Looking down from our eagle’s perch, a small grassy knob in the hill where the shepherds bivouac during season en route to Vasuki Tal, we can see the head of the Mandakini valley laid out below us like a cartographic model, the inside of a giant, hollowed-out ship. On the far left loom the icy mastiffs—Mt Meru and its neighbours. At their feet, somewhere amid the moraine, there’s Chorabari Tal, the blue lake that received some of Mahatma Gandhi’s ashes. The glacier that feeds it (and lends it its name) is reputedly one of the fastest depleting in the world. It’s also the source of the Mandakini, one of the Ganga’s chief tributaries. Sundry other streams join it on its 75-km sweep downhill, the Doodhganga hurtling down on our immediate left, Mahabhaga, Khirganga, Vasukiganga, and many other resonant names that carry either a Pahadi or a Puranic flavour. (The cumulative waters of the Mandakini flow and join the Alaknanda at Rudraprayag.) The valley is a snapshot of a whole hydrological system in the natal ward.
In the middle of all this, bottom centre of the valley, stands the ancient stone shrine of Kedarnath and the bustling habitation around it—pilgrims and locals put together, say 20,000 hyper-energetic humans. Far across on the opposite hill, 5 km as the crow flies, our guide points to little dots: horses grazing in the snow-flecked meadows above the shrine to Bhairon, the forest deity. We have a hard time getting our guide not to litter the place with empty Maggi packets. “Shall we hide it under the rocks?” he asks, cockily. The preferred method for trekkers is to burn the plastic waste, apparently. Near us, an alpine rodent, rabbit-sized and tailless, chews at the mud before scampering into the rocks. It’s well above the treeline, bracing cold, and the creature has four months to go before hibernation season. And on the far right, down below, little white-and-blue things fly in and out. You could mistake it for some exotic Himalayan dragonfly. Except for that clatter. It’s the helicopter shuttle service from Phata, 25 km downhill. There’s one every half-hour, weather permitting, landing and taking off from three helipads. Well-heeled pilgrims fly in at Rs 7,000 a pop, VIP darshan included.
Choppers set up a racket within the earshot of glaciers. (Photograph by Viju Thomas)
Not quite the ideal scenario for one of India’s biggest wildlife sanctuaries? Except, no one seemed to know it was one. We certainly didn’t. No guide book, no internet site, no GMVN official, no local signage has alerted us. It’s on our return to Kedar—past the Maggi dumps near the pony bazaar, past the polythene bags floating by the well-trodden bridge where pilgrims stoically lowered themselves into icy waters for their ritual ablutions—that a cop accosts us. “Two people, two tents? That’ll be Rs 500.” Why? We can only test our ill-informedness against everyone else’s. How many of you, readers, have heard of the Kedarnath Musk Deer Sanctuary? Apparently, all the way up the oak-covered greens from Phata to these alpine grasslands, over 975 sq km, is the “largest protected area in the western Himalayas”.
You wouldn’t guess it from the ‘diesel headache’ you get at Sonprayag, all along the endemic traffic snarls on the serpent-curve roads to Gauri Kund, hundreds of buses, sedans and SUVs homing in determinedly on what is only a nook in the hills. Or on the 14-km trek to Kedar thereafter—a thick congeries of pilgrims on foot, horseback and creaking palanquins, a cocktail of human sweat, plastic waste and horse dung—that passes through its heart. The Kedar shrine itself lies just outside, probably a cartographer’s trick meant to preclude the anomaly of having a bustling pilgrim centre, one of Hinduism’s holiest shrines, violating wildlife laws! One look at the devouts, walking resolutely barefoot in the icy slush towards the Lord, and you know you can’t take this away from India’s people. But how far do you extend the courtesy? How about those Pawan Hans choppers? Clattering away overhead, setting up a daylong racket on the edge of depleting glaciers, scaring away those eagles at Garud Chatti...what eagles! Our birding skills are too amateur to pinpoint the variety. Giant wing-spans, lumbering steps on riverside boulders. Could it be that rara avis, the Pallas’s Fish Eagle, the species that was once a sea-eagle and got landlocked as the Indian landmass rammed into the Asian plate?
You wouldn’t guess it from the people’s responses too. The streak of defiance our guide showed is echoed later by Vijay Prasad, a purohit at Kedar. “Pollution ek howwa hai (it’s a bogey). It’s the insatiable appetite of you city-dwellers that caused it, your vehicles, your factories. You create a problem in Delhi, and come to Garhwal to solve it? The Ganga is defiled in Kanpur and Calcutta, and you come to Gangotri to clean it?” What about the sanctuary? Won’t the merest imbalance upset the whole equilibrium? “What do you know? It’s our life, our vikas that’s affected. This is our place. We build anything, there’s a restriction. Our shepherds go to their age-old grazing grounds, they get fined. Aapke paap ka phal hamare upar kyon thop rahe hain? (Why must we pay for your sins?)”
Pilgrims throng the trail
He’s partly right. It’s this whole paradox of transferred responsibility that pulls down the moral logic of environmentalism. In a more remote place, conservationists would blithely evacuate unlettered forest-dwellers from their ancient homes to save the ‘system’. That’s not an option with the priests and pilgrims of Kedar. Or the other dhams, all of which sustain the immense strain of having to be India’s cultural nerve-centres. Those who have seen Gaumukh over 20 years testify to a retreat plainly visible to the human eye. Our own first brush with the vagaries of high-altitude climatology came two summers ago on a dusty trail in the Badrinath sector, about the time when back in Delhi Jairam Ramesh was issuing glib denials to TERI’s claims on retreating glaciers. It was about 5 km up the scree-filled Alaknanda valley from Mana, India’s ‘last village’, en route to the splendid desolation of Satopanth lake. We were to hug the trail up to the Vasudhara Falls, and cross to the other side on a snow bridge. A ‘glacier’ in loose trekker’s parlance, it’s actually just a compressed pack of ice forming every winter, spanning the valley like a giant dam, the river flowing underneath. Regular enough to be marked on trekking maps, it was to be my first walk on ice. That year, it simply wasn’t there.
