Populism, struggle and drama behind creation of a small state?

By Ashish Joshi?

The Making of a Small State, Anup Kumar, Orient BlackSwan, Pp 335, Rs 775.00?

At a time when fresh demands for creation of new smaller states are cropping up in India, the book tells the history of the populist social movement called the jan andolan for the creation of Uttarakhand.

It was in 1994 that the people of Garhwal and Kumaon launched the jan andolan to press their demand for a separate pahari (mountain) state, Uttarakhand which was created in the last round of reorganisation of states brought about in 2000 by the then ruling government of NDA. According to the author, this occurred due to the unravelling of the Mandal-Ayodhya politics with the tipping point being the jan andolan, especially due to the “aggressive role played by the Hindi-language press”.

In this compelling account of the mutual dependence between a “culture of protest” (jan andolan) and a “culture of news” (the press), the author’s objective is twofold – one, to tell the story of the making of Uttarakhand and two, to describe the role of the Hindi press, especially Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran in the making of the jan andolan. Seeing the proactive role played by the media in the current Anna Hazare’s andolan against corruption, one is tempted to agree with Joshua Meyrowitz, who said that news media “are themselves social contexts that foster certain forms of interactions and social identities.”

Unlike organised political movements that are led by political parties, jan andolan does not utilise institutional means such as electoral politics to make claims on the state and other stakeholders in a democracy. Instead, in order to be seen and heard in the corridors of power, the movement claims public space and garners support from the news media, a relatively autonomous institution and the civil society.

The book is divided into eight chapters including the Introduction and Epilogue. As all social phenomena emerge out of particular historical contingencies, Chapters 1 and 2 provide a historical context on the growth of the press in the region and the history of the political imagination of Uttarakhand. Chapter 1 discusses how Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran through their strategy of hyperlocalisation of news came to dominate the pahari public sphere. It also situates the growth of the two newspapers in the larger context of India’s newspaper revolution, driven largely by the Indian language press.

The book describes how the protesters who went to Delhi for a rally to address their demands to the Central Government were attacked by the Uttar Pradesh police which led to the carnage on the Dehradun-Delhi highway.

(Orient BlackSwan Private Limited, 1/24, Asaf Ali Road, New Delhi – 110 002; delhi@orientblackswan.com)