Sunderlal Bahuguna, my father, is no longer with us. He breathed his last at the age of 94 on May 21. I began to feel his absence only when I started receiving hundreds of calls from well-wishers offering condolences. But his absence is just physical and insignificant. Way back in 1996, while my father was sitting on his longest fast, 72 days, and his health was deteriorating fast, the Dalai Lama had sent a message telling him that death is inevitable, but it should be natural—like a ripe fruit falling to the ground from the tree. In keeping with my father’s innate spirit and nature, I consider his passing during a national calamity a natural one.
Let me recall an incident in my father’s life to explain exactly what I mean. Long ago, he was once returning to his village in a bus when one of its wheels suddenly came off on a narrow and muddy road. The bus, crammed with passengers, skidded off the road and hung precariously on the edge of a gorge. It seemed the bus would hurtle down into the valley hundreds of metres below, any moment. The spectre of death loomed ominously and everybody was fear-stricken. There was chaos all around. Some passengers started jumping out of windows to save their lives. Those who could not, began to cry and pray. All this while, the bus driver remained in a fix. He could not move an inch on his seat, fearing all of them would plunge into the valley of death. My father remained calm and composed. He reassured everybody not to panic and started guiding the passengers to get down one by one. It was only after the driver came out of the bus that he himself got down. In his lifetime, my father always sought to link his destiny with that of the common man. That is possibly why he chose to embrace death at the time of a pandemic, which has claimed the lives of thousands of people.
Born in 1927, my father spent his entire life in suffering and struggles. At the age of nine, his father passed away while his mother died when he was barely 16. Still, he joined the freedom struggle and was jailed at a young age. After his release from prison, he went to Lahore and did his graduation from there. He had to face all kinds of problems in life, but he refused to work under anybody even for a single day. He went to jail for the first time at the age of 17during the British Raj and the last in 2001, in independent India. In between, rail and jail remained an integral part of his life journey.
The acute shortage of oxygen the country is facing during the current epidemic is something my father might have visualised 50 years ago. He took up the cudgels to stop the indiscriminate felling of trees on the mountains by launching the Chipko movement. It began with women in the hills protesting to dissuade the authorities, by clinging onto the trees. My father undertook a 1,400-km-long yatra lasting 120 days to connect the youth with the movement. It soon became so intensified that the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi, took cognisance of it and prohibited cutting of trees on the mountains.
My father devoted his entire life to the causes of environmental protection and social harmony. In 1944, he fought against monarchy along with social activist Sridev Suman. In 1961, he took out the wedding procession of a Dalit craftsperson, Dola Palaki, with a lot of fanfare. Such a wedding had never taken place in her community. It did not result in any clash with upper caste people nor did it lead to any litigation. In 1996, he protested against the construction of Tehri Dam and sat on a historic 74-day hunger strike. The hunger strike was called off at the behest of the Dalai Lama. He himself had adopted this path in life. He quit politics at the peak of his career in 1955 and started living in a hut in a remote village. He would often say, “Let’s change the society together and eradicate all its bad customs.”
An active participant in the freedom struggle, my father received the prestigious Jamnalal Bajaj Award for his creative work in 1986, the Right Livelihood Award for Chipko Movement in 1987, Pahal Samman in 1998 and the Gandhi Seva Samman in 1999. The IIT Roorkee conferred an honorary doctorate on him in 1989, while in 2009, the government of India honoured him with Padma Vibhushan. But deep down inside, he remained a simple man from the mountains whose only mission in life was to protect nature in all its pristine forms.
(As told to Atul Bartariya)
Rajeev Nayan Bahuguna is a journalist and son of the late environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna