In Uttarakhand the ruling political dispensation seems to have lost control over law and order situations going out of hand with the criminals becoming more influential , rather dominating having no respect or apprehension of/ for the law and order machinery.
The recent back to back rapes of a thirty two year old nurse in Rudrapur and then her brutal murder by crushing her face with huge stones including a rape of an adolescent in Haridwar and gangrape at Dehradun Bus station in a bus compounded with a brutal attack on a journalist running his own You tube channel in Rishikesh exposing the liquor mafia literally breaking his jaws, injuring his head and leg has send shock waves in entire Uttarakhand. Few months ago a young man was openly killed by a criminal hailing from Western UP on a petty quarrel related to his car sold illegally by the accused. Recently , a cabinet minister Ganesh Joshi has been implicated by the Vigilance Court in a case of disproportionate assets related to massive corruption asking the Uttarakhand cabinet to grant it permission to register the corruption case against him. Similarly several months ago the then Mayor of Dehradun was in the midst on controversy for amassing wealth in a case filed by an advocate and RTI activist Vikesh Negi who was sent out of the state for six months.
Not only this but two BJP leaders including a chief of the Nainital Milk Produce Federation is absconding for raping a widow and eve teasing her minor daughter with rape case under IPC 376, POSCO act etc registered against him and non bailable warrant issued by the court.
Despite so much of hullabaloo the minister is not resigning on moral grounds. Last year a minister and former speaker Prem Chandra Aggrawal had publicly thrashed a social activist Negi in Rishikesh , with the video going viral but the minister didn’t resigned. The entire print, electronics and social media is agog with news of these shameful mishappenings with Ankita Bhandari case in which the son of a BJP former state minister is behind bars on the charges of brutal murder of this 19 year innocent girl also not reaching to its credible conclusion even after two years being elapsed and a VIP in the case still a mystry, though a fighter journalist cum activist Ashutosh Negi now the organising secretary of Uttarakhand Kranti Dal was sent to jail on unsubstantiated charges of SCST and his wife arbitrarily transferred to distant Pithoragarh with High Court giving the stay.
The Uttarakhand Subordinate Services Selection Commission’s massive paper leaks scam is also fresh in everyone’s mind in which several BJP leaders were involved.
Apart from these shocking incidents there had been natural calamities on wide scale in Uttarakhand with large number of accidents taking place,massive landslides destroying and demolishing villages, houses and roads on massive scale with human beings beings killed by boulders falling on them from mountain tops, pilgrims being buried under landslides debris and several tourist and pilgrims dying in accidents with vehicles, buses falling in gorges several hundred metres down in the valleys and rivers.
There have been unfortunate incidents of several villages having been wiped out after cloud bursts incidents in Tehri Garhwal.
The maneater human kills also have become the order of the day in Uttarakhand hills with maneaters entering villages , pouncing on pillion riders on roads, and grabbing children and women from their house compounds with their mutilated dead bodies found in the nearby bushes or jungles.
Uttarakhand which was carved out of undivided Uttar Pradesh 24 years ago with 43 sacrifices and thousands of people going to jail with women and men brutally murdered and obnoxiously raped in Muzaffarnagar Rampur Tiraha on 2nd October 1994 is today unfortunately in doldrums with its fiscal deficit crossing Rs 70000 crores from merely Rs 4000 in 2004 with 9 chief ministers changed so far in just 24 years and state witnessing crime rate going up phenomenally, becoming the safe haven for criminals mafia of buildings, lands and liquor and corruptors etc.
What is absolutely surprising and shocking to note is the fact that in Uttarakhand last year about 867 rape cases have been reported followed by neighbouring Himachal Pradesh with 359 cases. Other hilly Northeastern states reported Meghalaya 75 cases followed by Tripura 72 , Manipur 42, Mizoram 14, Sikkim 13 and Nagaland merely 7.
This unambiguously speaks of the hard fact that Uttarakhand once called the land of Abode of Gods is literally in mess of all kinds, economically, politically, socially, on health n education front , from law and order angle and also being counted as a corruption ridden state with migration becoming massive and about three thousand villages allegedly becoming ghost villages.
The health sector of the state is also in awry with fifty percent of state lands sold massively to outsider with Uttarakhand’s demography at stake in the absence of a credible “Bhu Kanoon”.
According to a state government data 86 Deaths have been reported so far during the Char Dham Yatra where as during the last year, 245 pilgrims died. Of them, 120 deaths were reported on the Kedarnath Dham route, 46 on the Badrinath route, 30 on the Gangotri Dham route, and 39 on the Yamunotri Dham route reveal the government statistics on these tragedies.
