Himalayan Saints and the Defence of Sacred Ecology: Resisting Developmental Hindutva Across the Char Dham Corridor

Posted on 27th November, 2025 (GMT 01:28 hrs)

ABSTRACT

The Char Dham conflict in Uttarakhand exposes a deep contradiction within contemporary Hindutva: a BJP-led “developmental Hinduism” that fuses neoliberal infrastructure, militarized nationalism, and centralized temple governance is destroying the sacred-ecological fabric it claims to protect. The 2016 Char Dham all-weather highway and the 2019 (later repealed) Devasthanam Management Act have sought to convert the fragile, divine Himalayan shrines of Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath into a securitized tourism-military corridor. In response, hereditary priests, ascetics, and local communities have mobilised a powerful resistance, framing the mountains and rivers as the living body of Shiva rather than exploitable resources. Drawing on Guattari’s three ecologies, their protests defend an embodied, relational sacred ecology against the state’s homogenizing, extractive logic. Far from a mere environmental dispute, this struggle reveals Hindutva’s betrayal of plural, place-based Hinduism and challenges the secular-pluralist foundations of the Indian republic.

IN CONTINUATION WITH

I. Introduction

In the northern arc of the Indian subcontinent, the Himalayas have long functioned as both mythic horizon and material sanctuary for what is described as “Hindu spirituality” — a terrain where gods are believed to reside, sages pursue liberation, and rivers emerge as living manifestations of the divine. Within this sacred geography, the Char Dham circuit — Yamunotri, Gangotri, Kedarnath, and Badrinath — has historically been understood as a pilgrimage of elemental communion: a mokṣa-yātra across the terrains of water, rock, and snow. Yet in the twenty-first century, these same mountains have become contested ground, where ascetics, environmentalists, and local communities resist the state in defence of what many understand not merely as landscape, but as the living body of Shiva.

Since 2019, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)–led government in Uttarakhand, backed by central leadership, has advanced the Char Dham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojana — a 900-kilometre all-weather highway intended to connect the four shrines. Supporters celebrate the project as an act of national devotion — a civilizational assertion that simultaneously enhances pilgrimage access and strengthens military mobility along the Indo-Tibetan frontier. Critics, however — including Hindu monks, hereditary priests, geologists, and ecological scholars — argue that the project constitutes a profound violation of Himalayan sanctity. Widened roads, deforestation, and the cutting of fragile slopes have already triggered landslides, flash floods, slope collapses, and hydrological disruption in a region long recognised as seismically volatile.

What began as an environmental dispute soon expanded into a struggle over religious authority. The 2019 Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act transferred control of 51 temples, including Kedarnath and Badrinath, from hereditary priestly custodians to a state-appointed board headed by the BJP government. For local priestly lineages, this was not administrative reform but political encroachment — a seizure of sacred custodianship under the guise of governance. The Teerth Purohit Mahapanchayat denounced the Act as an assault on the autonomy of dharma and accused the government of transforming sacred trusts into instruments of tourism revenue cloaked in devotional rhetoric. By 2021, sustained protests by saints, ascetic orders, and local actors compelled the state to repeal the Act — at least temporarily.

Beneath these events lies a deeper ideological rupture within Hindutva. The BJP and its ideological nucleus, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), present themselves as protectors of Hindu civilisation. Yet when Himalayan ascetics — figures traditionally revered as embodiments of renunciation and guardianship — confront state developmentalism, a structural paradox becomes visible. In contemporary Hindutva practice, loyalty to the nation increasingly supersedes devotion to the divine. The conflict reveals a fundamental tension between the fragile spiritual ecologies of the Himalayas and an emergent “developmental Hinduism” that fuses neoliberal infrastructure, cultural nationalism, military-bureaucratic power, and technocratic rationality. In this collision of sacred geography and statist development logic, Hindutva’s internal contradictions stand exposed.

This article argues that the Char Dham protests, when situated within the broader consolidation of Hindutva as ideology-in-practice, illuminate a profound sacred-political fracture. Far from a localised environmental controversy, the mobilisation by monks and priests marks a struggle over the meaning of Hinduism — and, by extension, over the normative foundations of the Indian republic. Their resistance resonates with global debates on religious nationalism, ecological crisis, and developmental modernity, yet speaks through a distinctly postcolonial idiom: one that refuses the commodification of sacred space and rejects the equation of devotion with spectacle, infrastructure, or administrative authority.

In articulating this refusal, protesters advance an alternative religious politics — one grounded in an understanding of dharma as ecological, relational, and irreducible to state management. This vision stands sharply opposed to the Sangh Parivar’s developmentalist teleology, wherein militarised road networks, pilgrimage circuits, and centralised temple governance are framed as civilizational imperatives. The resulting contradiction is not only theological; it is constitutional. The BJP’s state-led Hindutva does more than reveal tensions within Hindu political thought — it actively undermines the secular and pluralistic foundations of the Constitution: from the normative commitments of the Preamble, to the guarantees of equality and freedom in Fundamental Rights, and the civic orientation of Article 51A(h), which calls upon citizens to cultivate scientific temper, humanism, and the spirit of inquiry and reform.

The Char Dham conflict, therefore, is not merely a dispute over mountain roads or temple boards — it is emblematic of a larger contest over India’s future: between a constitutional imagination rooted in pluralism, ecological ethics, and coexistence, and a majoritarian developmental nationalism seeking to fold sacred space, citizenship, environment, and devotion into a singular homogenised ideological order. In this unfolding confrontation, the unresolved tensions of Hindutva — and its departures from India’s secular republican ethos — become starkly and inescapably visible.

II. Historical and Political Context of the Char Dham Controversy (2019–2025)

The Char Dham pilgrimage corridor — a central axis of Himalayan sacred geography — has historically functioned not only as a religious network, but as what an ecosophical framework identifies as a tri-ecological formation. Its integrity rested on the interdependence of:

a mental ecology, shaped by devotional imaginaries that perceived the Himalayas as animate divinity — a landscape of gods rather than scenery;
a social ecology, structured through hereditary priesthoods, ascetic orders, itinerant religious networks, and temple trusts;
an environmental ecology, embedded within fragile mountain systems defined by glaciers, tectonic volatility, and hydrological precarity.

Together, these ecologies sustained a relational equilibrium in which sacred autonomy, ecological stewardship, and ritual continuity co-evolved rather than competed. Governance, where it existed, was custodial rather than administrative; it preserved rather than redesigned the cosmology through which land, deity, and community were intertwined.

