Jal, Jungle, Jameen: A Conscience in the Mountains
- Independent Ink
- 4 days ago
- 5 min read
Tribute: On his birth anniversary, he should be remembered not as an unblemished icon in the environment movement in India, but as a steadfast conscience that sparked love for nature and unsettled power. Sunderlal Bahuguna’s life is both mirror and memory.
By Suresh Nautiyal Greenananda
When the Himalaya was still measured for timber and rivers for potential energy, Sunderlal Bahuguna emerged as a soft, but strong voice, questioning the very foundations of the dominant paradigm of ‘development’. Long before fragile ecosystems and the protection of our ecology became a common global phrase, he insisted that economic progress divorced from ethics was a form of violence.
His entire life and times revolved around the question thatIndia still evades: What kind of development preserves life, and what kind of progress destroys its own foundations?
From Freedom Struggle to Social Reform
Bahuguna was born on 9 January, 1927 in the princely state of Tehri Garhwal in the Himalayan hills, ruled by the Shah dynasty, and outside British-India jurisdiction. He passed away on 21 May, 2021 in Rishikesh, Uttarakhand.
He entered India’s freedom movement, absorbing Gandhian principles of simplicity, non-violence and moral persuasion. After Independence, he turned his entire focus and energy to social reform: combating untouchability, resisting caste discrimination, and educating villagers in their own cultural idiom. Following the Mahatma’s call, he devoted his youth working in remote and poor villages, living with ordinary, hardworking folks.
He spoke not as a technocrat. but as a people’s educator, using Garhwali language, folk memories, and lived experience.
He left behind a life-journey that profoundly shaped India’s environmental consciousness, moral imagination, and the unfinished journey toward Green Politics.
This formative phase shaped his ecological vision. For Bahuguna, social justice and environmental protection were inseparable, both rooted in dignity, restraint, and decentralised community life.
His lifelong companion and comrade, Vimala Nautiyal, stood beside him like a rock, sharing his hard work on the ground with total commitment, contributing intellectual and organisational labour that still remains under-acknowledged. Any serious remembrance of Bahuguna must honour her immense contribution as well.
Ecology as Ethics
Bahuguna’s originality lay in framing ecology as an ethical relationship between humans and Nature. He warned that Himalayan ecosystems were young, finite and geologically vulnerable, and that reckless extraction or construction would trigger social collapse alongside absolute environmental ruin. In anticipating the philosophical core of Green ideology, he argued that economic growth could never override ecological limits or community rights.
Chipko and Women’s Courage
The non-violent Chipko movement transformed environmental protest into moral action and brought into limelight the power of village women in the hills, and the value of courage and sacrifice. It became an iconic global phenomena, inspiring environmentalists all over the world, especially the young and women.
Villagers, particularly women like Gaura Devi, embraced the trees to stop commercial felling. You cut us with your axes, she told the timber mafia, cut our bodies first, only then you can cut the trees, she said, hugging the trees in the remote forests of Henwalghati, along with other brave village women.
Though Bahuguna was not central to the earliest village-led actions, his role was crucial in scaling Chipko from a local resistance to a national and global ethical narrative. The movement highlighted that ecological consciousness and community survival are inseparable. Bahuguna’s environmental commitment, however, went far beyond Chipko, spanning decades of advocacy and moral intervention.
Big Dams and the Limits of Development
The most defining chapter of Bahuguna’s activism was his opposition to large dams, especially the multi-crore Tehri Hydro Project with its epicentre in Tehri. He warned that such projects would submerge scores of villages across miles of habitation, huge tracts of fertile land, forests, water bodies, streams and mountain streams, displace communities, destabilise the fragile geology, and silence living rivers like the Bhagirathi and Bhilangana.
His protest included long fasts, including fasts lasting over 40 and 56 days— the longest in post-Independence India.
Though the Tehri dam was eventually built, backed by political power and big money, Bahuguna’s struggle was not only about winning, but about recording moral truth. Today, as landslides, deforestation, floods, climate disasters, rail projects, unbridled construction, and widening of the roads while cutting scores of trees (due to religious tourism), intensify in the Himalaya, ravaging its ecology, his prophetic warning resonate with prescient clarity.
Movements and Contradictions
Bahuguna’s non-violent activism extended far beyond dams. He supported women resisting deforestation and the liquor mafia, stood with the Beej Bachao Andolan (Save the Seeds Movement) to protect organic seeds and preserve local, indigenous food sovereignty, and undertook the Kashmir-to-Kohima Padayatra (foot march) to assert the Himalaya as a unified ecological and cultural continuum.
His political philosophy was embodied in walking, fasting, speaking, and listening.
Yet, his reluctance to institutionalise movements revealed a structural limitation. When urged to build a Green political alternative, he said, “Give me 100 Green activists, I will make a difference.”
This reflected both insight and hesitation. An understanding of collective power, coupled with caution about formal structures. In a democracy, where movements risk dissipation without political vehicles, this hesitation may have cost Indian environmentalism a historic opportunity.
His commitment extended to journalism. As a stringer for Dainik Hindustan and UNI-Varta, he reported from remote Himalayan regions mostly ignored by the mainstream media. Journalism became an extension of his ethics: Translating grassroots realities into public discourse and connecting marginalised hill communities with the larger democratic conversation.
A full understanding of Bahuguna must confront his contradictions. He accepted State honours, including the Padma awards, which some radical environmentalists viewed as accommodation and compromise with the very agencies which were inflicting havoc to the hill-ecology, including by building the Tehri dam, despite years of protests.
After Tehri’s submergence, he accepted State-provided housing in place of his riverside hut, provoking debate about moral consistency. Unconfirmed allegations of his earlier involvement (never proved) as a timber contractor further complicated his narrative—suggesting transformation rather than hypocrisy, though Bahuguna never publicly theorised this evolution. Critics also noted his affinity to political power, preference for dialogue over confrontation, and the personalisation of collective movements like Chipko.
These tensions reflect deeper dilemmas of social movements -- visibility versus collective credit, ethics versus power, leadership versus representation.
Legacy for Green Politics
Bahuguna’s life does not require idealisation. His contradictions humanise his philosophy, illustrating the dilemmas of ethical activism in the real world.
He was not a saint removed from history, but a moral actor navigating pressure, recognition, compromise, and uncertainty.
His life exemplifies the central challenge of Green Politics in India -- translating ethical protest into enduring political structures without losing moral ground.
On his birth anniversary, he should be remembered not as an unblemished icon, but as a conscience that unsettled power, while rooted in balanced restraint. He showed that ecological destruction travels alongside social injustice and economic profit, with the poorest and most rooted communities paying the highest price.
In an age of climate crisis and ecological amnesia, Bahuguna remains both memory and mirror. To remember him is not to ritualise his image or erase his failures, but to engage with the unresolved questions he posed.
The rivers still carry his warning: Protect life first—politics, economy, and progress must follow.
The Himalaya still echoes his voice. JAL, JUNGLE, JAMEEN ka sangharsh!
Suresh Nautiyal is a seasoned journalist and Green activist based in Delhi and Pauri, Uttarakhand.
Photos courtesy Madhu Pathak, Dehradun, Uttarakhand.