THG 20: Warnings from Joshimath: A sinking town devoured by development

A cautionary tale on how not to challenge the nature if we want to save our skins

Let me invent a proverb for the future here: if you are fond of creating sinkholes, they too will be fond of you and some of them will end up sucking you in.

That indeed neatly summarizes how nature tends to respond to the things humankind does to it.

This instalment of THG Recommendations will center around a sinking Himalayan town of Joshimath in India. This is how beautiful the place looks even now:

Kavita Upadhyay @Upadhyay_Cavita

The Himalayan life is perhaps about living with the two extremes of beauty and disasters. #Joshimath right now.

This landscape in the world’s youngest mountains, the geologists have been saying, sits atop a weak and silty base and have consistently warned over past six decades against causing any seismic disturbances in the area.

The Indian state, though, has been gleefully ignoring that advice and moved forward with mega-projects like big dams for hydroelectricity and express 4-lane highways connecting the four dhams, the sacred mountainous Hindu pilgrimmage sites.

Lately, the entire edifice of the town has been crumbling with massive cracks and sinkholes displacing the entire population of the settlement.

The Hindu @the_hindu

On October 2021, cracks first appeared in a few houses in Uttarakhand’s Joshimath town. Over a year later, by January 11, 723 houses in all of the nine wards in the town have developed major or minor cracks on the floors, ceilings, and walls.

trib.alExplained | Why is the land sinking in Joshimath?Joshimath has developed in exactly the way a committee of experts advised against — 46 years ago.

Please note that this has happened in the dry winter season. You can easily imagine what catastrophe this will lead to in the monsoons.

So, why this blind hurry for break-neck development in the Himalayas? Here is a pithy summary from an activist Amitabh Pande:

With Joshimath sinking, the worst prophecies I have made in the past about our disastrous policies for the ‘development’ of the Himalayas are sadly coming true. Joshimath is just the beginning. While I have much to say about how as a government as well as a civil society we continue to treat the destruction of Himalayan ecology with total disregard, the case of Joshimath, Kedarnath, and Badrinath and other sacred destinations has a different dimension. 

This is related to the growth of the most vulgar form of Hindutva, devoid of any connection with those Hindu spiritual traditions which have made these locations sacred. We have little understanding now of how and why these locations, sometimes chosen with great geographical precision as to the axis they formed, were designated as ‘sacred’. What was common to all of them was their remoteness, the difficulty of access and their intimate relationship with their natural surroundings – river, rock, direction of the sun, flora and fauna.

The temples were built to highlight these relationships. Journeying to them – the Yatra , the circumambulation – had to be arduous – a kind of Tapasya and it was the Yatra itself which led to self realization not the entry into a temple. In Kedarnath for example, it is the rock face which is worshipped as the icon.

Hindutva has destroyed this sacredness. We have Disneyfied these destinations. Built hotels, shops, parking lots, houses and made it possible to reach them by Helicopter or built the most destructive four lane expressways. We have forgotten that just fifty years ago a night stay in Kedarnath was forbidden by tradition and a pilgrim after reaching there from the last post from where the final climb began had to return before nightfall. Only the priest was allowed to stay in the complex – no one else. A few Sants lived in the caves around and that was all. All this was a part of the mystique, and critical to its sacredness. All gone.

As usual, as the Indian television channels race after the sensational tidbits, some thoughtful journalism on the issue is available in Youtube. This video, in particular, deals with the larger issues of infrastructure development in the Himalayas and the poitician-builder nexus that enables it even when it is known to be suicidal:

A series from the portal Lallantop has led to this comprehensive report:

Besides all this, the entire Himalayan and Mahabharat range of mountains, having been born out of tussle between the Indian and Tibetan tectonic plates, harbor enormous risk of earthquakes. The extreme weather events leading to massive floods and landslides are now set to intensify further as the Himalaya heats at a rate almost thrice the global average.

How is the Indian state dealing with this impending catastrophe? Again, let me end this post with the words of Amitabh Pande:

This is Hindutva as a flourishing industry, a perverse kind of commerce in pop religiosity, cheap calendar art iconography, mythology as Bollywood fantasy, raucous bhajans based on filmy tunes, filthy dhabas selling greasy ‘Prasad’ and travelers in hordes who treat this as a form of guilt free spiritual saturnalia.

In fact it is by adding to all this the layer of muscular, patriarchist, cultural nationalism that the new Hindutva identity is being constructed. It is an identity built on violence against nature and against humanity. There is nothing sacred about our Geography anymore. This is not Hinduism.

The sinking of Joshimath had to happen. Worse may follow.