Ranjona Banerji | Sonam Wangchuk's Himalayan blunder!

India’s Himalayan region is in deep distress.

O no! Have your eyes started glazing over and become unfocused?

Has your mind gone blank, with one lone sad voice repeating “here we go again”, “how do I escape from this same old same old”?

My deepest sympathies.

It is indeed unfair that this has been thrown before you. There are so many more pleasurable things to think about, after all.

Maybe, how great our own Modiji is?

How well India is doing in the world forum.

How the passport is more valuable than any other, especially because so many Indians have given them up for other passports.

How India is the only nation to have sent something to the Moon, singlehandedly overseen by our own Modi.

How electoral bonds have changed the face of the Indian economy for the better?

How enjoyable it is to eat vadas soaked in rasam compared to vadas not soaked in rasam?

The possibilities are endless.

It is perhaps keeping all this in mind that so much of India decided that a 21-day hunger strike by activist, engineer, inspiration for a movie character and Ramon Magsaysay Award winner should be largely ignored. Sonam Wangchuk fasted to draw attention to the ravages of climate change particularly on the Himalayan region, to demand statehood for Ladakh and to stop the destruction of the mountains by unscrupulous corporates and developers. On every count, as you can see, Wangchuk stood, or rather lay down without food, for what no one wants to really know about India.

There is so much to celebrate after all.

How about the fact that four years after the pandemic hit us, India achieved so much?

We invented vaccinations, thanks to the scientific interventions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself.

We vaccinated the world for free, thanks to the humanitarian interventions of Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself.

Not a single Indian died because of Covid-19.

There were no migrant workers forced to walk home in the hot sun.

There were no dead bodies in shallow graves along the banks of the Ganga and other rivers.

There was no Kumbh Mela held against all advice.

There was no falsification of RTPCR tests to ensure the Kumbh Mela was held.

No one died because of Covid-19 at the Kumbh Mela.

Truly, our achievements are immense. All that banging and crashing of vessels helped to keep this deadly virus at bay. Far more than any vaccinations could, to be honest. Prime Minister Modi also invented the concept of banging and crashing of kitchen vessels to terrorise a pandemic away.

I suppose though for some of us, memories of the pandemic are even worse than warnings about planetary collapse. There is so much left to do for those of us still alive, even if no one died.

And then there’s Wangchuk. Much lauded and loved by the government and its endless loving fan clubs when he applauded the abrogation of Article 370 and the inherent promise that Ladakh would get statement. Er, that was in 2019, I think. Since so much has happened, generally in the direction of nothing as far as the Narendra Modi government and its promises are concerned. Not even Wangchuk’s claims that China had encroached into Indian territory in Ladakh. You might remember that Modi spoke to China and China said “of course not my good friend”, and Modi reported back to us, “Of course not” and that was that.

So you can imagine how credible Wangchuk’s claims are.

Maybe like his claims of Himalayan endangerment.

The Internet being a dangerous place, you can even come across reports by scientists. We all know that scientists are dangerous people. I do suspect that Wangchuk also relies on scientists, which is why he’s being ignored. India has only one real scientist anyway.

These scientists have studied the Himalayan region — and am sure you now wonder, as you should, as to how they got permission — and they have found that not only is a year-long drought imminent if global temperatures rise by three degrees, but that India’s food security is at risk. Over 50 per cent of the land in India is likely to experience drought for the next 30 years. In addition, erratic rainfall patterns have already badly affected India’s farmers. You remember them? They keep trying to march here and there in the hope someone might listen to them. Like Wangchuk, they meet the sound of silence.

There are additional problems here. Exposure to extreme heat and exposure to extreme cold. Both bring separate sets of challenges for the people who will suffer and for any government that is interested. Strike that last sentence. You and I know — am not sure if Wangchuk has figured this out yet — that there is no such thing.

What we do have here in the Himalayas — and this is what young people called “lived experience”, so it has as much scientific strength as shouting “Go Corona Go” while hitting stainless steel plates together — is uncontained, ceaseless construction and destruction of forests and natural environs. Our aquifers are drying up.

I mean, so what if this is what all of us see around us?

We see India the way it is around us, every day. And still, we don’t believe it. We see joblessness, inflation, rising poverty, constraints to standards of living, dirt and squalor, corruption. But we also do not see it. We do not see the activists in jail. We do not see activists on hunger strike. We have been told that activists are evil and anti-national because they oppose the government. We have been told that our Union government is the greatest but only this current Union government. All the other Union governments conspired — though the invention of time travel, also by the current Prime Minister — to make life hard for the current Prime Minister.

But there is really no need to worry. When the Himalayas collapse, we’ll be told that there never were any Himalayas to begin with. It was a conspiracy which poor Sonam Wangchuk fell for. And so did the rest of us.

Like that movie, don’t look up.

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