- The mountainous state of Uttarakhand finds itself hitting news headlines repeatedly over the last couple of years, and mostly for all the wrong reasons. The Bharatiya Janata Party government led by Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami started the new innings on a positive note, winning the election with a comfortable majority. However, some of the measures and initiatives of the state government have been divisive, incoherent, and far from the realistic requirements of the present-day world, where people’s aspirations are different. All people desire is a steady income, job/employment opportunities, stable government, sensible governance, satisfactory law & order, and most importantly, harmonious living without any parochial considerations coming in the way.
PC: Hindustan Times
- Worryingly, what’s happening in Uttarakhand is a great cause for concern. Furthermore, why is the Uttarakhand government, confronted as it is with so many challenges, spending time on bad ideas that’re also unconstitutional? So much so that the state seems to be on fire even before the forest-fire season has begun. Protests over a 2022 murder have erupted again in multiple cities. Unease remains over the racist attack that killed Tripura student Anjel Chakma in Dehradun – a charming city with a sleepy colonial hangover, now the blingy bustling capital of a 25-year-old state. Sporadic stirs over the last year have come to a head with renewed agitation over the 2022 murder of a 19-year-old hotel staff member, Ankita Bhandari, by the hotel manager. Why?
PC: The Indian Express
- For refusing to render sexual favours to a VIP guest, allegedly a person linked to the BJP. The manager was sentenced to life. But Uttarakhand residents and the political opposition are agitating against the state’s failure to nab the alleged VIP guest. The protest narrative has included a lament for the lack of jobs that results in trapping people, like Ankita, in unsafe workplaces. Notably, Uttarakhand has India’s highest unemployment rate – 8.9% per PLFS data shared in Rajya Sabha last December. The state does not report high rates of crimes against women, so the outrage isn’t surprising. For 10 years now, its share of women aged 18-23 in higher education has been equal to or higher than the all-India average.
PC: Times of India
- Women’s self-help groups have evolved to empower women, but male outmigration, especially in rural areas, remains high. Yet, the state’s ghost villages aren’t a result of economic migration alone. Deforestation and the expansion of tourism infrastructure, the latter paying no attention to ecological balance, have pushed Uttarakhand into precarity, vulnerable to extreme weather impacts. There is an outpouring of a pile-up of several challenges that the otherwise mild-mannered locals are facing. And there’s UCC with mandatory registration of live-in couples. Its latest proposal to ban non-Hindus from 205 Haridwar ghats is patently unconstitutional since public places are for all. Little wonder public protests are for all these reasons.
