Himalaya Bound Read online

  Jamila, Roshni and the rest of us who had been sent ahead with the pack animals followed a narrow road that led to the Asan River. Once we reached the river, we turned left, marching west along the banks, sometimes splashing across the water where it looked most shallow to short-cut the looping meanders. Though the Asan is the main drainage system for the Doon Valley—a basin between the Shivaliks and the Himalayas, within which the city of Dehradun is located—it runs low in April, braiding into channels; in some sections, the water barely reached my ankles, while in others the buffaloes could stand shoulder-deep.

  Jamila and Roshni stopped on an empty patch of floodplain that was large enough to hold both families and all of their animals. On one side, we had instant access to the water. On the other, behind an embankment, spread a vast quilt of fields where the buffaloes could graze on the cropped stalks of wheat that had recently been harvested. Perhaps a hundred other Van Gujjar families who’d emerged from the forest over the previous few days were camped along the length of the river, resting their animals before moving towards the Himalayas. Normally dispersed over many square miles of difficult jungle or mountain terrain, here the nomads could easily meet to share news and gossip.

  Once the horses and bulls were unloaded, cook fires were started and tea and khichri were prepared. There’d been nothing to eat since an early dinner the previous night, long before the climb over Shakumbhari Pass. While the food cooked, each family pitched a shelter made from black plastic sheeting, which was propped up with sticks and secured with rope. Large enough for a whole family to crawl beneath, the tarps were flimsy but effective shields from the brutal assault of the midday sun. Years ago, Van Gujjars carried fabric tents with them, but switched to plastic because it is lighter and cheaper, if not as durable. There were so many tiny punctures in Dhumman’s tarp that, when gazing up from underneath it during the day, it looked like the ceiling of a planetarium, pierced with countless constellations; the longer lacerations looked like comets streaking across the night sky.

  Dhumman, Yusuf and the rest of those who’d stayed with the herd arrived a couple of hours later. The buffaloes immersed in the river to cool off, while the family ducked under the tents, grateful for shade and tea and food. Dhumman was silent while he ate. I was beginning to see that no time was as sacred as mealtime, in a completely secular kind of way; more than sleep, even more than prayer, it was the one activity during the day that was not to be interrupted.

  When he finished, Dhumman said he thought it would be best if we planned on camping here for about a week. I asked him why, and he said that there were two reasons.

  The first was something that Van Gujjars have had to reckon with forever: optimizing the timing of their ascent into the mountains based on seasonal conditions. If they reached their summer meadow too early, it would still be covered with snow. But if they lingered too long en route, they would waste money buying fodder that they didn’t need and spend more time on the road—which was much more dangerous and less comfortable than being at their home in the mountains. So they moved strategically, aiming to get to their Himalayan pastures as soon as the grass had come up, but not before then.

  Now, Dhumman also had to factor in the forest department’s refusal to grant him access to his meadow. He hoped that, given a little time, the authorities would relent, as they had during the previous couple of years. Waiting a week along the Asan might mean the difference between moving forward with confidence, or with nerve-wracking uncertainty. And while still in the lowlands, it would be relatively easy to reach forest department headquarters in Dehradun if Yusuf and he needed to appear there in person for any reason.

  Dhumman expressed little confidence that the park authorities would change their minds, even if we waited at the Asan for a month. Based on the intensity of their rhetoric, he thought this might be the year that they fulfilled their threats and really kept Govind National Park free of nomads and buffaloes. Dhumman saw no reason why his fate should be any different from that of his many friends and relatives who had once lived in the forests that became Rajaji National Park—and who had been forced out of the wilderness and into a sedentary life. Those evictions had had a seismic impact on the Van Gujjars, personally and culturally, with aftershocks that are still being felt today.

