The seemingly sedate Kumaon hills in Almora district were witness to some frenzied activity in April and May, when a nongovernmental organisation called Sahayog was on the dock for allegedly presenting a "distorted" image of Uttarakhand society. The ngo had, somewhat inadvertently, put out a report that carried some graphic descriptions of the sexual behaviour of a section of people in rural Almora. Tempers rose, mostly among the political elite it appears, and the ngo's office-bearers were jailed and generally vilified —far in excess of the presumed harm done to Uttarakhand society. Meanwhile, the civil administration kowtowed to a small but aggressive group that was playing full hilt to the gallery, using this episode as one more example of the outsiders' (read plainsmen's) insensitivity to hill society. In this case, it seems the activists overreached.
Almora is the hotbed of the movement for a separate Uttarakhand state in India, which is a legitimate demand from a hill region that has been constantly sidelined by the power brokers of Uttar Pradesh, based in Lucknow. Understandably, the activists here are on edge, as the Centre vacillates on the statehood demand. Unfortunately, the Sahayog episode does not leave the statehood proponents looking like responsible activists, people who will have to play a critical role in the days ahead to negotiate for their state, and who will have to show sagacity and courage in governance once statehood is attained. The reaction to the Sahayog booklet, instead, has projected them as reactive and insular, perhaps even sectarian, and opportunistic enough to use every convenient event to score a point and rouse the rabble.
The report in question was prepared in Hindi, titled AIDS and Us: Possibility of AIDS in Uttarakhand. It was published in September 1999, but caught attention only in April. Five hundred copies had been distributed among experts and ngos for feedback. Founded by outsiders Abhijeet and Jasodhara Das Gupta, Sahayog has worked in the villages of Almora for almost a decade now through the medium mostly of local men and women field workers. Its area of focus has been the dalit condition and women's empowerment, two areas where the hills of Uttarakhand are behind in social evolution. It does not seem unlikely that the ngo's area of focus had created an undercurrent of resentment among the majority upper castes of the region, as in the past ngos like Sahayog have been accused of diluting the "culture of movements" by "dividing Uttarakhand society on caste and gender lines".
The Sahayog report referred to the inferior quality of health services, the migration of menfolk to the plains, and the influx of plains people to the hills, all of which are high-risk conditions for the proliferation of HIV. However, the report's most contentious sections dealt with interviews indicating the prevalence of incest, homosexuality, extra-marital and premarital sexuality in the hills. It is also not clear whether it was the suggested notion that some Uttarakhandi women may be promiscuous (in a given circumstance) or the allegedly-broad labelling of Uttarakhand society as promiscuous that left the patriarchal order stunned and agitated. Male promiscuity, presumably, is par for the course.