Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [47]
But while the new green Brahmins naturalized poverty and invoked the interests of the rural poor as justification for their antimodern ideas, those ideas never stood a chance in a democratic India. Neither Gandhi’s vision for India in Hind Swaraj, nor the green Brahminism that developed in the 1970s, had any significant following among India’s lower castes, who increasingly rejected the exploitative nature of the traditional socioeconomic system. Even as early as 1945, Jawaharlal Nehru, who would become India’s first Prime Minister wrote to Gandhi, “It is many years since I read Hind Swaraj… but even when I read it twenty or more years ago it seemed to me completely unreal.” Nehru reminded Gandhi that, “the [Indian National] Congress has never considered that picture, [portrayed in Hind Swaraj] much less adopted it.”7 It was the nationalist, nonviolent, and humanist Gandhi that poor Indians admired and respected, not the Gandhi of asceticism, deprivation, and tradition.
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From its earliest moments, the Chipko movement was centrally focused upon economic demands, access to resources, and control of local forests. For Chandi Prasad Bhatt, who organized some of the first protests and efforts among local communities to develop the forests for their own benefit, Chipko meant preserving people’s traditional forest rights, which, in his view, were being threatened by a distant “bureaucratic set-up.” Although he was inspired by Gandhi’s promotion of economic self-sufficiency, Bhatt was not against development or industrialization as long as it was controlled by local communities.8
But outsiders were quick to take up the cause, and they had very different ideas about what the Chipko movement was about. Sunderlal Bahuguna, a well-traveled regional politician with good English language skills, supported the Chipko demands and eventually became the charismatic face of the movement outside the region. Influenced both by Gandhi’s asceticism and by a British environmentalist known as the “Man of the Trees,” Bahuguna presented Chipko to his growing audience as a deeply conservative movement, interested only in preserving the ecological balance of the Himalayas and the traditional socioeconomic order of its villages.9
Bahuguna took his demands directly to the Central (federal) Government in New Delhi, correctly betting that his antidevelopment message would appeal more strongly to distant metropolitan elites than to local government officials. “Gandhi had foreseen the doomsday as early as 1908, when he wrote Hind Swaraj,” wrote Bahuguna. “The objective of development is economic growth or prosperity, but to achieve this temporary economic prosperity we have lost peace and happiness.”10 Bahuguna’s message met with applause from his elite audiences, who hailed him as an ecological Gandhi, fighting the evils of modern technology and commerce.
The rebranding of Chipko as an “environmentalism of the poor” worked — at least in swaying influential figures. Bahuguna and allies won the support of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and international NGOs and succeeded in enacting a slew of laws and regulations, all aimed at better conserving the Himalayan forests. But the logging restrictions sparked a backlash in Uttarakhand. By the late 1980s, regional political groups such as the Uttarakhand Revolutionary Party and Jungle Kato Andolan (which literally translates as the “Log the Forest Movement”) began publicly exhorting communities to start cutting down trees in defiance