  Here’s what happened then:

  In the autumn of 1992, with little warning, Van Gujjar families that were migrating back down to their traditional winter territiories were blocked by rangers from re-entering the sections of the Shivalik forests that fell within the Rajaji Park boundaries. The nomads, desperate to reach their homes, protested non-violently against the Uttar Pradesh forest department and, with the help of the non-profit Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (RLEK, pronounced “relek”), appealed to the courts.

  RLEK was by this time famous for its groundbreaking human rights and environmental victories against powerful, entrenched interests; it had championed a campaign that led to the passage of the Bonded Labor System Abolition Act of 1976, and had filed India’s first-ever environmental public interest litigation with the Supreme Court, ultimately forcing the shutdown of over a hundred ecologically damaging limestone quarries around Mussoorie and Dehradun. The director of RLEK, activist Avdhash Kaushal, was alerted to the plight of the Van Gujjars by his son, Praveen, a former pilot in the Indian Navy who worked as a translator for the Swedish anthropologist, Pernille Gooch, when she did her fieldwork among the tribe from 1989 to 1992. Praveen—better known as Manto—would later start SOPHIA, the main organization that currently advocates for the Van Gujjars.

  With RLEK on their side, the Van Gujjar families who had been barred from re-entering the Shivaliks in the fall of 1992 quickly secured a temporary stay against their displacement, allowing them full access to their traditional forest lands until their fate could be properly considered.

  When the media picked up on the story, the forest department tried to spin the narrative in its favor. They demonized the Van Gujjars as the single greatest threat to the fragile Rajaji ecosystem and portrayed them as the tree-cutting enemies of tigers, elephants, and other wildlife. The nomads, park authorities argued, had to be removed if the forests were to be saved.

  Most journalists, however, sided with the tribe. Instead of being depicted as a menace to the forests, Van Gujjars were idealized in print as indigenous environmentalists who loved the forest and knew how to care for it better than anyone, since they had lived in perfect harmony with nature since time immemorial. As a result, much of the public sympathized with the tribe as peace-loving “victims of conservation” who were being abused by callous officials who wanted to push them off their ancestral lands.

  The media attention was a mixed blessing. On one hand, it won widespread popular support for the Van Gujjars’ cause and gave the government a sense that the public was closely watching the decisions that were being made about the tribe’s future. On the other hand, it opened up the Van Gujjars’ world to outside eyes for the first time. Before the Rajaji protests, few people knew anything about these secluded buffalo-herding nomads. The media coverage lifted the veil of the forest, and it never quite fell completely back into place.

  It was at this time that the tribe began to identify themselves as Van Gujjars. For most of their history, they were known simply as “Gujjars” and only attached the “Van”—meaning “forest”—as a way to distinguish themselves from the millions of other, mostly Hindu, Gujjars in India, with whom they have nothing in common, and with whom they may or may not share distant ancestral roots. Though they are historically related to the goat-herding, Muslim communities of Bakarwal Gujjars who summer in the upper elevations of Kashmir and winter in Jammu or Punjab, the Van Gujjars are a unique and separate tribe. It had never before been important for the Van Gujjars to differentiate themselves from any other Gujjars, since no one paid them any attention, but with the Rajaji Park crisis, they felt it was vital to establish a distinct identity—and to brand themselves as the Gujjars of the
Forest.

  Looking at the initial efforts to evict the Van Gujjars from Rajaji in the early-to-mid 1990s, it could be argued that the forest department was just doing its job, if heavy-handedly. According to India’s Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, when the government decides to create a national park, the first thing it has to do is issue an “initial notification” declaring the proposed boundaries of the park. For Rajaji, that happened in 1983. The next stage is to determine and settle all legitimate claims to that land. Only once that is completed can a park receive its “final notification,” after which time virtually all human activity inside the park would be forbidden—except for tourism, research and park management. Grazing livestock within national parks was expressly banned, and people certainly weren’t allowed to live in them.

  In other words, regardless of how the officials in the forest department felt about the Van Gujjars—even if, hypothetically speaking, they believed that the buffalo herders were beneficial to the forest—by law, they had to get them out—and to settle their claims one way or another—before Rajaji could become a fully-notified national park.

