Uttarakhand has been billed as Devbhoomi, or the Land of the Gods, but it has ironically become the source of distressing media headlines. Seldom does a week pass without Muslims and Christians being menaced. Increasingly, Uttarakhand witnesses a devastating disaster every year. To me, Hindutva as practised is the common driver behind the two sets of bad news that symbolise the growing social and environmental degeneration.

Hindutvawadis deliberately divide society. Their governments, at the Centre and in Uttarakhand, also pursue economic growth in complete disregard of the environment, triggering disasters erroneously dubbed “natural”. Their economic paradigm has, in fact, replaced Hindutva’s original idea of sustainable development as espoused by, say, the Swadeshi Jagran Manch, a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh affiliate.

I asked renowned environmentalist Dr Ravi Chopra what he thought of my proposition. He agreed: “Environmental degradation and social degradation are two sides of the same coin. Hindutvawadis worship the Rigveda, which celebrates nature. Yet they assault the environment, as they also do the constitutional idea of unity in diversity.”

Uttarakhand has yet to experience the full extent of nature’s fury provoked by unrestrained development aimed at profit and capital accumulation. A list prepared by Citizens for Green Doon, an NGO, showed that more than 25,000 trees had been felled in the Doon Valley alone in recent years for road building and other projects, with another 40,000 trees earmarked for removal.

Among all ongoing projects, the Char Dham highway, linking the holy spots of Badrinath, Kedarnath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri, bodes most ominously for the State. A pet project of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the 889-km Char Dham highway will consume 690 ha of forest, with 55,000 trees uprooted and 20 million cubic metres of loose soil to reckon with.

The highway is likely to cause havoc of a frightening scale in future. Geologists Biswajit Bera and Soumik Saha documented in a 2025 study, published in Springer Nature, as many as 811 major landslides over 800 km of the highway—a landslide a kilometre.

Religious nationalism had Modi conceive the Char Dham highway as an all-weather road to transport a higher number of pilgrims faster than before to the revered sites. Yet the highway is also an example of the Hindutva government not recognising the limits of power, believing its legislative majority bestows upon it the right to disregard regulations framed to protect the Himalayas’ fragile ecology.

The legal history of the Char Dham project bears this out. In 2018, arguing against a stay on the project sought on the ground that its environmental impact had not been assessed, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) said it did not have to do so. Why?

The MoRTH cited the Environment Ministry’s 2013 notification that said expansion work up to 100 km undertaken on existing national highways did not require environmental impact assessment (EIA). Wasn’t the Char Dham highway being turned into a dual carriageway 889 km in length? No, the MoRTH argued—the 889 km comprised 53 small projects, and therefore the EIA was not mandatory.

At the heart of the dispute was determining the width of the highway adequate for traffic to flow smoothly while inflicting as little damage on the mountainous terrain as possible. The narrower the highway, the less the cutting of mountain slopes. The less the cutting, the stabler these slopes would be, reducing the possibility of landslides.

To examine this issue, the Supreme Court appointed a high-powered committee, which submitted two reports in July 2020. The minority report, prepared by independent environmentalists like Chopra and Hemant Dhyani, recommended a 5.5-metre blacktop or tarred road. The majority report, written largely by government officials, said it should be 10 metres wide. The Supreme Court accepted the minority report.

Unwilling to relent, the Modi government brought into play militaristic nationalism. The Defence Ministry told the court it needed a road seven metres wide for speedier deployment of troops to the India-China border. Within weeks, it upped its requirement to a 10-metre blacktop, which the Supreme Court accepted. Who would dare oppose the military’s notion of national security?

Development, destruction

With the highway being widened and the ingress of pilgrims crossing well over 40 lakh a year, a scramble to build hotels and restaurants began. Those who had roadside establishments and houses were displaced because of the space needed to widen the highway. Murmurs of discontent began, with the rising incidents of landslides deepening the alienation of local residents. The killing of Ankita Bhandari at a resort owned by a senior BJP leader’s son, in Pauri, located on the Char Dham highway network, symbolised the makeover of a pilgrimage, once celebrated for its slowness and triumph of the human will, into tourism and its attendant corrupting commercialisation.

Pressure began to mount for preserving the pristine environment of the Bhagirathi Eco-Sensitive Zone (BESZ), the last stretch of the highway. On September 13, 2023, a meeting chaired by MoRTH Minister Nitin Gadkari decided to ask experts, including Dhyani, to review the detailed project report of BESZ. Citing a study showing that road widening between Tanakpur and Sukhidhang increased unstable slopes by a whopping 4,000 per cent, the experts recommended the highway in BESZ should have a 5.5-metre blacktop.

Was the recommendation accepted? Dhyani said to me: “I am dismayed, for all the permissions given [such as for clearing 43 ha of forest] suggest that a 10-metre blacktop will be built.” Dhyani’s dismay is not unwarranted, for Bera and Saha say, in yet another study, that the 2025 heavy rainfall-induced landslides in Garhwal were largely due to the “unscientific construction of roads, [which] have increased slope instability over the area”.

The commodification of Uttarakhand’s sacred geography could potentially rile its people against the Pushkar Singh Dhami government. This possibility is thwarted because the Sangh subliminally portrays the presence of religious minorities in Uttarakhand as defilement of the Land of the Gods. As in the environmental realm, so in the social context, the RSS-BJP refuses to recognise the constitutional limits placed on power.

Incidents crafted to terrorise religious minorities, particularly Muslims, are just too many to recount here. A detailed report on the othering of Muslims can be read in the Association for Protection of Civil Rights’ Excluded, Targeted, & Displaced: Communal Narratives and Violence in Uttarakhand, which can be accessed on the Internet.

There are two reasons why it is easy to polarise Uttarakhand. It is home to two infantry regiments, the Kumaon Regiment and the Garhwal Rifles, with many of its recruits dying in Kashmir and the 1999 Kargil war. It is easy, thus, to stoke the sentiments of Uttarakhandis against Pakistanis, increasingly a trope for Muslims in India.

Muslims are also highly visible in Uttarakhand, constituting 13.95 per cent of its population, although they are concentrated mostly in four districts—Haridwar (34.28 per cent of its population), Dehradun (11.91 per cent), Udham Singh Nagar (22.58 per cent), and Nainital (12.65 per cent). These four districts account for 36 of the State’s 70 Assembly seats. The Sangh’s invoking of the fear of Muslims, even though unfounded, strikes a chord with people here.

The BJP’s othering of Muslims turns the faux defiling of the Land of the Gods into more pressing issues of security and religious-cultural purity. This overshadows its own role in the depredation of Uttarakhand’s sacred geography, a classic neoliberal method of capturing power by degrading both the environment and society, Indian style.

Ajaz Ashraf is a senior journalist from Delhi and the author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste.

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