The ascent of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the consolidation of the Sangh Parivar’s paradigm of “developmental Hindutva” disrupted this equilibrium. Through an infrastructural and techno-bureaucratic logic that prioritised militarisation, extractive development, and state rationalisation, the pilgrimage landscape was reconceptualised: no longer as a sacred ecology requiring care, but as a corridor to be optimised, securitised, and engineered. In ecosophical terms, the Char Dham conflicts since 2019 constitute a rupture across all three ecologies — a reterritorialisation in which sacred, social, and environmental systems are reorganised under a homogenising state logic shaped by civilizational nationalism and a wartime political economy.

The analysis that follows traces these ruptures through five interlinked domains:

The Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act — a legislative restructuring of religious authority and custodianship.
The priest and ascetic protest movements — resistance grounded in claims to sacred autonomy and lineage legitimacy.
Ecological contestations surrounding the Char Dham Highway Project — debates over seismic risk, environmental degradation, and ecological ethics as well as the claims of “facilitation of troop movement” across the Indo-Tibetan borders amid larger border tensions between India and China.
Media and ideological responses — the production of narratives that either legitimise or delegitimise dissent, often through the idiom of nationalism.
Judicial interventions — legal attempts to adjudicate competing claims of religious freedom, environmental vulnerability, national security, and infrastructural ambition.

Together, these zones reveal the transformation of the Char Dham from a historically plural ritual-ecological formation into a contested terrain where constitutional secularism, religious authority, ecological stewardship, and majoritarian development politics collide.

1. The Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act (2019)

The 2019 Devasthanam Act transferred control of 51 temples from hereditary custodians to a centralized state board. Read through a conventional political framework, this appears as a dispute over governance. Yet an ecosophical analysis reveals a far more consequential process: the attempted reterritorialization of a sacred ecology into a bureaucratic one. The Act sought to collapse diverse ritual traditions, embodied custodianship, and cosmological autonomy into an administrative apparatus geared toward efficiency, tourism, and revenue extraction.

Many Hindus who are opposed to such political Hindutva described this transition as mere “corporatization,” but the shift is better understood as a deeper metamorphosis — the conversion of a spiritual-social ecology into a market-regulated social ecology. Practices once grounded in intergenerational memory, ritual intimacy, and metaphysical responsibility are increasingly rearticulated through managerial logics of optimization, cost-benefit rationality, and infrastructural scalability. Rituals, lineages, and sacred obligations — components of a living ecology that historically linked deity, land, and community — are displaced by bureaucratic oversight and technocratic control. In this new paradigm, the sacred is not simply governed: it is reframed as an asset — quantifiable, standardizable, and ultimately tradable.

For priests and ascetics, the stakes were not administrative but ontological. They argued that the Act violated the nija swarupa — the inherent self-sovereignty — of sacred spaces, where divine presence is not metaphorical but “felt”, real, relational, and embodied. From an ecosophical standpoint, their resistance reasserts a cosmology in which land, deity, ritual practice, and custodianship constitute a co-dependent ecosystem rather than separable domains.

As Rukmini (2017) notes, the Sangh Parivar’s homogenising project routinely marginalises local religious plurality. Viewed through this lens, the Devasthanam Act was not a managerial intervention but a state-led attempt to overwrite heterogeneous spiritual ecologies with a unified administrative ecology. In doing so, it not only centralized authority but destabilized the plural lifeworlds — ecological, historical, affective, and devotional — that have sustained Himalayan religiosity across centuries.

Thus, what appears superficially as institutional reform emerges, on closer examination, as a restructuring of the sacred itself — a shift from relational ontology to administrative ontology, from embodied cosmology to bureaucratized devotion.

2. Himalayan Saints and Statewide Protests: Counter-Hegemonic Resistance

The priest-saint protests across Uttarakhand in 2021 cannot be reduced to mere bureaucratic objections to the Char Dham Devasthanam Act; they represented a form of counter-hegemony. In the terms of subaltern studies, this was not simply a dispute over administration but an assertion of religious and ecological authority—a statement that the sacred is defined by custodial lifeworlds nurtured over centuries, not by the homogenizing logic of the Hindutva state. Religion here functioned as a site of resistance, a living critique of the religious fundamentalism imposed from above, where monastic orders and hereditary priests enacted an alternative polity rooted in praxis, ritual, and ecological stewardship rather than the statist centralization of sacred space.

Hereditary priests, monastic orders, and temple trusts mobilized across Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri, Yamunotri, Joshimath, Rudraprayag and Ukhimath. The All India Teerth Purohit Mahapanchayat coordinated the movement, articulating not only procedural objections but a broader critique of state overreach into sacred domains and the ecological governance of pilgrimage circuits. In several shrines, priests escalated protest into hunger‐strikes and fasts — for example, priests at Gangotri began an indefinite hunger strike (mid‑2020) demanding dissolution of the Board. The Times of India+1 At the Kedarnath shrine, a priest began a bare‑chested sit‑in protest in June 2020 and later joined a fast when protest continued outside the temple. Hindustan Times+2www.ndtv.com+2 These actions — hunger‐strikes, sit‑ins, symbolic bare‑chested meditation, blood‑letters to the Prime Minister — intensified pressure on the state and highlighted the desperation of priests facing the loss of hereditary custodianship and religious‑ecological autonomy. The New Indian Express+2The New Indian Express+2 Simultaneously, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad’s campaign to “free” temples from government control — the so‑called “Mukt Karo Mandir” drive — inserted a broader ideological dimension, revealing internal contradictions within the Hindutva‑umbrella: on one hand, state‑led temple management via the BJP government; on the other, a Sangh‑aligned demand for community‑based temple autonomy.

Documented timeline of protests:

June 2020: Santosh Trivedi, a Kedarnath priest, began a bare-chested sit-in outside the shrine, sustaining a visible protest for several weeks demanding the Board’s suspension. (mattersindia.com)
Mid-2021: Priests across the Char Dham shrines escalated into silent sit-ins, hunger fasts, and marches to the state capital. (ndtv.com)
August 2021: The Mahapanchayat announced statewide agitation, urging priests to mobilize and exert pressure on the government, including restricting access to political dignitaries supporting the Board. (hindustantimes.com)
State Response: Administrative restrictions were imposed, including bans on sit-ins within 200 meters of temple premises. (opindia.com)
30 November 2021: The government repealed the Board law, widely recognized as a concession to the sustained agitation of priests. (indiatoday.in)

These protests went beyond politics or administration. In ecosophical terms, they defended sacred authority, ecological stewardship, and ritual continuity. Priests framed temples and pilgrimage circuits as living nodes of interdependent mental, social, and environmental ecologies: devotional imaginaries, custodial lineage, and Himalayan landscapes formed a co-dependent system resistant to bureaucratic appropriation and infrastructural rationalization. In Guattari’s terms, the movement enacted an ecosophical enunciation, simultaneously reshaping mental, social, and environmental relations and asserting that sacred geography, community, and ritual practice are inseparable.