  Hence, in 1992, the authorities planned to move the Van Gujjars out of the forest and into a village that had been built for them at a place called Pathri. This would achieve multiple goals: Rajaji would be “freed” from the nomads; the Van Gujjars’ claims would be settled through the land compensation scheme; and the forest department could reap substantial amounts of funding for the conservation-based “rehabilitation” of tribal people, offered by the Indian government and international conservation organizations, including the World Wildlife Fund, which didn’t want people living in parks.

  There were, however, a couple of major flaws with their plan. First, Pathri had been built to accommodate 512 Van Gujjar families, which was the official number that wintered in the Rajaji area, according to the records. But the reality on the ground bore little resemblance to what was on paper, as there were at least three times that number of families in the park. Even if all the homes in Pathri were filled, the majority of the people and livestock would still need to be dealt with.

  The bigger obstacle, though, was that the Van Gujjars didn’t want to leave the forest. It was their home and they loved it and their life in it. They felt like they belonged there more than in any town. Their buffaloes, they thought, also belonged there, like any other forest animals. Sedentary village life, in a place with no room for their herds, had no appeal to them whatsoever, so they launched a struggle to remain in Rajaji that would last for years.

  The nomads were not opposed, in theory, to the preservation of the Rajaji area as a national park. They agreed that it needed protection from development, poaching, logging, and other destructive forces—but not from their buffaloes. In 1996, as the debate over their future was being hotly contested, a group of Van Gujjars collaborated with RLEK to create a plan titled “Community Forest Management in Protected Areas: We will turn this forest into a diamond—A Van Gujjar proposal for the Rajaji Area.” It detailed a conservation strategy in which the tribespeople would take the lead in managing Rajaji National Park, with the forest department’s role reduced to that of “supporter and monitor.” If it had been approved, the Van Gujjars would have been allowed to remain in the park, using their intimate knowledge of the native ecology and geography to maintain and improve the health of the forests—a solution intended to assure “environmental protection while respecting the needs, rights, and traditions of local people.”

  The plan was heartily endorsed by luminaries such as P.N. Bhagwati, a former chief justice of India, who was vice-chairman of the United Nations Human Rights Commission at the time. He saw in it the possibility to secure “social diversity as well as forest biodiversity.” A delegation of Van Gujjars was invited to Delhi to explain and promote their proposal to representatives from the World Bank, which was supporting projects in Indian national parks. But the World Bank and the forest department preferred a more conservative compromise of “joint forest management,” which would have given some token jobs to Van Gujjars while leaving the forest department in full control of the park—and still requiring all of the buffalo herders to clear out. According to reports of the meeting, once the World Bank’s position became known, one Van Gujjar leader spoke out, saying, “Madam, you call yourself the World Bank, but is it only the forest department that is in the world? Are not we also in this world? Why don’t you give us the money and let us take care of the park?”

  With their community forest management plan going nowhere, Van Gujjars, again with the aid of RLEK, pleaded their case to stay in the forest to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, and the Ministry of Environment and Forests. Between 1998 and 2000, each of these departments issued a series of rulings that, on the surface, were favorable to the tribe, essentially saying that the forest department could not evict the nomads against their will—though the forest department could use “honest means of persuading them to move out.” Until Van Gujjar families voluntarily agreed to leave Rajaji, the NHRC declared, “they should not be subjected to any difficulty or harassment by the forest authorities in the enjoyment of their legitimate rights and be allowed to lead their normal life as before,” including grazing their herds. Before any family could be moved out of the forest, a district judge was supposed to confirm that they were freely choosing to accept a settlement deal.

  Apparently, using “honest means” didn’t get the forest department the results it needed. None of the carrots it dangled in front of the Van Gujjars tempted them to leave Rajaji—so, despite the orders against it, park authorities allegedly turned to intimidation, physical violence and outright trickery.

