogra

IT was a bitterly cold night in January 1977 when villagers of Henvalghati in the Tehri Garhwal district of Uttarakhand huddled for a crucial meeting. News had just reached that the police staged a march in the nearby market of Jajal.

More importantly, the police was on its way to the Himalayan forest of Advani where villagers had been struggling since days to protect trees from being axed.

What should they do now? It was one thing to confront the contractor and his workers, quite another to face a police force armed with rifles and the power to arrest people.After some hesitation, the villagers decided bravely that they will not abandon their trees. After all they had tied sacred threads on those trees. The villagers vowed to continue to protect them.

People from several villagers had been coming to Advani forest to collect fuel, fodder, vegetables, fruits and herbs. This forest, like many others in the Himalayas, played an important role in soil and water conservation and in protecting villages from landslides and floods. This forest formed part of the catchment of the Henval river, which is a tributary of the Ganga river. When officials thoughtlessly auctioned 640 sal and chir pine trees of this forest, villagers realised that this can destroy the forest, especially since contractors were known to cut trees much in excess of the auctioned numbers.

This auction of trees took place at a time when several Gandhian activists of Uttarakhand region (it was then part of Uttar Pradesh) had been spreading the message of protecting forests. Opposition to the government’s insistence on auctioning and felling trees had been building up. Even within Henvalghati, there had been an earlier effort to prevent damage to pine trees by plucking out the iron bars which had been inserted into trees for extracting a thick liquid for making turpentine oil.

On 1st February nearly 500 people gathered in Advani forest to ‘greet’ the police with slogans of protection and peace. They chanted:

The Himalayas will awaken today
The cruel axe will be chased away
What do the forests bear?
Soil, water and fresh air
Police are our brothers
With them we don’t fight

The contractor’s men moved from one tree to the next with their axes and saws ready, under the ‘protection’ of the police. But where was the need for protection? The villagers did not touch a single worker. They simply hugged the trees. Women were in the forefront and children did not lag behind. With slogans of peace and brotherhood being shouted all the time, it was impossible for the police to stoop so low as to fire on the tree huggers.

A classic Gandhian struggle in action! The police soon realised that trees can’t be felled with villagers clinging on to them and asked the
contractor to take away his men and tools.

Recalling those days, Vijay Jardhari, a stalwart of the movement, says: “The Advani struggle was followed by other tree-hugging movements as in Badiyargad, Tehri Garhwal, in 1978. Sundarlal Bahuguna, a very senior leader and his wife Vimla Bahuguna had come here to guide this movement. He was on fast for a long time. Conditions had become very difficult here. Once, a forest official forced a worker to continue sawing the tree even while I was hugging it, to the extent that the teeth of the saw started touching me. Seeing my injury the worker told the official that he had come to cut trees, not people. He then stopped tree-felling work.”

Here, too, the peaceful struggle prevailed and towards the end of January 1979 the felling of trees was cancelled.

Dhum Singh Negi, another senior activist, recalls: “Tree-hugging captured the imagination of the people. They begun to speak widely of a Chipko (tree-hugging) movement. Poet-activist Ghanshyam Sailani also popularised the Chipko movement in his songs which really moved the people. He came to sites where the movement was taking place to sing those songs. In the forest of Salet I was trapped alone with the contractor’s men for such a long time I had to do all the tree-hugging on my own till help arrived from nearby villages.”

Sudesha Devi, an ordinary woman from Rampur village, played the most extraordinary role in opposing tree-felling and tree-auctions and even went to jail. “We hill women know more than anyone else the damage that deforestation causes,” she explains. “This realisation was behind my ability to confront officials and go to jail. At one protest against the forest-auction in Narendranagar I sat down on the senior most official’s chair and declared that tree-auctions will not be held!”

The most dedicated Chipko ‘activist’ I met was Kunwar Prasun, a staunch Gandhian. He made crucial contributions to many struggles and went to jail, yet never publicised his achievements. He died in July 2007. His wife Ranjana Bhandari recalls: “Recently when high-tension wires linked to the Tehri dam were being laid, thousands of trees were threatened. Prasunji was away in the forests for a long time trying to find out how many trees could still be saved. Finally, a team from the Supreme Court arrived and helped to reach a settlement according to which the width of the stretch to be cleared was greatly reduced and thousands of threatened trees were saved.”

