No Non-Hindus should be allowed to enter Char Dham: BJP MLA

The anti-Muslim thrust of the Uttarakhand government continues — even if Kedarnath MLA Asha Nauityal, a long-time activist for women’s empowerment, is an unlikely candidate to be spouting this anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The BJP’s latest bete noir is non-Hindus entering Kedarnath, Badrinath, Gangotri and Yamunotri. The state government must, of course, impose a ban upon them.

What has hurt Nautiyal’s sensitivities in particular is that non-Hindus consume meat and liquor, thereby hurting the religious sentiments of Hindu pilgrims (now where have we heard that before?) who visit these shrines during the Char Dham yatra.

Obviously, Nautiyal is oblivious to the fact that ever since the formation of the state, its maximum revenues were garnered from the sale of liquor. Uttarakhand has earned over Rs 22,648 crore in revenues from liquor sales in the last two decades. This New Year of 2025 was rung in with the joyful clinking of liquor glasses and on 31 December evening alone the state earned Rs 14.26 crore from the sale of liquor.

Uttarakhandis, both pahadis and those living in the plains, enjoy liquor and make no bones about it.

Being a largely hill state, meat is also consumed in large quantities by both populations and, historically, they have no history of vegetarianism. Nepali labourers migrating to these hill towns in search of work have no record of vegetarianism either.

Yet Nautiyal held a meeting recently with local traders in Rudraprayag, in the course of which she claimed local traders had demanded such a ban.

But some random phone calls to local traders and dhaba owners in the area had them denying having made any such demand.

Nautiyal is planning to raise this issue with chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami to ensure a ban on non-Hindus is imposed at the earliest.

The problem is that chief minister Dhami has little to show in terms of achievements. So, targeting the minority Muslim population is one way to distract the local population from the state government’s inability to fulfil their electoral promises.

In Kedarnath, Muslims do not comprise even 1 per cent of the population, with the hill regions having witnessed a major migration of this minority during the last five years.

During the Char Dham yatra, Muslims would arrive with their horses and ponies to take the pilgrims from Gaurinath up to the Kedarnath shrine. Some Muslims from Uttar Pradesh do reach Kedarnath when the yatra opens up for the public but return to their homes as soon as it ends.

The problem is that many Muslim shopkeepers residing in the hills found their shops being vandalised and have had Bajrang Dal activists warning them to leave or they would face a threat to their lives.

With Dhami repeatedly speaking of Muslims indulging in ‘love jihad’, ‘land jihad’ and ‘thook jihad’ and the BJP wanting to establish a ‘Muslim-free’ state in this Devbhoomi, Nautiyal’s tirade is but a continuation of the anti-minority pattern.

The Uttarakhand Congress senior vice-president Suryakant Dhasmana addressed a press meet on this issue and emphasised that the BJP was determined to divide the country along communal lines.

The court’s opinion on this issue remains ambivalent. In August 2022, the Nainital High Court upheld a ban on meat sale within 500 metres of the river Ganga, stating it was in line with the Constitution owing to the sanctity of the Ganga.

Is it not imperative for the state government to build STPs along all the hilltowns to ensure untreated sewage is not emptied into the Ganga too, then?

Rather than address the key issues, skirting problems seems to be the easy way out.