  Complaints emerged from the forest of nomads being detained and brutally beaten by rangers; of families being threatened with death if they refused to sign away their rights to stay in the forest; of girls and women being seized and taken from their homes; of buffaloes being confiscated. Some Van Gujjars claimed that they were brought to forest checkpoints, shown pieces of wildlife contraband like tiger skins and ivory, and were then told that if they didn’t sign settlement papers, they’d face poaching charges. Sometimes, the authorities allegedly prevented the nomads from performing funeral rituals for their dead. And the rule requiring a judge to certify that each family that moved out of the jungle did so voluntarily was ignored; according to Avdhash Kaushal of RLEK, “corrupt people” in the forest department gave “favors to the judiciary” to turn a blind eye.

  All of these accusations were denied by the forest department, which maintained that it had never done anything illegal or unethical in its dealings with the Van Gujjars. You, dear reader, are free to decide who you believe.

  The first Van Gujjars to leave the forest were the poorest ones with the smallest herds, who were least able to pay the bribes that the rangers allegedly demanded in exchange for leaving them alone. Many families held out for years, but as the forest department’s efforts continued unabated, increasing numbers of Van Gujjars ultimately capitulated. Some say they were driven out of the forest by rampant harassment; others left because they honestly believed the forest department’s false promises that they’d be able to get a house in Pathri or the newer, larger settlement at Gandikhatta and still live and graze in Rajaji; others came to sense that this was a hopeless battle that they would never win, so it would be wise to take something while it was being offered, rather than lose everything and get nothing.

  Meanwhile, life within the forest was changing. Some Van Gujjar families stopped migrating for fear that if they left the Rajaji area for the summer, they wouldn’t be allowed back in. Many other families would leave one or two people behind in the Shivaliks to keep an eye on their huts, for if they were abandoned for five or six months, they’d be destroyed by park rangers. The family would then have to rebuild from scratch, and would have to pay exorbitant bribes to gather the amount of wood they needed for the job (even though they build with dead logs). W
hile most of the buffaloes were still taken up to the high mountains in summer, some herds stayed down low. This put more pressure on the ecosystem than in the past, when seasonal grazing practices gave the forest a chance to fully regenerate in their absence and left the wildlife to use the scant fodder and water sources before the monsoons hit.

  The Van Gujjars, of course, recognized this, but there seemed to be a sense that if the forest was going to be taken away from them anyway, they might as well use it while they could. Some started taking leaves from the same trees multiple years in a row, breaking the unwritten Van Gujjar rule that any one tree should only be lopped every other year; some began lopping more aggressively than in the past, leaving far less foliage on the branches, which made it harder for the trees to regenerate.

  The park authorities had thus created a self-fulfilling prophecy; by trying to push the Van Gujjars out of Rajaji, the forest department was turning the nomads into the very threats to the environment that it had long claimed they were.

  By 2009, most Van Gujjar families had been worn down by what they felt was the forest department’s relentless crusade of fear-mongering and abuse, and had agreed to accept settlement in Pathri or Gandikhatta, leaving Rajaji largely empty of nomads—on paper, anyway. As usual, the reality in the forest was different. While many families did clear out of the park, some would leave a few members in the forest with their buffalo herd; this was done in part out of their desire to stay in the forest, but also because, as settlement deals were made with families, older sons who would need independent homes were not counted as eligible for compensation and were denied plots of land within the villages. They had nowhere to go. Other families sent a couple of members to the village, while most of the family remained in the park and paid bribes to the rangers. It was a system that wobbled on a crooked axis, but which had advantages for all: Van Gujjar families were able to keep a foot, and quite a few hooves, inside Rajaji. Rangers were able to continue collecting lucrative payouts from the nomads. Forest department authorities could crow about conservation successes, reporting rapid improvements to the health of wildlife habitats and attributing them to the removal of the Van Gujjars, thus vindicating their displacement strategy—even in areas where nomads still lived.