The Bishnoi believe in saving the planet, but they can’t do it on their own. If billions of non-Bishnois all do their little bit, drop by drop…who knows? Perhaps we could start using “bishnoi” as an adjective in the way “zen” is used: this project is very “bishnoi”. It takes care of nature.
Back in 1983, in the Kanpur district of Uttar Pradesh, the state to the east of Rajasthan, poachers were targeting nilgai, those large antelopes who are fond of eating crops.
On 26 April, a twenty-three-year-old man – a non-Bishnoi – announced that in fifteen days he would set himself alight if this nilgai poaching was not stopped.
Nobody responded. On 11 May, Harinarayana Bajpai duly settled himself down on the banks of the river Saigur and burned himself to death.
The Bishnoi read about his actions and took his cause as their own. They sent reports of the incident to government officials and awaited responses.
None came.
So they announced that one Bishnoi a day would sit where Harinarayana had sat and follow his example, set themselves alight, until action was taken.
Their deadline neared.
On 13 August, the state government of Uttar Pradesh announced the banning of many forms of hunting.
One man burns himself to death? Well, that’s one protester less. One nuisance despatched.
One Bishnoi threatens to die for a cause? The authorities know the problem will escalate until it is solved.
Now a leading elder in the conservation movement, Harsh Vardhan was working as an environmental journalist in 1976. After a reporting mission in Jodhpur, he had a free day before his evening train. With a driver and a photographer, he headed out in search of chinkara. He spotted the animals, but the local Bishnoi also spotted him. First, they shouted their challenges. And when the chinkara fled for the safety of the village and Harsh and his small party gave chase, the villagers blocked the road and wielded batons. An argument flared at the front of the jeep while Bishnoi men rummaged through the back of the vehicle in search of guns.
The driver spoke the villagers’ dialect. His passengers were not hunters, he explained, but a reporter and a photographer, who shot with a camera, not a gun.
The aggression melted. The villagers became happy to field questions. In response to one, a young man led Harsh toward his hut. Within, a young woman wearing a veil was squatting in a corner, a baby chinkara by her side. The young man spoke to her. She bared her breast and guided the chinkara’s mouth to her nipple. Poachers from the city had killed its mother a few days before, and then fled. The Bishnoi woman was acting as its mother.
On the train that night Harsh kept waking. Each time he did, the image of the woman breastfeeding the orphaned chinkara shone vivid before him. “She is around me even today; in thoughts at least,” Harsh recalled. “I was enslaved by these people.”
In December 1978, an Arab prince and his retinue crossed from Pakistan to camp in the Thar Desert outside Jaisalmer. They were there to shoot Great Indian Bustards. A group of villagers marched in protest through the streets of Jaisalmer and, alerted to the situation, Harsh marched too. “When there’s a breach of the Wildlife Act, and the government is not doing anything, we have to stand in opposition,” he recalls. “It fell on our shoulders. You write a letter, the government does nothing. The only thing you can do is protest in the street.”
The march was in Jaipur, where Harsh supplied a group of forty Bishnoi with banners painted with slogans and led them to the home of the governor. The mansion served as a scenic backdrop for a photo opportunity. Journalists had received Harsh’s press release. “The press is a messenger,” Harsh explains. “A bridge between society and the rest of the world. The worth of the media was known to me.”
The Jaipur protest against the royal hunting party became the front-page story in the following morning’s edition of the newspaper Patrika. It served as a lesson for the Bishnoi in how to deploy the media in support of their aims; each action for wildlife becomes a campaign.
Harsh Vardhan pioneered another conservation campaign method the Bishnoi would utilise: the use of the courts to protect wildlife. With a friend in Jodhpur, he petitioned the Rajasthan High Court to stop the Arab hunting party and on New Year’s Day 1979, the court took mere minutes to deliver its decision; they imposed an immediate fourteen-day ban on killing bustards in the Thar Desert. The Arab hunting party withdrew.
Isn’t it expensive, I ask Harsh, taking your wildlife cases to court?
“I’ve given petitions to court four times, and never used a lawyer,” he says. “In any case, I couldn’t afford one. I have faith.”
When the Bishnoi caught Salman Khan hunting blackbuck, Harsh took their case to Doordarshan TV. At the time he had a high-powered management job running PR for a major company that relied on its government contracts. “I bitterly criticised the Chief Minister’s Office – they were just sitting on this poaching case. My action was picked up as evidence against me. I was a threat to the government.”
His activism cost Harsh his job. Since then he’s got by on his passion for wildlife.
Whenever I read reports about nature conservation in India, Harsh’s name crops up. For example, when the Indian government memorialised the sacrifice of villagers in the 1730 massacre at Khejarli, on the 2001 anniversary, it was marked by the presentation of the annual Amrita Devi Bishnoi Wildlife Protection Award. This is given for a significant act of nature conservation and that first award was posthumous, to Ganga Ram Bishnoi from the village of
Chirai who was shot in 2000 while chasing deer hunters.
“Financial help was offered to his widow,” I read, “by Mr Harsh Vardhan.”
Money, for Harsh, is a free-flowing stream; you don’t build a dam and collect it but direct it to whatever needs watering. His sense of money reflects the words of Jambhoji. “If you have something in little quantity, donate little; do not refuse to donate if you have something.” Harsh has a simple policy as regards finances. “We should save as much as we can and put all that into conservation. Be truthful to yourself and to society or we become hypocrites. Money makes us a different person. I need it, but I am doing conservation work without it.”
A decade or so ago, when Harsh was on an overnight business trip in Jodhpur, the Bishnoi asked him to join in a protest against chinkara hunting. He did. “I spoke loudly, and didn’t know what consequences would happen.” The police charged him with “violating civic norms” and the case continues. Ram Niwas, who guided me on my initial excursion into the Bishnoi world, has a dozen such cases against him, Harsh tells me. Jail is a constant threat.
Excerpted with permission from My Head For A Tree: The Extraordinary Story of the Bishnoi, the World’s First Eco-Warriors, Martin Goodman, Profile Books/Hachette India.