The protestors’ rhetoric clearly emphasized that temples are living entities, not infrastructural assets. The movement explicitly rejected the conversion of pilgrimage into spectacle: helicopter tourism, widened highways, and commodified resource extraction—linked to militarization, infrastructural geopolitics, and monetized pilgrimage—were seen as antithetical to sacred ecology.

The repeal of the Act in November 2021 marked more than a legislative retreat. It represented a reluctant recognition of an alternative epistemology in which sacred geography resists enclosure within managerial, infrastructural, and revenue-driven logics, even if projected under the banner of so-called “Hindutva”. The protests succeeded not merely through policy pressure but by reasserting a worldview in which ritual lineage, ecology, deity, and memory remain inseparable—a living system impervious to bureaucratic abstraction.

In effect, what emerged was not only protest but an ontological reminder: the sacred cannot be nationalized, catalogued, or administered; it is a relationship to be lived, tended, and remembered. The 2021 movement reaffirmed this truth, signaling that attempts to centralize or nationalize the divine provoke resistance and demand acknowledgment of custodial, ecological, and ritual sovereignty.

3. The Char Dham Highway Project and Environmental Resistance

The Char Dham Highway Project represents a second, highly visible axis of ecological disruption in the Himalayas: the conversion of a sacred, ecologically fragile landscape into a militarized infrastructural corridor. Launched in 2016 by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the project seeks to connect the four principal Hindu pilgrimage sites—Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri, and Yamunotri—through an 889-kilometre network of “all-weather” highways. Officially, the government frames it as a measure to enhance spiritual connectivity and disaster resilience. In practice, however, it doubles as a strategic military artery, enabling rapid troop movements and logistics deployment along the Indo-China border. Here, religious developmentalism and militarized nationalism converge, normalizing large-scale ecological disruption under the twin banners of Hindutva devotion and jingoistic security.

The project’s environmental toll has been severe. Hill slopes have been cut up to 24 metres wide, roughly 690 hectares of forest have been cleared—amounting to over 55,000 trees felled—and nearly 20 million cubic metres of soil excavated. These interventions have devastated one of the most delicate mountain ecologies on the planet, where slope stability, water recharge, and biodiversity are tightly interdependent. Endangered and Schedule-I species—including the Kalij Pheasant (Lophura leucomelanos), Himalayan Tragopan (Tragopan melanocephalus and T. satyra), several vultures, and the Golden Mahseer (Tor putitora)—face critical habitat loss, heightened exposure to landslides, and riverine contamination from construction debris.

Supreme Court-appointed environmentalist Ravi Chopra, chairing the High-Powered Committee (HPC), repeatedly warned that the Char Dham Highway project violated environmental safeguards and sharply increased risks of slope failure and flash floods. Rather than heeding these assessments, the government pressured the HPC to dilute its findings, and in 2020 amended the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) norms to retrospectively legalize ongoing violations. While no direct causal link has been established between Char Dham construction and the 2021 Chamoli glacier disaster, blasting and bedrock fracturing across the corridor have left slopes highly destabilized, sharply raising the probability of future debris avalanches and catastrophic flooding.

From an ecosophical standpoint, the conflict is stark: the state treats the Himalayas as a “resource ecology” to be engineered, optimized, and militarized, while ascetics, environmentalists, and local communities insist on a sacred ecology, where mountains, rivers, and forests are living, animate entities. Saints have articulated this explicitly: “The rivers and forests are deities”—a claim that is not metaphorical but ontologically grounded, expressing intrinsic value akin to Arne Næss’s deep-ecology framework, rooted in what is thought to be Hindu (an umbrella term) cosmology.

This analysis forms a distinct, cohesive Himalayan critique of “developmental Hindutva”: the project is not merely road-building but the militarization and commercialization of sacred geography. Pilgrimage routes have been transformed into strategic corridors; sacred mountains have become zones of extraction, securitization, and infrastructural spectacle. Landslides, road cave-ins, silted rivers, and habitat destruction now recur with alarming frequency in Rudraprayag, Chamoli, and Uttarkashi. Critics argue that the rhetoric of national rejuvenation masks a deeper political economy of military-industrial expansion, real estate speculation, and crony contracting in the high Himalayas. What is presented as modernizing pilgrimage is, in effect, the weaponization of development itself: sacred ecologies subordinated to national security, capital accumulation, and ideological spectacle.

4. Media and Public Discourse

Media coverage played a decisive role in framing the Char Dham conflict as more than a regional dispute — turning it into a national debate over ecology, identity, and state power.

In The Hindu, editorials and analyses foregrounded the Himalayan terrain’s ecological fragility, warning that the 900‑km highway could inflict “catastrophic consequences” on mountain ecosystems long considered sacred. Down To Earth and The Wire Science Desk documented the concrete environmental aftermath: tens of thousands of trees cut, slope destabilization, recurring landslides, and destruction of river‑valleys and wildlife habitats. These outlets raised the alarm not only about biodiversity loss but about the erosion of an ecological lifeworld rooted in reverence for mountains, rivers, forests — the traditional fabric of Himalayan religiosity.

Meanwhile, newspapers such as Hindustan Times reported the strategic dimension more candidly: that the Char Dham route was being widened not just for pilgrims, but for troop movement and military logistics near the Indo–China border, thereby exposing the project’s inner logic of securitization and militarised nationalism. Times of India and other mainstream outlets added to the chorus of concern, highlighting biodiversity destruction, deforestation, and repeated collapse of newly built slopes — contesting the official narrative of safe “all‑weather” connectivity.

