Articles > Himalayan Endings

Terrible things are happening at the eastern end of the Himalayas and almost no one is aware of them. Everyone knows about the social and environmental problems faced in Kashmir, Nepal and even Bhutan, but few have heard of the last Himalayan state, Arunachal Pradesh. I spent February 1995 there and found all the ingredients of Paradise about to be destroyed by a plethora of serpents.

North East India is the least known and least visited part of the sub continent. Most of its seven hill states have been largely closed to outsiders since the Second World War. After Indian Independence in 1947, Nehru instituted a policy of governing the region directly from Delhi. This was done ostensibly to protect the unique tribal cultures but in effect resulted in martial law and large parts of the North East, especially Nagaland, have been under virtual army rule for three decades. Two of the compensations in the past for what has often amounted to brutal military repression have been that the natural resources of the region have been protected and immigration has been prevented. Even Indian citizens required Inner Line Permits to visit almost all the North East States and there were special laws that prohibited the transfer of land to non-tribals and other constitutional safeguards to protect them.

Recently all that has changed. Outsiders are flooding in, the Indian government is promoting tourism and illegal logging is rife.

The real wealth of Assam lies in its rice production and its famous 800 tea gardens, which produce over half of India’s tea. In Arunachal Pradesh, which wraps itself around Assam and occupies virtually all the high ground, the hill tribes have traditionally practised jhum, slash and burn cultivation. In the past cleared areas would have been left alone for up to 30 or even 60 years and the original forest would recolonise the slopes from the wooded valleys, which were also rich in game. Axed trees were burnt on the fields, correcting the soil’s acidity.

Today, in many areas, the trees have all gone and I saw endless vistas of bare hillsides off which the soil was washed by the monsoon rains to silt up the Brahmaputra and its tributaries. The manager of one of the largest and best run tea gardens down on the plain told me that he could remember a time when all the streams ran throughout the dry season and there were fish in the rivers. Now they are all dry, there is no water for irrigation and the climate is changing, to the detriment of the tea crop.

I saw the villains. They were farouche, romantic characters riding arrogantly through the gardens on their massive elephants. Chains for pulling logs trailed from them and a pile of great tree trunks lay crushing some of the immaculately trimmed tea bushes beside the road. I asked the manager why he did not call the police and have these illegal loggers arrested. ‘It is more than my life is worth’ he replied. ‘Anyway, the logs will be gone by morning.’

Some days before, I had met the head of the Police Special Branch for one of the remote tribal regions on the India-Burma border. ‘This logging scandal should be exposed by the international media!’ he exclaimed. ‘The police, the Forestry Department, the lorry owners - they’re all in on it and there is nothing any of us can do.’ Close to the border between Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland, I spoke to the chiefs of two Naga sub groups, the Nocte and the Wanchu. ‘Our land is being turned into a desert’ one said.

‘Why don’t you protest?’ I asked. ‘You send elected representatives to the State legislature. They must speak up.’

‘They do’ he replied ‘but no one listens. It is the politicians who are behind it.’

Unfortunately, the corruption is now so endemic and the rewards from extracting the remaining teak from ever-remoter valleys so great that there is little hope of anything changing. The sudden enthusiasm to promote tourism is dangerous and paternalistic. Far from generating development by creating jobs and bringing revenue to the people, it will only undermine finally the pride and self confidence of people who could themselves rapidly restore their economy and their environment if the logging were simply stopped.

But that is unlikely to happen and I felt frustrated and guilty on my return at being unable to ‘expose the scandal’ as I had wished. Although the talented photographer, Paul Harris, had been with me and had brought back powerful images of the rich cultures we saw and the devastation overwhelming them, newspaper editors in Britain were only interested in our story if we could prove that the timber came here. And that, in spite of strenuous efforts by Greenpeace, has so far proved impossible to do. Who knows where it goes? Much is processed into plywood in factories down in the Assamese plains. Some may even go to China via Burma and a new road that is rumoured to have opened to take the remaining Burmese teak. I have seen too many great forests around the world disappear in my lifetime and watched, helpless, as corrupt politicians took their cut. The consequences of deforesting the catchment of the Brahmaputra may be the worst of all.

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