Sunderlal Bahuguna with his wife, Vimla
A look back at Sunderlal Bahuguna’s journey on the path of social activism and the beginnings of the Chipko movement:-
FROM 1973 to 1979, the mountain regions of what was then Uttar Pradesh (now Uttarakhand) witnessed several agitations to save forests from the axe.
These agitations gained fame as the Chipko movement and eventually forced the government to ban the commercial felling of trees. But the Chipko movement had already been scripted in 1967.
The late Sunderlal Bahuguna, who left politics and dedicated his life to social service, came up with the idea of focussing on forest conservation while the folk singer Ghanshyam Sailani came up with the name Chipko for the movement through a song he wrote.
He also introduced the philosophy of “Ecology is the permanent economy”.
Let us look at some of the events that laid the basis for the movement in the 1970s. On May 30, 1930, residents of the area gathered at Tiladi, Barkot, on the banks of the Yamuna, demanding to be allowed to use wood and fodder from the forest free of cost.
The King of Tehri thought of the forest as his personal property and had his army open fire on the protesters, killing 17 people. Many people jumped into the Yamuna to save themselves and many were swept away; 80 people were put behind bars.
To pay his respects to the people who were martyred in Tiladi while fighting for their rights to the forest, on May 30, 1967, Sunderlal Bahuguna decided to declare May 30 as forest day.
He appealed to everyone besides his Sarvodayi (the title the Gandhian Vinoba Bhave coined for social workers who followed the Gandhian philosophy) colleagues to join him.
In 1968, Sunderlal Bahuguna brought out a booklet titled Parvatiya vikas aur van neeti (Mountain Development and Forest Policy) to commemorate the day.
It said that forest, agriculture, animal husbandry and cottage industries should provide at least 300 days of employment throughout the year.
With the establishment of the Shaheed Smarak(martyr’s memorial) at Tiladi in 1969, Sunderlal Bahuguna along with his Sarvodayi colleagues took an oath to protect the forests. Meanwhile, he rushed from Garhwal to Kumaon to join a movement that from 1969 to 1971 campaigned for a liquor ban in the State. After the government imposed a liquor ban in the hills in 1971, Bahuguna returned to his quest to protect the forests.
On December 11, 1972, the first procession for a radical change in the forest system took place in the town of Purola near Barkot. A large number of villagers took part. The next day a huge procession was taken out in Uttarkashi in which Janakavi (folk singer) Ghanshyam Sailani, Chandi Prasad Bhatt and Sunderlal Bahuguna participated.
After that, Sunderlal Bahuguna walked to spread the message of the Chipko movement across Uttarakhand. He started his journey from Simlasu on the auspicious day of Deepavali, October 25, in 1973, with the blessings of Swami Chidananda, his spiritual guru and the head of the Divine Life Society.
Speaking on the occasion, Swami Chidananda, who had arrived from Munikireti, said: “I see the power to spread the great message of Indian culture in this 120-day journey.”
Sunderlal Bahuguna made his birthplace, Marora village, the first stop in his yatra. He had left the village at the age of 13 after differences with the royal family. The village was full of royal devotee diwans, but Sunderlal Bahuguna had become a disciple of Suman, who opposed the monarchy.
When he did not get support from his family, he left the village. Later, Sunderlal Bahuguna settled in Silyara village of Ghansali where he set up the Parvatiya Navjeevan Mandal Ashram. Later, he left the ashram to protest against the dam on the Bhagirathi in Tehri.
On the yatra, Sunderlal Bahuguna reached Kafkot via Ravaain, Jaunpur, Jaunsar Bawar, Rudraprayag, Sukhtal, Gwaldam and Tharali in Chamoli. Through Dharmaghar, Pithoragarh, Almora, Nainital, he measured the whole of Uttarakhand on foot. He completed his journey of 1,400 km on February 22, 1974, at Munikireti.
He was accompanied by his Sarvodayi colleagues such as Ghanshyam Sailani, Anand Singh Bisht and Surendra Dutt Bhatt. (Anand Singh Bisht was a forest ranger and the father of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Adityanath. He died on April 20, 2020, at the age of 89 in New Delhi.