At the same time, opinion and critique pieces (for instance in The Indian Express) framed the project as symptomatic of a larger cultural shift: pilgrimage routes transformed into consumer-tourism circuits, “spiritual journeys” reframed as commodified holiday trails, and sacred geography subsumed under “developmentality.” In such discourse, the Char Dham infra‑project becomes a clear emblem of what critics call “development‑oriented Hindu identity,” stripping ritual, sacredness, and ecological ethics from the hills and replacing them with concrete, contracts, and traffic.

Beyond traditional media, social media and alternative platforms amplified these intersecting ecologies of dissent. Environmental reports, images of landslides, testimonies of local residents, and statements by monks circulated widely — forging a “transversal” public, where ecological facts, spiritual values, and political dissent converged. What might otherwise have remained fragmented — environmental activism, temple‑custodian protests, local grievances — was woven into a broader narrative of resistance: a Himalayan ecopolitics that challenges developmental Hindutva not only on policy grounds but on ontological and ethical grounds.

Thus, media discourse — from sober environmental journalism to moral‑ecological op-eds to social media activism — played a central role in shaping perception. It brought Himalayan ecological fragility into national conversation, articulated the stakes of militarised infrastructural projects, and allowed custodial communities, environmentalists, and religious actors to speak through a shared ecological language.

In doing so, it helped make tangible a critique of modernity: one that sees the Himalayan mountains not as infrastructure to be conquered, but as living geographies to be honoured.

5. Judicial Interventions and Legal Context

Judicial proceedings around the Char Dham Highway Project introduced yet another layer of tri-ecological conflict, linking sacred, environmental, and constitutional ecologies. The Supreme Court repeatedly intervened to mandate environmental assessments, suspend construction in ecologically sensitive zones, and enforce compliance with procedural safeguards SC order, 2018. The Court’s application of the precautionary principle recognized the relational fragility of Himalayan systems and the moral imperative to preserve them against unregulated developmental pressures SC Judgement on Precaution, 2020.

Yet these judicial safeguards were repeatedly undermined by state policy. The central government amended Environmental Impact Assessment norms in 2020 to retrospectively regularize ongoing violations EIA Notification Amendment, 2020, allowing road expansion, blasting, and deforestation to continue despite documented slope-failure and landslide risks HPC Report, 2020. The Supreme Court-appointed High-Powered Committee (HPC) chaired by environmentalist Ravi Chopra repeatedly highlighted the ecological dangers: destabilized glaciers, deforested slopes, riverine sedimentation, and heightened vulnerability of endemic species such as the Himalayan Tragopan, Kalij Pheasant, and Golden Mahseer.

The legal interventions illustrate a critical tension: while the judiciary invoked constitutional ecology to check state overreach, the BJP’s developmentalist agenda subordinated ecological and sacred considerations to militarized infrastructure and crony capitalism. The highway was explicitly justified not only as a pilgrim-access project but also as a corridor facilitating troop movement and rapid military logistics along the Indo-China border TOI Report, 2020. Sacred mountains and rivers were treated as mere resources to be engineered, while ecological science and ritual custodianship were repeatedly overridden in favor of market-driven, security-centric development.

In this context, judicial deliberation became an arena where constitutional, ecological, and sacred principles collided with political-economic imperatives. Courts invoked environmental law and precautionary measures to uphold both public and divine interests, yet enforcement remained partial. The BJP’s approach reflects a broader pattern of climate-denialist, developmentalist, and market-fundamentalist governance: sacred ecologies are subordinated to extractive projects; Himalayan landscapes are treated as infrastructural commodities; and state policies systematically privilege corporate contractors, real estate developers, and military-industrial objectives over ecological stewardship and ritual sovereignty.

The Char Dham case thus exemplifies the limits of constitutional protection in the face of a political ethos that prioritizes crony capitalism and militarized developmentalism over sacred and ecological values. Legal interventions, while crucial, operate within a structural system where ecologies — mental, social, and environmental — are continually at risk of reterritorialization under the logic of “developmental Hindutva.”

6. The Contested Core: Ideological Divides With-in and With-out Hindutva Developmentalism

The Char Dham dispute exposes a deep ideological fissure within contemporary Hindutva: though the Sangh Parivar presents itself as the custodian of Hindu identity, its model of “developmental Hindutva” actively erodes the religious and ecological lifeworlds it purports to safeguard—prompting Hindu monks, saints, and priests to rise in protest against the very ideology of Hindutva that claims to defend them.

From an ecosophical perspective, the project enacts a dominant ecology of market-driven developmentalism, where sacred sites, rivers, forests, and ritual networks are subordinated to managerial rationality, infrastructural expansion, and extractive accumulation. Claims of environmental protection and disaster resilience are used rhetorically to justify large-scale ecological disruption, presenting a veneer of concern for nature while prioritizing state control and strategic-military access. Localized ritual ecologies are flattened into administrable units; fragile environmental systems are destabilized; and diverse theological traditions are compressed into a homogenized, state-sanctioned narrative of “civilizational development.”

This is what critics term a “market mask of identity” — an ideological alibi that cloaks economic and political extraction in the language of dharma. Hindutva, in practice, replaces plural and relational sacred ecologies with a singular economic-national-fundamentalist ecology, where the profiteering metrics of growth, militarized notion of security, and tourism take precedence over ecological reciprocity, intergenerational custodianship, and the spiritual autonomy of local communities.

The result is a dual erasure: both of the ecological integrity of the Himalayas and of the epistemic frameworks through which dharma has historico-mythologically been understood — not as property to be optimized, but as relational, place-based, and ethically intertwined with the land, water, and ritual lifeworlds. Developmental Hindutva thus enacts a subtle, yet deep, form of dispossession: spiritual sovereignty is subordinated to political and corporate agendas, and sacred ecologies are reconfigured as assets in the service of nationalist-modernist ambitions.

7. Towards An-Other Ecological Ethics, Eco-Sensitive Politics

The Char Dham protests revealed something deeper than mere policy dissent — they showed that religiously grounded ecological ethics can generate potent counter‑ecologies. Across 2020–2021, priests, monks, temple communities, and local residents mobilized simultaneously across mental, social, and environmental ecologies, forging a resistance that challenged both state power and developmental Hindutva’s extractive vision.

In June 2021, Kedarnath priest Santosh Trivedi staged a headstand (shirshāsana) outside the shrine, symbolizing ascetic dissent and ecological‑spiritual defiance. Silent sit‑ins and fasts soon spread across Char Dham temples, as noted earlier, evolving into a coordinated, state‑wide agitation. Through rallies, temple mobilization, and political pressure, custodial communities reclaimed agency over sacred geography. The BJP, projecting itself as the custodian of Hindutva, found its claims contradicted: its developmental agenda disrupted centuries-old ritual ecologies, exposed internal contradictions, and provoked resistance from the very religious communities it claimed to protect.

