Love Your Monsters_ Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene - Michael Shellenberger [48]
Now they tell me that because of Chipko the road cannot be built, because everything has become paryavaran [environment].... We cannot even get wood to build a house.... I plan to contest the panchayat [village council] elections and become the pradhan [mayor] next year.... My first fight will be for a road, let the environmentalists do what they will.12
When researcher Antje Linkenbach visited Reni in the 1990s, the villagers accused Bahuguna of misrepresenting the Chipko movement and even complained, perhaps apocryphally, that in some public events Bahuguna had used another woman to impersonate Gaura Devi, a prominent Chipko activist from Reni. Asked what they had gained from Chipko, the villagers interpreted the question in strictly economic, not environmental, terms and replied that they had not seen any gains at all except that “two boxes came with old clothes” and some certificates.13
But the most dramatic testimony came in a Press Institute of India workshop in which villagers from Reni and a neighboring village, referring to the establishment of the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve in their area, complained that the conservation laws and federal control had backfired. The local communities were better at managing the forests than the federal government, they asserted. “Now there is virtual plunder to supply valuable herbs to the Delhi cosmetic market,” one man lamented. “So there is no protection in the protected area while the local villagers are denied their basic needs.”14
3.
While deep greens romanticize village life and sustainable development NGOs deliver solar panels, efficient cook stoves, and other “appropriate technologies” to rural communities, Indian villagers are migrating to cities in massive numbers, drawn by the promise of economic opportunity. The popular mass movement that would ultimately define Uttarakhand’s future would not be Chipko, but rather the Uttarakhand statehood movement demanding regional autonomy and development. In 2000, the new state of Uttarakhand was carved out of Uttar Pradesh and today its leaders prioritize economic development, industry, and jobs.
Ultimately India’s destiny does not lie in the traditional village-based society promoted by Mahatma Gandhi in Hind Swaraj, but in an entirely different paradigm envisioned by Babasaheb Ambedkar, the father of India’s democratic constitution, whose ideas have become increasingly prominent in modern India. During his life, Ambedkar, who was the leader of the Dalits, formerly known as the “untouchables,” publicly and emphatically rejected Gandhi’s idealization of India’s traditional rural order. “The love of the intellectual Indians for the village community is infinite, if not pathetic,” Ambedkar wrote in 1948, “What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow mindedness, and communalism?” He observed, “In Gandhism, the common man has no hope… The ultimate goal of man’s existence is not reached unless and until he has fully cultivated his mind.” Ambedkar argued:
Machinery and modern civilization are thus indispensable for emancipating man from leading the life of a brute…. The slogan of a democratic society must be machinery, and more machinery, civilization and more civilization.15
In contrast to the asceticism of Gandhi and the green Brahmins, Ambedkar saw that liberating India’s lower castes from the exploitation of the caste system could unleash the energy and creativity that might make India a modern and prosperous nation. This is in fact what is transpiring across the subcontinent as India’s enormous population embraces technological transformation, modernization, and urbanization in search of better lives and greater freedom. Rapid modernization and urbanization bring their own problems and challenges,