for years uttarakhand has been celebrating the festival of harela: the day of green.
this year i cannot celebrate it. i am too angry. i am too heartbroken.
the kumaon region has honoured this day for generations, and so have parts of himachal pradesh. this festival was a relationship between the people and their mountains. and our government has taken that relationship and turned it into a performance and a photo op, while the real forests burn and fall around us.
the delhi-dehradun expressway was built to reduce travel time between the two cities—something the citizens never asked for, only the tourists did. this pathetic expressway instead opened the floodgates to the overtourism that has already been severely prominent in uttarakhand for the past few years. thousands of trees have been cut, wildlife has been pushed out of the only homes it has ever known, all of it sacrificed in the name of "development", as if that one word can launder what has been done here.
and now this. locals have already reported fresh tree felling inside the iconic 'saat mod' (7 bends) of the dehradun reserve forest. the government plans to completely straighten this legendary, scenic ecosystem just to facilitate a bit faster tourist movement. i genuinely don't have words for how much this hurts, and i don't have words for how much this enrages me.
so today, on the 15th of july, we are not celebrating harela. we stand and mourn it. today we observe black harela.
black harela is a citizen-led protest and mourning movement rising out of dehradun, born directly out of this contradiction, the state government pushing massive tree felling projects, like the widening of the bhaniyawala-rishikesh highway, while running state-sponsored tree planting pr campaigns on the very same festival meant to honour these forests.
today, instead of the usual festivities, we wear black, we gather peacefully, we mourn openly and publicly for the thousands of mature trees that have been cut down, trees that cannot be replaced by a sapling planted for a press photo. we are angry about the destruction of ecological zones and elephant corridors across the shivalik forests. we refuse to accept that a few saplings can undo the loss of old growth trees that took decades, and in this case, centuries, to grow.
harela was never meant to be a hashtag for the government to hide behind. it has always been a promise from the people to the mountains that we call home. we are done watching that promise get broken just so that some of the most beautiful cities of uttarakhand can be developed enough to be "virtually a part of NCR".
our times have given us more than enough reason to protest, for our right to breathe, our right to live with dignity, our right to protect the environment, the ecosystems, the forests and the mountains upon which our survival depends.
if you are not angry, you are not paying attention.
i ask my friends, wherever you may be, to join this movement and support #blackharela.