Seen from an ecosophical vantage point, these protests were more than political acts — they were living acts of Himalayan ecosophy. The headstand, sit‑ins and fasts, the collective mobilisation, the refusal to accept state‑imposed commodification — all were ritual‑ecological strategies. They reaffirmed a relational ontology: mountains, rivers, forests, temples, priests, pilgrims — all are part of a co‑dependent sacred ecology. The struggle rejected the flattening of Himalayan sacred geography into roads, tourist circuits, bureaucratic boards, and revenue streams.

By combining praxis, community mobilization, and ecological awareness, the Char Dham movement potentially illustrates the viability of a Himalayan ecosophy: a political‑spiritual formation that refuses the instrumental logic of infrastructural capitalism, and insists that devotion, stewardship, and sacred landscape are inseparable. In doing so, it offers a paradigm in which dharma functions as ecological ethics, pilgrimage becomes ecological belonging, and sacred geography is treated as living, not as mineral‑rich terrain to be exploited.

III: Sacred Landscapes Under Siege — Disasters, Socio‑Economic Stress & Pilgrimage Disruption along the Char Dham Corridor

A. Spiralling Disasters & Ecological Breakdown

The geology of the Himalayas — young sedimentary and metamorphic rocks — makes the region inherently fragile. Road‑widening, hill‑cutting, blasting and slope‑excavation for the Char Dham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojana have magnified this fragility. Experts have warned many slopes along the route are now highly unstable. Hindustan Times+2India Today+2
According to a 2024 study by the Uttarakhand Disaster Management Authority (UDMA), there are 54 critically landslide‑prone zones along the Char Dham alignment — including sensitive stretches in Chamoli, Joshimath, Pauri, and Rudraprayag districts. India Today
On 25 July 2023, heavy monsoon rain washed away a 100‑metre stretch of the Badrinath‑highway near Kameda village, Chamoli — completely severing the Badrinath axis and stranding thousands of pilgrims. Hindustan Times
The 2025 monsoon has been especially devastating: landslides near the Yamunotri route reportedly killed and displaced construction workers; a major slide at Rudraprayag washed away a Kedarnath‑access road, cutting off the shrine temporarily; multiple collapses closed long segments toward Badrinath and Yamunotri. India Today+2Hindustan Times+2
In a single heavy‑rainfall episode, over 155 roads across Uttarakhand — including national highways vital to pilgrimage traffic — were blocked by landslides and debris, exposing systemic fragility induced by infrastructural overreach. Hindustan Times
The environmental effects go beyond slope‑failure: deforestation, earth‑excavation, disruption of drainage, accelerated glacial‑melt discharge, and soil destabilization have begun to alter natural hydrology and ecosystem stability across the corridor. Experts link such unscientific engineering to long-term ecological degradation. Hindustan Times+1

Together, these events expose a structural mismatch — where heavy engineering and “development” collide with a fragile mountain ecology, producing recurring disasters instead of resilience. Sacred valleys have become fault‑lines; pilgrimage routes, danger zones.

B. Socio‑Economic Disruptions & Local Vulnerabilities

Pilgrimage and tourism — once vital to local economies (hotels, guesthouses, transport services, porters, mule‑owners, artisans) — have become precarious livelihoods. Frequent road washouts and transport disruptions leave workers and small-business owners without income for extended periods.
Remote high‑altitude villages are cut off from markets, medical services, and emergency evacuation routes when roads collapse — deepening existing marginalization of mountain communities.
Construction expansion, slope‑cutting, and route realignments encroach upon farmland, grazing grounds, and traditional commons. Soil erosion and disrupted water courses threaten agriculture, water security, and long-term livelihood viability.
Traditional hereditary occupations — local priests/pandas, artisans, community‑based guesthouses — are being sidelined. Helicopter rides, luxury coach fleets, and corporate hotel chains increasingly dominate pilgrimage tourism, marginalizing locally rooted economies.

In effect, the promised “development” model has become a source of dispossession, ecological risk, and dependency for communities that historically stewarded these lands.

C. Pilgrimage, Rituality & Sacred‑Ecology under Stress

The spiritual character of the Char Dham Yatra is being hollowed out. Traditional pilgrimage — weeks of walking or mule travel, aligned with seasons, terrain, and ritual time — fostered ascetic discipline, reflection, and intimate communion with sacred geography. Now, motorable roads and the constant threat of landslides turn the yatra into hurried vehicular transit, eroding its ritual rhythm and contemplative value.
While improved accessibility benefits elderly, disabled or differently‑abled pilgrims, it undermines the ascetic discipline and spiritual transformation traditionally associated with pilgrimage.
Pilgrim influx, mass transport, and tourist infrastructure cause severe overcrowding. Reports note hill towns and temple precincts “brimming with people,” overstressing sanitation, waste management, water supply, and local services. Hindustan Times+1
Sacred groves, rivers and mountains — once experienced as animate, divine geography — are increasingly experienced as logistical corridors or hazard zones. Landslides, unstable slopes, and debris‑flow hazards make pilgrimage unpredictable, risky, and spiritually alienating.
Rituals and festivals, once woven into the rhythms of landscape and seasons, risk being reshaped into commercial packages, with schedules tailored to tourist convenience rather than sacred time. Pilgrimage risks becoming a fragile commodity rather than an embodied spiritual practice.

D. Governance, State Power & the Political‑Ecological Order

Until the state acknowledges geological fragility and sacred ecology, and integrates local ecological wisdom and environmental caution into planning, Char Dham highways risk continuing to collapse — threatening not just lives and livelihoods, but a millennia-old covenant between people, land, and sacred geography.

A new political‑ecological hierarchy is being asserted: Himalayan ecology and millennia‑old local knowledge are subordinated to state-led infrastructural logic, contractor profits, and urban tourist demand — all legitimated as “development,” “connectivity,” and “resilience.”

For corporate builders, contractors, and city-based pilgrims, these highways mean “accessibility” and “ease.” For mountain‑dwelling communities, priests, and traditional custodians, they signify ecological fragility, livelihood unsettlement, and the loss of spiritual‑ecological sovereignty.

