What is also interesting in Guha’s account is his contrast of the three strands of the movement, the ones separately led by two Gandhians, Sunderlal Bahuguna and Chandi Prasad Bhatt, with the latter stressing reforestation of barren hillsides and the setting up of micro-hydel (hydroelectric) projects. There was also the Marxist-oriented Uttarakhand Sangharsh Vahini (USV), the movement’s third strand, emphasizing that the human–nature relationship can only be transfigured into one which is ecologically harmonious if human relationships are transformed from exploitative to egalitarian associations. Among the prominent USV activists were the historian Shekhar Pathak, left-wing lawyers Shamsher Singh Bist and P. C. Tewari, and the Dalit student leader Pradeep Tamta. These activists differed from the Gandhians in some respects. They hailed from Kumaun, not Garhwal; they came from the student movement, not the Sarvodaya movement; and unlike the Gandhians, they were actively involved in the movement for a separate hill state, this to overcome decades of “over-exploitation” by the plains. Nevertheless, they had enormous respect for the Gandhians, particularly for Chandi Prasad Bhatt, and in their own activities, they eschewed violence. In the 1970s they organized struggles against deforestation, targeting forest contractors and the state, while in the 1980s, they led a major campaign against alcoholism, focusing on violence against women by drunken men.16
Chipko and an earlier satyagraha (non-violent resistance) in the early 1920s at Mulshi (close to Pune in the Sahyadri hills in Maharashtra)—where the business house of the Tatas had proposed to construct a series of dams—may be said to have inspired the activists of the environmental movements and campaigns of the “1968” period and beyond. Considering the 1970s, and part of the 80s when the spirit of “1968” was still alive, and eschewing comprehensiveness, the following are some of the better known ecological movements/campaigns:
• the campaign to “Save Silent Valley,” a tropical forest in Palakkad district of Kerala, which began in 1973, in the wake of a planned hydroelectric project there, and in which the Kerala Sastra Sahitya Parishad took an active part;
• the movement to “save the Bhagirathi” and stop the proposed Tehri Baandh (dam) project on that river in the Garhwal Himalaya in Uttarakhand;
• the movement to save the Narmada led by the Narmada Ghati Navnirman Samiti (Narmada Valley reawakening committee) in Madhya Pradesh and the Narmada Ghati Dharangrasth Samiti (committee for the dam-affected people of the Narmada Valley) in Maharashtra, which became the Narmada Bachao Andolan, as also, initially, the struggle led by the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Vahini (student-youth struggle forum) in Gujarat, where the terminal dam, the Sardar Sarovar, was to come up, entailing the submersion of a number of villages there;
• the movement to protect the forests and safeguard tribal livelihoods in the wake of planned mining of bauxite deposits in the forested Gandhamardhan Hills in Balangir and Sambalpur districts in Orissa (Odisha from 2011); and,
• peasant and fisher folk opposition to the setting up of a missile test range in the Baliapal-Bhograi area in Baleshwar district of Orissa.
Preceding the development projects underlying these ecological movements, there were the large dam projects of the 1950s: the Bhakra Nangal Project on the Sutlej River in the Himachal region; the Damodar River Valley Project spread over parts of Jharkhand and West Bengal; the Hirakud Dam, near Sambalpur in Orissa, on the Mahanadi River; and the Nagarjunasagar Project on the Krishna River where it formed the boundary between the Nalgonda and Krishna districts in the then Andhra region. These were all designated the “temples of modern India” in Jawaharlal Nehru’s proclamations. Their victims, thousands of poor households displaced along with loss of their livelihoods, and without any resettlement and rehabilitation worth the name, were made to suffer all this adversity in the “national interest.” Identifying these victims and placing them alongside the principal beneficiaries of these projects gives a solid clue to the nature of the ruling classes and their political representatives in the Congress Party of those times. Ecological conflicts were a long time coming in independent India, and it was “1968” that brought them on the political agenda, with Satyagraha once more a significant part of the political lexicon of protest.
The forms of protest under the rubric of Satyagraha in almost all the campaigns/movements resisting environmental degradation have been the pradarshan, a collective show of strength of the likely victims; the dharna (a sit-down strike) attempting to stop work on the project; the gherao, involving the surrounding of an official and heckling him/her until the person is forced to accede to the demands or the police intervenes and rescues him/her; raasta roko (road blockade), which disrupts transportation channels; the jail bharo (fill the jails), in which the protestors court arrest by breaking a law that in times of unrest prohibits large gatherings; and the bhook hartal (hunger strike), in which a charismatic figure undertakes a “fast-unto-death” to compel the authorities to yield to campaign demands.17 These six protest forms didn’t originate in Gandhi’s Satyagraha, and neither were they the main instruments of protest only in the environmental conflicts. Widely undertaken by the left in the struggles of workers, they proved efficacious only when they threatened to precipitate a (local) crisis of the state, which is what radical mass protest managed to do, even when it adopted some of these non-violent forms, only to bring on violent suppression by the state.
“NOTION OF WITNESS”
In India, violence and non-violence are usually contrasted as mutually exclusive Marxist and Gandhian ways of confronting oppression. This is far from the truth. At the heart of all radical political activity is organizing and convincing people, not only of the need to fight against oppression, but of the need for a new society free of oppression. Most of this political activity involves, among other essential attributes, non-violent defiance, albeit in a more committed manner. At the heart of the philosophy of non-violent resistance is the “notion of witness.” A small number of highly committed persons, by force of example, involving a great deal of sacrifice, and taking huge risks, teach a large number of people and, in the process, change the political consciousness of these people and win them over in the collective struggle for freedom and justice.
But just like the colonial state perceived the just peasant uprisings of the nineteenth century as pathologies—disease metaphors (contagion, contamination) were common and the insurgencies were deemed criminal—so also the independent Indian state viewed the Naxalite movement. A radical ’68er, Mary Tyler—a British schoolteacher who was arrested in 1970 in Singhbhum district of Bihar and spent five years in prison as an “undertrial,” the charges against her never proven in court—consigns the criminal imputations to the historical dustbin when she movingly articulates the political core of being a Naxalite:18
Amalendu’s crime, Kalpana’s crime, is the crime of all those who cannot remain unmoved and inactive in an India where a child crawls in the dust with a begging bowl; where a poor girl can be sold as a rich man’s plaything; where an old woman must half-starve in order to buy social acceptance from the powers-that-be in her village; where countless people die of sheer neglect; where many are hungry while food is hoarded for profit; where usurers and tricksters extort the fruits of labour from those who do the work; where the honest suffer while the villainous prosper; where justice is the exception and injustice is the rule; and where the total physical and mental energy of millions of people is spent on the struggle for mere survival. It is the crime of those who know that a radical change is necessary, so that the skill, creativity, ingenuity and diligence of the Indian people can be given full scope to work in building a different kind of India,