Uttarakhand, the hill state in North India carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000, took 60-odd years in the making. It began in the late 1930s when the then General Secretary of the Communist Party of India (CPI) PC Joshi, who belonged to the region, first raised the demand for a separate state for the people of the hill region of the United Provinces, the precursor to Uttar Pradesh. The demand was, however, subject to the ebbs and flows of UP politics for the following decades till the late 1980s-early 1990s when the movement for a separate state caught the imagination of a people suffering from lack of development and administrative inattention.

The region threw up leaders of national stature, including GB Pant, HN Bahuguna and ND Tiwari. But the people of Uttarakhand continued to labour under hardship, eking out a living in harsh mountainous terrain and lacking even basic healthcare and educational facilities. When the AB Vajpayee-led Union government conceded the demand for statehood in 2000 after a decade of atrocities committed by police on participants in an overwhelmingly peaceful movement, the hills erupted in joy. While there have been as many governance misses as hits during Uttarakhand’s existence, the state has, till now, never been subject to communal tensions of the kind observed in the rest of North India. In part, this is because of its homogenous social structure with Hindus, predominantly so-called upper caste, comprising 83 per cent of the population and being the overwhelming majority community in all 13 districts. The state’s Muslim population, pegged at 14 per cent by the 2011 census, has traditionally been concentrated mostly in the foothills, terai, and railhead towns. But as mobility and economic opportunities have expanded, the hill regions of the state have seen an influx of members of the minority community.

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Anyone who has managed to keep their biases aside while travelling through Uttarakhand’s mountains over the past decade would have discerned the simmering societal tensions. In June this year, these spilled out onto the streets. Self-proclaimed Hindu outfits of unknown provenance began a campaign against ‘love jihad’, accusing Muslim men of entrapment and/or abduction of Hindu women. Ideologically motivated civil society groups and media began, almost immediately, to take extreme positions. One side painted the acts of a few vigilante Hindu elements as an orchestrated campaign to drive Muslims out of the state known for its sacred Hindu sites, and refused to acknowledge the societal cleavages which had been apparent for years.

The other side insisted that incidents of Muslim men ‘entrapping’ Hindu women were rising exponentially and pointed to the alleged abduction of a Hindu girl in the town of Purola. Officials say integration and respect for Indic traditions regardless of the faith one practices is the way forward. To that end, the Uttarakhand Waqf Board’s announcement earlier this week that it will implement the NCERT syllabus, including the teaching of Sanskrit, in the 117 madrasahs under its jurisdiction, is a welcome step in a delicate situation.