Yet resistance persists. Priests and local communities — often citing geological risk assessments and ecological damage — have petitioned state and judicial authorities, mobilized protests, and raised public awareness. Their interventions argue that dharma demands ecological stewardship, and that roads carved through sacred mountains are not merely technical projects — but moral and spiritual intrusions.

IV. Neoliberal Religious Governance and Critiques of Hindutva

The Char Dham infrastructure projects illuminate the deep tensions between neoliberal development logic and religious governance under Hindutva. When the Sangh Parivar merges market-driven growth with centralized temple administration, it privileges state authority and commercial interests over centuries-old ecological knowledge, hereditary priestly authority, and community-based ritual practices. By framing sacred landscapes as sites of tourism-led economic expansion, the state risks alienating the very actors—local communities, ascetics, and ritual custodians—who historically maintained the spiritual and ecological integrity of these regions.

It is to be argued that developmental Hindutva masks extraction under the guise of devotion, transforming spiritual capital into financial and political capital. Himalayan protests articulate a counter-narrative: genuine development must integrate sacred ecology, ritual autonomy, and sustainable livelihoods. In this vision, spiritual, ecological, and economic imperatives are not in conflict but mutually reinforcing, guided by ethical stewardship rather than purely market-driven logic.

A. Pilgrimage Ethics as an Alternating Framework

Himalayan saints advocate for infrastructure and tourism strategies grounded in pilgrimage ethics:

Controlled Pilgrim Flow: Limiting daily visitor numbers to reduce environmental stress, preserve sacred rhythms, and maintain ritual integrity.
Ecologically Sensitive Infrastructure: Designing roads, bridges, and lodgings that minimize deforestation, slope destabilization, and hydrological disruption.
Community Participation: Involving local communities, priests, and ascetics in planning and decision-making to sustain cultural and spiritual continuity.
Ritual Consultation: Integrating traditional ecological knowledge and dharmic frameworks into environmental and infrastructural assessments.

This framework parallels global paradigms of sacred ecology and sustainable pilgrimage tourism, demonstrating that religious authority can effectively enforce ecological safeguards, complementing rather than substituting technical planning and secular governance.

B. Policy and Practical Implications

The Char Dham case underscores key lessons for governance and planning:

Religion as Ecological Oversight: Religious actors provide ethical and environmental accountability that complements engineering and scientific assessments.
Limits of Centralization: Top-down state-led development, divorced from local knowledge and ritual authority, generates cultural, spiritual, and ecological harm.
Sustainable Pilgrimage Models: Combining dharmic ethics, ecological science, and participatory governance mitigates the negative consequences of mass tourism and infrastructural expansion.
Critical Hindutva Reflection: These interventions reveal internal contradictions within Hindutva, where nationalist agendas may conflict with localized dharmic obligations and ecological stewardship.

By foregrounding Himalayan saints’ voices, this approach challenges the dominant narrative of “developmental Hindutva” and proposes an alternative rooted in sacred ecology, participatory governance, and moral accountability.

C. Sustainable Retreat from Unsustainable Development

The ecological, socio-economic, and ritual disruptions along the Char Dham corridor illustrate that infrastructural “modernization” is neither neutral nor inherently beneficial in sacred landscapes. The projects follow a debt-fuelled, consumerist, and extractive developmental model long promoted by global institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and WTO—prioritizing rapid growth, capital accumulation, and market integration over ecological and cultural resilience. Under the BJP, this model has been repackaged with a veneer of Hindutva, framing large-scale infrastructure and tourism expansion as nationalist and civilizational imperatives, while sidelining local communities, hereditary priests, and sacred-ecological stewardship.

Himalayan saints and custodial communities provide an indispensable corrective: advocating for selective retreat from oversized, debt-ridden projects, insisting that development respect ritual ethics, ecological limits, and participatory governance. Their resistance exposes a structural contradiction within contemporary Hindutva—between the drive for infrastructural and political aggrandizement and the preservation of authentic religious and ecological life. Sustainable governance in the Himalayas demands humility before both geology and divinity, privileging relational stewardship over expropriative, high-capital infrastructure.

V. Conclusion: When Hindutva Betrays Hindus — The Market Mask of Identity

A. The Debt of “Development”

The controversy surrounding the Char Dham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojana reveals that “development” today carries many debts — financial, ecological, social, and spiritual. Under the guise of modernization and national integration, the project pushes a neoliberal template: heavy infrastructure financed through state resources and often debt-laden contracts, aimed at short‑term growth and tourism revenue rather than long‑term ecological equilibrium or community well‑being.

From an ecosophical lens, this model represents a brutal re‑territorialization of sacred ecologies: rivers, glaciers, forests, mountains — once sites of relational dwelling, sacred memory, and ecological reciprocity — are treated as commodifiable resources. Pilgrimage circuits, ritual landscapes, ancestral livelihoods and ecological interdependencies become collateral in a market‑driven understanding of progress.

In effect, the market logic transforms sacred space into a corridor of economic circulation, and the inhabitants — human or other-than‑human — into expendable units of production, consumption, or capital accumulation.

B. Modernity/Coloniality, Greed, and Ecological Crisis

This brand of “modernity”/neo-coloniality is inseparable from greed, extractivism, and infrastructural hubris. Roads, blasting, slope‑cutting, tunnel‑blasting, and expanding highways destabilize fragile Himalayan geology. They accelerate landslides, destabilize slopes, disrupt hydrology, and threaten glaciers and rivers — increasing the region’s vulnerability to flash‑floods, debris flows, and ecological collapse. At the same time, greater carbon emissions, deforestation, and habitat loss amplify climate stress.

What emerges is not simply environmental damage, but a broader crisis of relational ethics: modernity driven by growth fetishism severs human communities from the living networks (mountains, rivers, forests, climate, seasons) upon which they traditionally depended. From an ecosophical perspective, this rupture is both moral and spiritual — a violation of our duty to care for the land, not just for ourselves, but for future generations of human and non‑human life.

C. Hindutva’s Internal Contradiction

Here lies a central paradox: the political project of Hindutva — claiming to safeguard Hindu identity, culture, and heritage — ends up undermining the very communities, landscapes, and spiritual traditions it claims to protect. As one critical observer puts it, “developmental Hindutva masks extraction under the guise of devotion, transforming spiritual capital into financial and political capital.”

