Uttarakhand marks 25 years of its formation today (November 9).

While the demand for a hill state had been sporadically raised even before Independence, the Uttarakhand movement gathered momentum in the 1990s, and the state came into being in 2000 , along with Jharkhand (carved out of Bihar) and Chhattisgarh (from Madhya Pradesh).

Long history of demand

Though the earliest demands for special rights for the region date back to 1815 after the East India Company annexed Kumaon, the cause attained prominence in 1938 when Jawaharlal Nehru supported it in the Congress’s special session.

According to Emma Mawdsley’s 1999 research paper ‘A New Himalayan State in India: Popular Perceptions of Regionalism, Politics, and Development’, ahead of Independence, elite representatives from the reg

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