In Loital in Tehri district, a forest was saved on the insistence of activists who campaigned to relocate a unit of the GB Pant Agriculture University. But the biggest achievement of the Chipko movement was that the Uttar Pradesh government agreed to stop the auction and felling of green trees over a vast area of Uttarakhand region. So, while the various hug-the-tree movements saved a few thousand local trees, many times more trees were saved due to the combined impact of these efforts.

While the Chipko movement was succeeding in saving trees in Uttarakhand, a bright young student of social work, a gold medalist, had come to visit this area. Pandurang Hegde was on a study tour, but his mind wandered beyond his thesis. People in our villages in Uttara Kannada district, Karnataka, face similar problems, he thought over and over again. Why can’t a similar movement take place there?

After working for some time to pay back his study loans, Pandurang went back to his home district and started visiting several villages.He learnt that in many of these villages located in the ecologically sensitive Western Ghats, people were very upset since a large number of trees in nearby forests had been auctioned. Villagers had written protest letters to officials but this had no impact. Apart from providing fuel, fodder, water, fibre, vegetables and medicines these forests provided green manure and a conducive environment for the famed mixed gardens where villagers grew cardamom, black pepper, arecanut, coconut and banana could flourish.

Pandurang spent long hours telling villagers inspiring stories about the Chipko movement in Himalayan villages. Can we repeat this success in our Western Ghat hills, the people wondered! Around this time Chipko veteran Sunderlal Bahuguna was visiting Karnataka. A local youth club invited him for a public meeting in Balegadde village. The inspiring words Bahuguna spoke motivated people to take direct action to save forests.

The opportunity came soon enough. In September 1983, the forest department started felling trees in the Kalase Forest. On 8th September about 60 people of Belegadde, Gubbigadde and Salkani villages trudged eight km on leech infested rough paths to reach the forest and hug trees. Felling work was temporarily stopped. A team of officials and scientists came to meet the tree huggers on 22 September. The main official first tied to deny anything was wrong, but he had to back down when the scientist accompanying him admitted that allegations of excessive felling were justified. He said that people should be complimented for bringing this to the notice of the government.

In Husri village a natural forest had been clearfelled earlier. People had access to a small remaining patch. In late 1983 when axe-men came to fell some trees in this small patch, about 200 people marched to the forest and started embracing trees.

In December 1983 Karnataka’s Forest Minister visited Kalase and other forest areas and gave orders to stop the felling of trees which had been earlier marked for felling.

Pandurang Hegde continues relating the story, “The news of the new ‘Appiko’ (which means Chipko) movement spread rapidly in Uttara Kannada and neighbouring districts like Kodagu, South Kanara and Shimoga. At several places people rose spontaneously to save trees. Tree-hugging actions took place in Bilgal forest, Gubbigadde and Doddanahalli. Much later, in 2007, the students of Agriculture University in Bangalore also hugged trees in the city to protect them from being felled. Several padyataras or foot marches took place to spread the message of this movement to more and more areas.”

In 1990 the Karnataka government announced a moratorium on felling of green trees in the natural forests of the Western Ghats. As in the case of the Chipko movement, the Appiko movement succeeded in saving many more trees than what had been saved by the tree huggers.

Millions of trees in ecologically crucial areas like the Himalayas and Western Ghats have been saved by these two movements. These movements also worked for the regeneration of greenery over thousands of acres. The results can be seen in the forests of Jardhar and Piplet in Uttarakhand or the forests near Mendemane and Gubbigadde villages in Karnataka. Taken together, the impact of these movements has led to a much greener world.

As Ghanshyam Sailani, the Chipko poet says in one of his famous Garhwali songs:

Do not axe these oaks and pines
Nurture them, protect them
Streams get water
Fields their greenery
See the flower smile in the forest

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