"Gandhigiri in Sikkim" a talk by Dr. Vibha Arora, Indian Institute of Technology, at Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg > 3pm on 19th February 2013

Time : 3:00 pm

Entry : Free (Seating on First-Come First-Served basis)

Place : Seminar Room, Annexe Building, Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML), Teen Murti House, Teen Murti Marg, New Delhi
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Event Description : Nehru Memorial Museum and Library cordially invites you to ‘Gandhigiri in Sikkim’ a talk by Dr. Vibha Arora, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

Mahatma Gandhi’s ideas and political practice has found an overwhelming reception among the Lepcha leaders of the Save the Teesta River movement. I use the term ‘Save the River Teesta’ movement (henceforth SRT) to refer to the formally organized opposition offered by ethnic and civil society organizations to the 26 power projects proposed, planned and constructed on the flowing waters of the Teesta river by the government in partnership with
private capital to generate about 3635 mega watts.
Indigenous activists are opposing the hydropower projects located in North Sikkim and in North Bengal, as these will undermine the fragile ecology and legitimize the settlement of outsiders. They have organized dharnas, offered non-violent resistance, and with minimal financial resources staged multi-sited protests in North Sikkim, Gangtok, Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and
Delhi during 2007-09. The youthful leadership of this movement has retained a high moral ground and subscribed to Buddhist-indigenous-Gandhian imagery and organized a relay hunger strike to pressurize the government. Some of the youth leaders even declared a willingness to die for their espoused cause.
I argue that SRTs leaders and their political practice have adapted Gandhian political strategy to challenge the formally elected government of contemporary Sikkim and programme of ‘national’ development. I was puzzled as to why Buddha was not the pre-eminent guiding ideal of the SRT movement given the fact that most leaders were practicing Buddhists, and
many activists were lamas. I emphasize that this was possible because Gandhian ideas had a lineage ancestor in Gautam Buddha. What is critical and continuous in this adoption and transformation of Buddha’s message was the idea of satya (truth), the ideal of ahimsa, satyagraha, and the practice of swadeshi  for achieving swaraj.


Speaker : Dr. Vibha Arora is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the Department of
Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. She has received numerous awards, national and international scholarships and fellowships for her research on the Himalayan region and North-East India. She has published approximately about 30 papers in reputed journals and edited volumes on research methods, environmental politics, identity and ethnicity, state and development politics and visual anthropology. She has co-edited Routeing Democracy in the Himalayas: Experiments and Experiences (Delhi, London, New York: Routledge, 2013) and is currently writing two monographs on identity politics and environmental issues in Sikkim and North-East India.

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