The policies it promotes — state‑led shrine control, tourism corridors, commercialization of pilgrimage — often erode custodial authority, ecological integrity, and ritual autonomy. The result is financial and spiritual dispossession for ordinary Hindus — pilgrims, priests, villagers, mountain dwellers — who once lived in intimate relation with a sacred ecology, now reduced to consumers or collateral damage in a profit-driven infrastructural game.

Thus, the promise of patriotic development becomes a betrayal of the Hindu ethos — when market logic overrides dharmic ethics, and temples, mountains, rivers, and forests are rebranded as assets.

D. Ecological Ethics as Religious Resistance

Yet, the story does not end in capitulation. The protests in the Himalayas — led by saints, priests, local communities — exemplify how religious ethics can become a potent form of ecological resistance. These actors assert that:

Rivers, mountains, forests are not inanimate resources but sacred, animate beings.
Infrastructure projects are not just technical interventions — they are moral and spiritual intrusions whose consequences affect entire ecologies.
True development must honour sacred-ecological interdependence, not sever it.

This tri‑ecological defense — environmental ecology, social ecology, ritual/mental ecology — challenges the market‑centric ideology of Hindutva by reframing development as a moral and ecological question, not just an economic or political one.

E. The Moral Bankruptcy of Modernity and Global Parallels

The Char Dham conflict captures a global dilemma: when development proceeds without ecological or ethical constraints, it deepens climate disasters, social dislocation, and cultural erasure. In sensitive landscapes — mountains, rivers, forests — the stakes are high and irreversible. The Himalayas offer a stark example of how extractive modernity destroys the living networks of which humans are part.

This is not a local problem alone but a symptom of a broader global crisis: modernity’s insistence on exploitation, commodification, and growth — at the cost of ecological balance, cultural memory, and spiritual dignity.

From an ecosophical standpoint, this crisis demands a rethinking of what “progress” means: not speed, not consumption, not extractive growth — but relational flourishing, ecological resilience, spiritual integrity, and community sovereignty.

F. Hindus Against Hindutva: Reclaiming Religion from the Market

Resistance to developmental, profit‑driven Hindutva is not marginal or external to Hindu tradition — it often arises from within the fold, from religious custodians, ascetics, and temple authorities themselves. Notable among them:

Baba Lal Das and the Babri Masjid Campaign: The late Hindu priest Baba Lal Das publicly opposed the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, criticizing the temple campaign as a political ploy rather than genuine religious revival. He advocated for communal tolerance, heritage-based pluralism, and ritual integrity. His dissent cost him his life in 1993, illustrating the high stakes of standing against politicized religious projects (Outlook India).
Shankaracharyas’ Opposition to the BJP’s Political Instrumentalization: In the aftermath of the Ram Mandir consecration, several leading Shankaracharya seers from the four main Peeths declined to participate in politicalized rituals, citing violations of scriptural protocols and warning against turning sacred ceremonies into spectacles for mass consumption or political gain (India Today, NDTV).
Temple Management and Ritual Integrity: The chief priest of Ram Mandir, Acharya Satyendra Das, has consistently emphasized adherence to traditional management, warning in 2024 against outsourcing ritual preparations to commercial agencies and advocating for the preservation of scriptural discipline and ecological awareness (Organiser, HinduPost).
Socio-Economic and Civic Marginalization of Hindus: Large-scale exclusionary processes in India have also affected Hindus. For instance, in Assam’s NRC exercise, data indicates that a substantial fraction of the roughly 19 lakh excluded individuals were Hindus — particularly Bengali-Hindus and Assamese-Hindu communities (The Wire). Similarly, financial dispossessions, as in the DHFL scandal, disproportionately affected small investors, many of whom are Hindu households, revealing that Hindutva’s economic and political strategies do not uniformly protect Hindu constituencies.

Even as some of them acknowledged the political ascendancy of the ruling party, they maintained that their refusal was not rooted in anti‑government sentiment but in adherence to religious ethics. One of them, Swami Avimukteshwaranand Saraswati, stated that although the community had reasons to feel proud, the temple structure was “incomplete,” and consecrating an unfinished temple would violate Dharma‑Shastra principles. The Economic Times+1

These acts of refusal and dissent — by priests, seers, and custodians — challenge a common assumption: that faith automatically aligns with majoritarian political currents. Instead, they reclaim moral, ritual, and ecological authority over sacred spaces. They reaffirm that temples, religious practice, and sacred landscapes are not commodities to be leveraged for political gain but living traditions demanding respect, integrity, and custodial responsibility.

In this framing, “Hindus against Hindutva” is not an oxymoron but an assertion: an insistence on preserving Hinduism’s plural, ethical, and ecological roots — resisting attempts to subsume religious life under state‑driven, market‑oriented, majoritarian designs. This dissent foregrounds a vision of Hindu spirituality grounded in care, stewardship, and relational belonging — where sacred geography, ritual practice, and community agency remain inseparable from ethical ecology.

G. Toward an Ecosophical Future

The Char Dham conflict offers a critical lesson: development divorced from ecological and ethical responsibility is ultimately unsustainable — spiritually, socially, and environmentally. A genuine future demands integrating ecosophical thinking with dharmic ethics, allowing communities to reimagine progress as relational, regenerative, and sacredly accountable.

Such a vision privileges humility before geology, reverence for divinity, respect for ancestral knowledge, and care for ecological interdependence. It invites Hindus — and all citizens irrespective of religion or caste — to reclaim development from the market‑driven distortions of modernity and align it instead with climate‑conscious, ethically grounded, ecologically sensitive principles of living with the Earth.

References

A. Char Dham, Political, and Religious Context

Government of Uttarakhand. 2019. The Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act, 2019. Dehradun: Uttarakhand Legislative Assembly.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). 2019. “Char Dham Mahamarg Vikas Pariyojana: Project Overview.” New Delhi: BJP Press Release.
Hindu Existence. 2021. “51 Temples Are Being Wrested From Traditional Guardians: Teerth Purohit Mahapanchayat Opposes Devasthanam Act.” September 24, 2021. https://www.hinduexistence.org.
The Hindustan Times. 2019. “Priests Protest Against Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act.” August 15, 2019. https://www.hindustantimes.com.
The Hindu. 2021. “Uttarakhand Repeals Key Provisions of Char Dham Temple Act After Saints’ Protests.” April 20, 2021. https://www.thehindu.com.
Teerth Purohit Mahapanchayat. 2019. Statement on Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act. Garhwal, Uttarakhand.
The Hindustan Times. 2021. “Uttarakhand Announces Repeal of Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/uttarakhand-announces-repeal-of-char-dham-devasthanam-management-act-101638259292095.html
The Hindustan Times. 2020. “Uttarakhand HC Upholds Constitutional Validity of Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/uttarakhand-hc-upholds-constitutional-validity-of-uttarakhand-char-dham-devasthanam-management-act/story-2uN3FHHxImID6j1oj0ORKO.html
Wikipedia contributors. 2021. “Uttarakhand Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act, 2019.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uttarakhand_Chardham_Devasthanam_Management_Act%2C_2019

