Uttarakhand ka tempo high hai!

In my student years spent in Nainital, the local slang for a lucky period in someone’s life was “Yaar aajkal uska tempo high hai!” Invoking the phrase, one can safely say, “Aajkal Uttarakhand ka tempo high hai!”

For proof, see how between two phases of the crucial Bihar Assembly elections, the Prime Minister found time to visit Uttarakhand to celebrate the silver jubilee of its becoming an independent state. The state was carved out of the vast northern hilly regions of Uttar Pradesh after the Pahadis went on a dharna against the Samajwadi Party government in Lucknow perennially neglecting the poor region.

With the late Mulayam Singh Yadav’s son on the rise again, this is the perfect time for politicians to remind the Uttarakhandis of a sorry chapter about many demonstrators demanding a separate state being shot dead by Yadav’s government in Rampur. It also provides sub-plots about how the subsequent Chief Ministers from OBC and Dalit ranks went back on their word for a fair division of joint assets between UP and Uttarakhand.

The BJP says it broke the jinx and put Uttarakhand, christened Devbhumi, on a fast track for development. Speaking in Dehradun, the PM pronounced that Uttarakhand’s greatness lay in its ‘spiritual power’: adhyatmic shakti. He underscored, as is his wont, his deep personal attachment to the spiritually charged holy land and added that in the coming years, this area will become the ‘spiritual capital’ of India.

The young Chief Minister, Pushkar Singh Dhami, also came in for special praise for having implemented the Uniform Civil Code, and for putting a stop to religious conversions and communal riots. While the jury is still out on the assertions, here are a few thoughts about what Uttarakhand’s long history of spiritual and religious beliefs evolving out of a melange of faiths and local beliefs and practices has actually been.

The new Devbhumi narrative crafted by the Sangh came to my generation of Pahadis as a shock, when a multi-coloured dreamscape created by our ancestors is sought to be bulldozed to pave way for a new vision of Bharat Mata and “tikaoo vikas”. The latter is a self-contradictory term as the great environmentalist Anupam Mishra pointed out. The term, he said, was a shoddy translation of what the UN was selling as “sustainable development”. Development, Mishra pointed out, means moving ahead, while “tikaoo” means static. How do the NGOs and villagers they were working with reconcile to this cracked vision of modern development, where the more you changed, the more things remained the same?

To free land from land-grabbers, the double-engine Dhami government is going to squeeze out all shrines, mazaars and churches. An ugly new word, ‘Land Jihad’, has been coined. The government in promoting religious tourism has clarified that it considers the Sangh’s version of Sanatan Hindu Dharma as the golden benchmark. But what about Uttarakhand’s pre-Sanatan pantheon of local gods and goddesses? What about demi-gods like Golu Devta, Sam and Airy, gods of cattle rearers? Muslim pirs, Nathpanthi Gorakh Baba, Guru Nanak, and the famous gurdwara located near Kedarnath in Hemkund Sahib?

As for Muslim pirs, Syed Kalu (of Turkic origin) and Maimanda Pir, Devbhumi itself has never discriminated between them and other holy ones. Maimanda Pir is said to have received his diksha in Kashi. Both Kalu Pir and Maimanda Pir are still routinely invited through songs sung during exorcism rites to protect the innocent and drive out evil: “Tu Maimanda pir masaan…Turkani ko putra haat avyu...” (You the son of a Turk mother, the brave Maimanda, please emerge from the burial site). The two are referred to as the bravest among the brave and the pir of pirs (“Veeranu ko veer, piran ko pir”).

It is unsurprising that in the manner of many other medieval pirs, gurus and sadhus, at each place the great men paused to take a break, a commemorative shrine came up. As a child, one has seen at least three Kalu Pir shrines in Almora, Ranikhet and Haldwani and heard of two more, one in Lohaghat near the Nepal border and Bhimtal.

So yes, Devbhumi it is, but not in the way it is being sought to be projected. Landscapes such as these are not sanctified by the size of shrines and the wealth of rich devotees in the name of who those disaster-prone six-lane roads and year-long religious tourism channels are being created.

The sacred ecology of the region has been protected and maintained by a humble bunch of local faithfuls. Please let us not force this grand melange of cultures in a restrictive narrative crafted by some political strategists for winning elections, and influencing young minds with a wrong understanding of what it means to live and love.

— The writer is a veteran journalist