Saving the Aravallis or Saving Face?

India’s oldest hills have become collateral damage in a political culture where environmental concern is performative and opportunism perennial.

Public faith in India’s political class has sunk to a low ebb, and the Aravallis tell the story better than most parliamentary debates. These ancient hills - older than the Himalayas and far more consequential for north India’s ecology – have today become props in a theatre of convenience. The same leaders who once petitioned the Supreme Court for mining rights now don sackcloth and shout ‘Save Aravalli’ slogans when the court tightens the rules.

This chameleon instinct is not confined to one party. Across the spectrum, ideology is something to be changed as power demands. Ordinary citizens have learned to their chagrin that political alliances are transactional, stances reversible and U-turns, instead of being a political embarrassment, has been recast as ‘smart strategy.’ In this vein, environmental concern is weaponized as a tool for mobilising supporters, embarrassing rivals or protecting old revenue streams.

Toxic Silence

Nowhere is this hypocrisy more visible than in the governance of the Aravali range and the choking air of Delhi-NCR. Each winter, as the region’s air-quality index breaches the 400-mark deemed hazardous even for short exposure, around 300 million people inhale what amounts to a slow poison. Yet this year’s winter session of Parliament passed without a single substantive debate on the crisis. There was, however, time for late-night arguments over politically lucrative causes, time for renaming schemes to suit vote banks, and even time for a convivial tea party hosted by the Lok Sabha Speaker, attended by leaders from every major party.

Calling the Aravallis an ‘ecosystem’ is itself a mild act of resistance. Officialdom prefers narrower terms like ‘mountain’ or ‘mountain range’ because definitions matter in court. A mountain can be measured, sliced into contours and leased. An ecosystem demands protection across landscapes. The Aravallis stretch across Rajasthan, Haryana, Delhi and Gujarat, binding together tiger reserves such as Sariska, wildlife sanctuaries like Mount Abu, Kumbhalgarh, Asola Bhatti and Jessore, and dozens of smaller forests that regulate groundwater, block desertification and trap dust before it smothers the plains. If one reduces this living system to a set of peaks, then the low hills between them become expendable.

Convenient Crusade

The political opportunism surrounding this reduction is most stark in Rajasthan. Today, the Congress party presents itself as a champion of the hills, railing against court rulings and warning of ecological apocalypse. Yet for decades it presided over, and often facilitated, precisely the mining practices it now condemns. Illegal quarrying flourished for 20–25 years through a simple alchemy in which forest land was reclassified as ‘revenue land’ while the maps were quietly altered, officials bribed and illegality dressed up as compliance. The profits ran into billions.

The Supreme Court began intervening as early as the 1990s, alarmed by complaints of ecological collapse, falling water tables and runaway air pollution. In 2002, a probe by the Central Empowered Committee recommended a ban on mining across the Aravallis in Haryana and Rajasthan, citing irreversible damage. Rajasthan’s Congress government appealed. The court relented partially, allowing existing leases to continue but barring new ones.

What followed was a masterclass in regulatory creativity. In 2003, a state-appointed panel invoked a formula attributed to an American geomorphologist, defining only hills above 100 metres as ‘mountains’ worthy of protection. Everything shorter became fair game. The effect was devastating: entire hills were reduced to stumps or erased from maps. When the BJP took power later that year, it issued leases under the same formula, proving that ecological amnesia crosses party lines.

The Supreme Court returned to the matter in 2005, halting new leases without environmental clearance, and by 2009 imposed a full ban in parts of Haryana. Subsequent reports, including one by the Forest Survey of India in 2010, documented extensive damage in Rajasthan’s Aravalli districts. Orders followed demanding clearer definitions and stronger conservation.

The latest controversy turns on cartography. Earlier surveys treated the range as polygons in which continuous systems where lower hills between higher peaks were integral. A 2025 revision shifted to contour lines, protecting only land above 100 metres and leaving intervening stretches exposed. Congress leaders now decry this as a death sentence for 90 percent of the hills. Yet it was under Congress rule, between 1998 and 2023, that the worst destruction occurred. Official data record at least 31 hills obliterated, thousands of illegal quarries, and millions of tonnes of stone extracted in defiance of court orders. There was no mass ‘Save Aravalli’ movement then.

The irony deepens when the party’s chosen standard-bearers are examined. One prominent leader of the current campaign belongs to a family that owns a granite and marble company operating in the Aravallis and has himself faced allegations related to illegal occupation of quarry land. Accusations of “mining mafias” ring hollow when the lines between politics and extraction have long been blurred.

Such double standards help explain the public’s cynicism. When leaders dismiss the common citizen as irrelevant, or insist that policy is the preserve of insiders, they reinforce the sense that governance is a closed club. Even parties that claim to speak for the aam aadmi have failed to deliver breathable air in the capital they govern.

The Aravallis are north India’s green lungs, a climatic barrier against the Thar desert, a reservoir of biodiversity and history. To save them requires less slogan-shouting and more consistency: clear ecological definitions, enforcement that survives changes of government, and a willingness to confront vested interests including those within one’s own ranks.

Until then, ‘Save Aravalli’ will remain what it has largely been so far: not a conservation ethic, but a convenient cry which will be abandoned when power beckons elsewhere.