B. Environmental and Ecological Sources

Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). 2020. Environmental Assessment of Char Dham Highway Project. New Delhi: CSE.
Rawat, Harak Singh, et al. 2020. Petition to the Supreme Court of India on Himalayan Road Expansion and Environmental Risk. Dehradun: Environmental Law Initiative.
Down To Earth. 2021. “Uttarakhand Gives In-Principle Approval for Char Dham Road Through Disaster-Prone Zone, Putting Thousands of Deodar Trees at Risk.” https://www.downtoearth.org.in/governance/uttarakhand-gives-in-principle-approval-for-char-dham-road-through-disaster-prone-zone-putting-thousands-of-deodar-trees-at-risk
Down To Earth. 2021. “BRO Downplays Environmental Impact Assessment for Gangotri Stretch Despite SC Panel’s Concerns.” https://www.downtoearth.org.in/environment/char-dham-highway-bro-downplays-environment-impact-assessment-for-gangotri-stretch-despite-sc-panels-concerns
Urban Mirror. 2022. “Char Dham Project Proving Disastrous to Fragile Himalayan Ecology.” https://urbanmirror.in/char-dham-project-proving-disastrous-to-fragile-himalayan-ecology/
Times of India. 2021. “Char Dham Highway Project 75% Complete; Environmental Concerns Arise.” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/char-dham-highway-project-75-complete-environmental-concerns-arise/articleshow/114225576.cms
Hindustan Times. 2021. “SC Weighs Security, Green Worries Over Char Dham Road Expansion Project.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/sc-weighs-security-green-worries-over-char-dham-road-expansion-project-101636482787909.html

C. Legal-Judicial and Institutional Framework

Hindustan Times. 2020. “Uttarakhand HC Upholds Constitutional Validity of Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/uttarakhand-hc-upholds-constitutional-validity-of-uttarakhand-char-dham-devasthanam-management-act/story-2uN3FHHxImID6j1oj0ORKO.html
Hindustan Times. 2021. “Uttarakhand Announces Repeal of Char Dham Devasthanam Management Act.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/uttarakhand-announces-repeal-of-char-dham-devasthanam-management-act-101638259292095.html
India Today. 2021. “Char Dham Highway Project Not Linked to Uttarakhand Disaster, Centre Tells SC.” https://www.indiatoday.in/india/story/char-dham-highway-project-not-linked-to-uttarakhand-disaster-centre-tells-sc-1770125-2021-02-17
Hindustan Times. 2025. “Char Dham Road Widening: Former Ministers Seek Review of 2021 Supreme Court Ruling.” https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/char-dham-road-widening-former-ministers-seek-review-of-2021-supreme-court-ruling-101758945060553.html

D. Theoretical Frameworks: Ecosophy and Deep Ecology

Guattari, Félix. 1989. The Three Ecologies. London: Continuum.
Næss, Arne. 1989. Ecology, Community, and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Governance Now. 2022. “Supreme Court Urged to Reconsider Char Dham Pariyojana Verdict.” https://www.governancenow.com/news/regular-story/supreme-court-urged-to-reconsider-char-dham-pariyojana-verdict
Economic Times. 2023. “Experts Warn Current Char Dham Road Plan Could Trigger Himalayan Disaster.” https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/experts-warn-current-char-dham-road-plan-could-trigger-himalayan-disaster/articleshow/123278146.cms

E. Hindu Ecospirituality and Philosophy

Lochtefeld, James G. 2002. The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Hinduism. New York: Rosen Publishing.
Singh, R. P. 1993. The Himalayas and Hindu Pilgrimage: Sacred Geography and Ritual Practice. New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts.
Raina, D. 1988. Chipko: Women, Trees, and Ecological Resistance in the Himalayas. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Mahadevan, T. M. 2014. Kashmir Shaivism and the Ecological Imagination. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo Institute of Research.
Deutsch, Eliot. 1969. Advaita Vedanta: A Philosophical Reconstruction. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
The Quint. 2022. “Char Dham Project Poses Grave Danger to Himalayas.” https://www.thequint.com/news/environment/char-dham-project-poses-grave-danger-to-himalayas
Times of India. 2021. “Char Dham Highway Project 75% Complete; Environmental Concerns Arise.” https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/char-dham-highway-project-75-complete-environmental-concerns-arise/articleshow/114225576.cms

F. Contemporary Critiques of Hindutva

Once in a Blue Moon. 2025. “When Hindutva Betrays Hindus: The Market Mask of Identity.” September 24, 2025. https://onceinabluemoon2021.in/2025/09/24/when-hindutva-betrays-hindus-the-market-mask-of-identity/
Once in a Blue Moon. 2022. “Hindus Against Hindutva.” December 30, 2022. https://onceinabluemoon2021.in/2022/12/30/hindus-against-hindutva/
The Quint. 2022. “Char Dham Project Poses Grave Danger to Himalayas.” https://www.thequint.com/news/environment/char-dham-project-poses-grave-danger-to-himalayas
Economic Times. 2023. “Experts Warn Current Char Dham Road Plan Could Trigger Himalayan Disaster.” https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/india/experts-warn-current-char-dham-road-plan-could-trigger-himalayan-disaster/articleshow/123278146.cms

G. Climate and Development Critique

The Print. 2022. “SC Allows Widening of 3 Strategic Stretches in Char Dham Road Project Cites Security Concerns.” https://theprint.in/judiciary/sc-allows-widening-of-3-strategic-stretches-in-char-dham-road-project-cites-security-concerns/781310/

Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Shiva, Vandana. 1988. Staying Alive: Women, Ecology, and Development. London: Zed Books.

Sachs, Wolfgang. 1992. The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power. London: Zed Books.

Urban Mirror. 2022. “Char Dham Project Proving Disastrous to Fragile Himalayan Ecology.” https://urbanmirror.in/char-dham-project-proving-disastrous-to-fragile-himalayan-ecology/