B.C. KHANDURI: Let me begin with a few remarks about Uttarakhand. Uttarakhand came into existence on November 9, 2000, after a fairly painful struggle. The demand for a new state became very voluble in the 1990s. We suffered hardships and considerable humiliation. I was associated with the struggle from the beginning; one of the reasons I joined the BJP was that their agenda included the creation of Uttarakhand. In 1991, the struggle picked up, and by March 1992 it intensified. The then Uttar Pradesh government favoured reservation in higher education, and in Uttarakhand, then a part of Uttar Pradesh, a very large number of boys and girls go to school with the hope they will get jobs in the future. So the Uttar Pradesh government’s intentions upset a lot of young people who could not get college admission.

There were four main issues driving our struggle. One was that Uttar Pradesh was and is a big state, not manageable administratively, and there were problems peculiar to the Uttarakhand area, its geography, the hills, and the Uttar Pradesh bureaucracy did not want postings there. The second issue was employment: traditionally, the people of Uttarakhand have been in the armed forces, but increasingly, young people wanted opportunities in the state. The third problem was corruption: we spoke of the three Ps, that is, the bureaucracy was forced to come to Uttarakhand only during probation, promotion, or punishment postings. Post-1991 I added one more P, that is, Paisa, if you wanted to make money, you came to Uttaranchal, as it was then known.

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