The Statehood Movement

For half a century the hills were the northern edge of Uttar Pradesh, governed from distant Lucknow. A long movement for a separate mountain state, which turned into a mass upsurge in 1994, won Uttarakhand its statehood on 9 November 2000.

After independence the hill districts, joined by Tehri in 1949, became part of Uttar Pradesh, a state whose centre of gravity lay far away in the plains. The case for separation was made as early as the 1950s, and organisations like the Uttarakhand Kranti Dal (founded 1979) kept the demand alive: the hills' terrain, economy and problems, they argued, could not be governed as an afterthought of India's largest state.

The Chipko movement of the 1970s, when villagers led by women like Gaura Devi hugged trees to stop commercial felling at Reni, had already shown the hills' capacity for collective action. In 1994 the statehood demand became a storm: strikes and processions swept the hills, and the police firings at Khatima and Mussoorie in September, then the assault on activists at Rampur Tiraha on the night of 1-2 October, gave the movement its martyrs and hardened its resolve.

Parliament passed the Uttar Pradesh Reorganisation Act in 2000, and on 9 November 2000 the new state of Uttaranchal was born, the name formally changed to Uttarakhand in 2007. Dehradun became the interim and then winter capital; in 2020 Bhararisain in Gairsain, long the movement's dream site, was declared the summer capital. The date is kept each year as Uttarakhand's foundation day.