NEW DELHI >> As the trapped workers came out of the under-construction road tunnel after 17 days, the happy end to a rescue effort that had riveted India set off celebrations across the country.

Gone for the moment were questions about why the 41 men had been put at risk of being entombed in the tunnel in the first place. Instead, television crews outdid one another in excitement and volume, showering praise on the officials involved in the rescue, who lined up Tuesday with garlands for the workers. Cameras focused on local representatives of India’s governing party, who credited the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“Modi makes it possible!” they chanted in Hindi.

While activists and environmentalists also watched with relief, the scenes carried another, very different meaning for them. They had long warned, in futile court cases and failed tribunal hearings, that the $1.5 billion road-widening project was dangerously destabilizing the already fragile Himalayan landscape.

To them, the fact that the work had proceeded anyway, ultimately incurring a disastrous landslide, was another reminder of how Modi has removed almost every obstacle to getting his way.

“The focus is on rescue and not the reasons thereof,” said Mallika Bhanot, an environmental conservationist in Uttarakhand, the northern state that is the site of the tunnel. “They do not want to bring attention to it.”

The construction project, which is largely widening more than 500 miles of roads to connect four major stops of a Hindu pilgrimage route, brings together two pillars of the image Modi has built: as an ambitious infrastructure developer and a champion of Hindu interests.

The prime minister personally inaugurated the highway project in 2016. In front of tens of thousands of people, Modi said the improved highways would make travel between the pilgrimage sites so easy that “people will remember the work that has been through the project for the next 100 years.”

He dedicated it “to all those who had been killed in the 2013 Kedarnath tragedy,” when flash floods killed more than 6,000 people in the state unintentionally pointing to an example of the increased risk of natural disasters in the Himalayas as the planet warms. More recently, in another vivid case, the town of Joshimath began rapidly sinking, with hundreds of buildings and homes developing cracks.

Modi is credited with increasing investment in India’s abysmal infrastructure, hoping it helps unlock the country’s vast economic potential. But in the case of the highway project, activists and scientists say his government simply bulldozed through their concerns.

India’s Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, reached for comment Wednesday, asked that questions relating to the project be sent in writing.

While scientists have warned of the impact of major construction on the fragile Himalayas, it remains unclear whether additional checks, or a less ambitious program, would have been able to prevent the landslide that trapped the workers in Uttarakhand.

In 2018, a citizens group appealed to India’s environmental court, the National Green Tribunal, asking for the work to be stopped because no environmental impact assessment had been done. Widening the road would be impossible without increasing the risk of disaster, the group argued, and the project would require removing tens of thousands of trees.

The tribunal ruled that it had little power to act.