When Delhi papers label the demand for Uttarakhand secessionist, racist and rejectionist, they ignore the economic and cultural factors behind the agitation. Meanwhile, because the hill people lack coherent ideology and organisation, their righteous anger and energies are being squandered.
The eight hill districts of Uttar Pradesh state that make up Kumaon and Garhwal have always made news quite dispro¬portionate to their size and population. More than elsewhere in South Asian hill or plain, Garhwalis and Kumaon is have been fighters for social justice— whether combatting turn-of-century feudals to emancipate forced labour, daring the British in pre-Independence times, or fighting government and big business through the Chipko movement.
Today, the hill people are once again generating news. Their battle with authority is approaching a derisive juncture. After a period of relative quiet in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the Chipko and anti-alcohol movements had lost their steam, the hills are once again alive with slogans and mass action. The population demands Uttara-khand, not just a collective name for Kumaon and Garhwal, but a new state of the Indian Union to be wrested from Uttar Pradesh. The six million yahadis of Uttarakhand want the centuries of domination by "outsiders" and "plains people" to end.
While an undercurrent for separate statehood has always been part of the earlier agitations, it was only in the middle of 1994 that the final fuse was lit. Instead of fighting village overlords, the British, the timber mafia or the hooch merchants, the hill people are this time challenging the reluctant power elites of the Indian mainland to redraw the map and give them a state.