By Ajaz Ashraf
Uttarakhand has been billed as Devbhoomi, or the Land of the Gods, but it has ironically become the source of distressing media headlines. Seldom does a week pass without Muslims and Christians being menaced. Increasingly, Uttarakhand witnesses a devastating disaster every year. To me, Hindutva as practised is the common driver behind the two sets of bad news that symbolise the growing social and environmental degeneration.
Hindutvawadis deliberately divide society. Their governments, at the Centre and in Uttarakhand, also pursue economic growth in complete disregard of the environment, triggering disasters erroneously dubbed “natural”. Their economic paradigm has, in fact, replaced Hindutva’s original idea of sustainable development as espoused by, say, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh affiliate.
I asked renowned environmentalist Dr Ravi Chopra what he thought of my proposition. He agreed: “Environmental degradation and social degradation are two sides of the same coin. Hindutvawadis worship the Rigveda, which celebrates nature. Yet they assault the environment, as they also do the constitutional idea of unity in diversity.”
Uttarakhand has yet to experience the full extent of nature’s fury provoked by unrestrained development aimed at profit and capital accumulation. A list prepared by Citizens for Green Doon, an NGO, showed that more than 25,000 trees had been felled in the Doon Valley alone in recent years for road building and other projects, with another 40,000 trees earmarked for removal.
This story was originally published in frontline.thehindu.com. Read the full story here.
