Recently, we have seen disturbing visuals of a minister's confrontation with women from a remote village in Garhwal, protesting against the felling of trees, in his own constituency. The mountains are once again seething with anger at the destructive development being unleashed by a double engine government. To understand what's happening, we need to go back in time.
The year 2013 was a watershed in the history of the state. The massive glacial burst caused by a spell of more than usual rain created such havoc in Garhwal Himalaya that the state is still reeling under its after effects. lamenting the needless loss of life in a disaster that was anticipatable serves no purpose. But one would have thought that such wanton destruction would bring home some lessons for the future. At the time the disaster occurred, many attributed it to the rapid transformation of pilgrimage into tourism, the desecration of a holy site through sheer over exploitation. And indeed, several studies have revealed that the disaster was man made—a saga of meteorological warnings unheeded, burdening of the site beyond its carrying capacity, rampant encroachment of the Ganga riverbanks and sheer lack of preparation on the part of the Government.
While working on a book that documented the traditional foot-pilgrimage routes to Kedarnath, right after the disaster, I witnessed, first hand, the enormity of the disaster that we had unleashed upon our state and the thousands of hapless pilgrims who found themselves in alien conditions. Even as I walked the debris choked, death infested streets of Gaurikund, the base from where the pilgrimage begins, and witnessed the reclamation efforts en route, the one question that kept hitting me hard was whether we had learnt any lessons from the disaster. Today, looking back, the answer has to be a resounding no! In fact, what we are now doing will destroy the very essence of pilgrimage.
Across the world, pilgrimage is best accomplished by walking up to sacred sites. In India, pilgrimage is equated with the allowing of darshan: the vision of the supreme. Darshan is the process of approaching the deity in the temple in a state of spiritual communion, open and ready to receive sacred revelations. It means to see the absolute reality, to be able to look into the self, and also to be seen by that supreme reality. Darshan also stands for the philosophy of leading our lives, and Kedarnath is perhaps the ultimate destination, to imbibe Shiva’s philosophy of environmental protection, for who but Shankar could restrain the mighty Ganga in his forest-like matted locks. The pilgrim arriving after the arduous journey to Kedarnath does not come with the expectation of a mela like atmosphere. One is looking for solitude, an opportunity for a dialogue with the Shiva element within oneself. This dialogue is facilitated by the sheer magnificence of Kedarnath's sacred landscape.
Walking the Kedarnath trail, in the midst of dense forests and with the mighty Himalayas always in view, one is reminded of one’s own insignificance in the universe. Modern civilization conditions us to center ourselves on the egoistic self and its possessions, while walking as a pilgrim, we give up these possessions and surrender our ego to that supreme power that has created the universe and is also endowed with the power to destroy. In pilgrimage, the journey is radiant with hope that arrival at the tangible destination will bring spiritual benefits with it. The pilgrim has achieved a story of his or her own, and in this way becomes part of the religious discourse consisting of stories of travel and transformation.
Pilgrimage has always been linked to walking and slow progress because its essence lies not just in the destination but also in the landscape traversed. For instance, in the Kedarnath pilgrimage every spot that you halt at, every chatti, has its own significance and a visit to these points becomes a mini pilgrimage in itself. When you walk, your carbon footprint is minimal, and you leave the space in a state of minimal disturbance. When you halt at the little inns and teashops along the route, you contribute to local economies and support communities. You make a difference to their lives and enrich your own karma. In brief, a pilgrimage is most meritorious when achieved with simplicity.
Compare this with the "disneyfied", mass scale pilgrimage that we are transforming the Badri-Kedar pilgrimage into. Raucous laser shows with visuals lifted straight out of BR Chopra serials produced in the 1980s projected on the temple itself, temples decked with tonnes of flowers that will doubtless be dumped into nearby rivers and glaciers once dried, rampant use of plastic and styrofoam disposables, are all symptomatic of this process. It does not take rocket science to realise that deriving mileage by claiming that 25,000 pilgrims arrived on the day the temple gates opened, works contrary to all precepts of pilgrimage as a spiritual experience.
But what is the wanton degeneration of the Kedarnath sacred landscape so disturbingIJ According to estimates given to the National Green Tribunal, about 70,000 trees would have to be felled for the ill-conceived 900 kilometre long all-weather roads project. About 25,000 are already gone. These trees include thousands of Peepal (Ficus religiosa) trees, planted by pilgrims over centuries in memory of their ancestors. For a Hindutva inspired government, this should be sacrilege of the worst kind, but the mental and moral bankruptcy does not end here. In village Kaviltha, once the home of Kalidas' Shakuntalam, I have seen the precious tar-like medicine, Shilajit, raining down from the rock faces due to vibrations caused by helicopter blades. We have given a free run to choppers, aerial to terrestrial, to conduct destructive sorties in this landscape.
So whose tunnel vision are we implementing at KedarnathIJ Is it not the same lobby at work that permitted the Akshardham temple complex to come up on the outskirts of Delhi right on the Yamuna watershed, or the lobby that allowed a god man to hold a mega-event on the banks of fragile Yamuna floodplains and ruined them, or the thought process that has allowed the Kanwad pilgrimage at Haridwar to become a hotbed of crassness and hooliganism. When we start using pilgrimage, as an exercise in mass religious mobilisation to nurture vote banks, spiritualism will most certainly degenerate into pop-religion, and sacred pilgrimage will turn into IPl cricket, with tunnel-vision politicians as cheerleaders.
The question to be asked is that if Baba Kedar does not grant darshan throughout the year, why build an all-weather road leading up to his abodeIJ
(The writer is an anthropologist, author, traveler and activist who also runs a public walking group Been There, Doon ThatIJ Views expressed are personal)