Whose idea of “Himachal” do we remember on its Founders Day, January 25? Is it a postcard state of snow-fed peaks, tourist trails and gated townships, or a living territory of terraced fields, winter orchards and village assemblies that once formed the moral and material core of the state?Dr Yashwant Singh Parmar, the first chief minister of Himachal Pradesh, was also the political mind who shaped the idea of the hills as a distinct social and moral project. Born in 1906, he led the hill-state movement, fought to keep the region politically autonomous and later shepherded its transition from a conglomeration of princely territories into a state in the Indian Union.Parmar’s politics grew out of a mountain sociality: he stressed land security, co-operatives and smallholder welfare and he framed institutions so that local people could remain custodians of their ecology and livelihoods. His Himachal was emphatically polity built from the dignity of land and the voice of its people – not from spectacle or extraction.The political and social context in which Parmar united the hills matters to understanding his priorities. The post-colonial hill territories were a patchwork of princely states with distinct identities. Efforts in the 1950s to merge them with Punjab alarmed hill leaders who feared cultural and economic subordination. Parmar organised across these diverse districts, drawing on Praja Mandal and satyagraha traditions to build a shared demand for separate statehood, a demand realised through staged administrative changes and, finally, full statehood in 1971.Also read: The Himalayas Are Not a Blank Slate for Our Highways and TunnelsHis project was therefore as much about protecting a way of life as it was about winning constitutional recognition. Later, he did not merely administer a region; he argued for a different political imagination, one that treated land as livelihood, culture and collective right. The Himachal Pradesh Tenancy and Land Reforms Act, 1972, with its famous restriction in Section 118, which limits the transfer of agricultural land to non-residents, embodies that conviction. Such provisions are not bureaucratic obstacles to investment; they are political claims that hilly land should not become a tradable asset that dispossesses cultivators and dissolves community ties.Why does this legal safeguard matter today? Because a majority of Himachal Pradesh’s households still depend on the primary sector. Even as the state’s GDP composition has shifted towards services and industry, fifty to sixty per cent of the workforce remains engaged in agriculture and allied activities – people whose seasons, food and identity are tied to the slope and stream.In recent years Himachal has seen a surge of construction, tourism projects and flagship townships that promise growth but raise difficult questions about scale and consent. Proposals such as the Jathiya Devi satellite township near Shimla and large riverfront and tourism projects in Manali illustrate an eagerness to monetise mountain space, often met by village panchayats worried about land loss, environmental strain and altered livelihoods.When roads and riverfronts are designed primarily to service outside investment, who gains and who pays the ecological and social costs? These debates show why Parmar’s insistence on cautious, locally rooted development feels urgently relevant.Parmar recognised the fragility of mountain ecologies and the political dangers of misreading them. What his political imagination narrates is quite simple: “Development in these valleys is not an abstraction. It is a set of lived relations between people, animals and soil.”His programme emphasised land reforms, security for small cultivators and cautious, incremental connectivity: roads to reach schools and hospitals, co-operatives to help market apples and wool and institutions that would let villagers be agents of development rather than objects of it. Infrastructure was never conceived as an end in itself; it was a means to widen the conditions of dignity and autonomy in remote communities.There is a practical morality here. In fragile geographies, grand projects, large reservoirs, strip-mining or speculative townships rarely remain only technical operations. They change demographics, commodify land and concentrate power in distant hands. The very reasons that justify protective tenancy laws, to keep land in the hands of those who till and tend it, are moral: they preserve the community’s capacity to feed itself, rear livestock and transmit knowledge across generations.Parmar’s politics asked a simple question: who benefits when a valley changes hands?If the answer is outsiders and developers, the community pays the price.Contrast that with recent developments. Plans for large township projects and aggressive land transfers, public and private, have revived the debate about whether Himachal’s land should be made more “liquid”. Critics and even opposition leaders warn of state land being packaged for developers, sometimes after transfers to statutory bodies and of local panchayats being pressured for their consent. Such moves strain the protective architecture Parmar helped build and raise questions about whose “development” is being prioritised.The ecological cost is already visible in other arenas. Hydropower, for instance, has been pursued as a green solution, but run-of-the-river projects and their accessory works have triggered landslides, disrupted water regimes and provoked local resistance when designs run roughshod over fragile geology and community consent. Recent panchayat protests and legal notices in parts of Kullu are not isolated complaints: they are symptomatic of a pattern where projects, once greenlit, alter landscapes in irreversible ways.Also read: People in the Mountains Need Disaster Justice, Not Sermons on EnvironmentalismParmar’s caution that you “cannot impose development on delicate slopes” reads like a warning now.There is a political dimension as well. When land becomes a commodity and decision-making shifts away from villages, authority centralises. The moral and civic consequences are serious: local leaders lose credibility, small farmers find themselves priced out and a sense of stewardship of rivers, pastures and groves erodes. A state that reduces its people to audiences for spectacle risks eroding democratic accountability. Parmar’s insistence on community voice is therefore not quaint; it is vital for the health of politics in the hills.What would it mean to reclaim Parmar’s vision today? First, it would mean reaffirming legal protections that keep cultivable land tied to those who work it, while improving mechanisms for genuinely compensatory and participatory change when projects are necessary. Second, it would mean rethinking “connectivity”: roads and internet links must enhance local economies and services, not simply accelerate real estate speculation. Third, it would place ecological limits at the heart of planning, not as afterthoughts but as preconditions for any project that touches mountain ecologies.Finally, the moral argument: development without community is devastation. Growth that strips people of land, voice and consent does not enlarge the state; it hollows it. Parmar’s Himachal was a plural, rooted republic of people who could shape their own futures because they retained control over the instruments of life. If we are to honour Founders Day honestly, even days after it has passed, we must ask whether current policies deepen or dilute that inheritance.So, we end where we began with a question: whose Himachal are we celebrating?If the answer points to a state where land and voice still confer dignity, then Parmar’s spirit is alive. If the answer is a territory converted into assets for outside capital, then the celebration is incomplete, perhaps even a ritual of forgetting. Remembering Yashwant Singh Parmar is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a reminder that a state’s worth is measured not by the size of its projects but by the dignity of those who live on its slopes.