By Harsh Mander
India’s most populous hill state Uttarakhand is in unprecedented turmoil. It is the first state in India in which an influential and popular campaign for ethnic cleansing has gathered ominous momentum: a battle for the expulsion of all Muslims from the state. This crusade is tacitly supported by the state government.
These alarming fractures in the state have mostly escaped national attention because not much blood has been spilt. But barely below the surface, Uttarakhand smoulders with communal temperatures ratcheted to perilous levels.
Uttarakhand has not witnessed significant communal tensions between its religious communities in the past. Its ruptures have much more pivoted on caste. Uttarakhand probably has a higher proportion of Brahmins than any other state, estimated at around 20% of the population. The sometimes violent movement for the separation of Uttarakhand from Uttar Pradesh to create a separate state in the 1990s was substantially sparked off by the decision of the Mulayam Singh government to extend reservations in government jobs to members of the other backward classes. Muslims widely supported the demand for the separate hill state.
Muslims constitute around 14% of the state’s population. The present canvassing for the ejection of the state’s Muslim population rests on three pillars. The first of these is the premise of the pristine sacredness for Hindus of the hill state, polluted by the presence of Muslims. The second is claims of the exclusive indigeneity of Hindus in this holy land, threatened by the surge of Muslim outsiders who are rapidly and dangerously altering the demography of the state. The third is the alleged inherent perfidy of Muslims, evident in the battery of jihads that they are unleashing on hapless Hindu residents of this sanctified land – population jihad, love jihad, land jihad, mazaar jihad and, most recently, vyapar jihad. Mazaar refers to mausoleums and vyapar to trade.
These arguments are propagated vigorously by an extensive network of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and its family of Hindutva formations that have expanded to remote mountainous corners of the state. There are 1,400 shakhas or branches of the Sangh in Uttarakhand and plans are underway to double the number in the next two years. Sangh workers explain that their work is cut out for them: they must warn the Hindu people of the dangers that Muslim residents of the state pose to the purity of the Dev Bhumi.
Local activists such as Shankar Gopalakrishnan had warned about the deliberate assaults on the customary harmony between religious communities as far back as in 2017.
This story was originally published in scroll.in. Read the full story here .