During his travels, Sunderlal Bahuguna came to understand the consequences of forest destruction and the benefits of forest conservation. He saw that trees had the potential to keep the soil fixed and to help in water conservation. He noticed that there were disasters in the areas where deforestation had taken place.
For the British (who spread chir pine trees in the hills) and their Forest Department, the forests had been only a source of wood, lisa (pine resin) and other such products for trading. This approach continued even after Independence. But Sunderlal Bahuguna said that the real products of forests were soil, water and air (oxygen).
He argued that the first use of forests should be for the people living nearby so that they got the food, grass, wood and fodder they needed near them. This would increase the spirit of forest conservation among people. This thinking later led to the slogans of the Chipko movement, including the one mentioned earlier.
The Chipko movement began with the idea of the right of villagers over forests. Then the thinking arose that the forests were being destroyed for commercial exploitation. The contractor cuts many more trees than are allotted to him, for profit. The local people have to bear the loss.
In such a situation, the idea of forest-based employment for the local people was raised through the Forest Cooperative Society. The Uttarakhand Sarvodaya Mandal was established, and Anand Singh Bisht became its president. Sarvodaya sewaks started setting up forest-based industries in their institutions.
Chandi Prasad Bhatt established the Dasholi Gram Swaraj Mandal for the same purpose, but it could not even get five trees for its saw machine, while the Simon Company of Allahabad (now Prayagraj), which manufactures sports goods, was allotted thousands of ash trees in Chamoli district in March 1973.
From the ash tree, the villagers make a bull’s gamble to plough the fields. So when the Simon Company in collaboration with Dehradun’s State-run sports company planned to cut trees in Chamoli, it created a lot of discontent in the village.
Residents of Mandal and Fata villages protested and did not allow the company’s workers to cut trees in the forest. Despite several efforts between June and December, the company could not cut down trees because of the agitation of the residents.
Learning from this incident, the district administration cleverly summoned the men from the villages to the district headquarters in Gopeshwar on the pretext of compensation distribution for roads and gave the contractor a green signal to go ahead with his plan to cut the trees. As a result, the responsibility of saving the trees fell upon the women in the village.
Led by Gaura Devi, the women at Reni near Joshimath forced the labourers who had come to cut the trees to leave empty-handed. They chanted with zeal: “We will not allow our trees to be cut down.”
Seeing the widespread opposition to deforestation, the then Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, Hemavati Nandan Bahuguna, invited Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt to Lucknow on April 24, 1974, for a discussion. Sunderlal Bahuguna highlighted his travel experiences and expressed the need for commercial felling of trees in the mountains to be stopped immediately. A committee was constituted under the chairmanship of Virendra Kumar, a professor of forest sciences at Zakir Husain Delhi College, to report on commercial tree felling. While the committee was still on the job, the auction process for cutting trees resumed. In October 1974, Sunderlal Bahuguna sat on a two-week fast to protest against this.
Later, in 1978 and 1979, local people led by Sunderlal Bahuguna did not allow trees to be cut in Adwani, Badiyargarh, Kangad, Lasi and Khurat. Sunderlal Bahuguna and Dhoom Singh Negi sat on fasts in Badiyargarh and Jajal respectively against the repression by the police, who were supporting the contractors. But in the end, the sustained agitation led to the banning of commercial felling for 15 years in this part of the Himalaya.
Activists from the ashram in Silyara
Sunderlal Bahuguna walked 22 miles from Tehri and built a hut in Silyara village, to fulfil a condition for marriage laid down by Vimla Nautiyal, who studied at the Kausani Ashram of Gandhiji’s English disciple Sarla Behn. She told Sunderlal Bahuguna that she would marry him if he “left politics and settled in a remote backward village”. On June 19, 1956, they were married.
The Parvatiya Navjeevan Mandal Ashram that started in the hut became the centre of Gandhiji’s principle of non-violence. This is where many Gandhian activists emerged, including Dhoom Singh Negi, Ghanshyam Sailani, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, Dharmanand Nautiyal, Surendra Dutt Bhatt, Bhavani Bhai, Kunwar Prasoon, Vijay Jardhari, Pratap Shikhar and Pandurang Hegde.
They later launched several movements with Sunderlal Bahuguna and independently. The children of most of the workers had their primary education at the ashram in Silyara.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.