Terai

The Terai, also spelled Tarai, is the low belt of land at the foot of the Himalayas. In Sikh history the name stands for the Terai of Nainital district in Uttar Pradesh, where Punjabi Sikh farmers cleared jungle and settled. Rudrapur, near Nainital, is its main town, and Udham Singh Nagar district, created in 1995 out of Nainital district and headed from Rudrapur, lies in the Terai; Rudrapur became part of Uttarakhand when that state was created in 2000 (Wikipedia).

Key moments

• 5 July 1960: Gurnam Singh's open letter to Prime Minister Nehru said the Sikhs saw Uttar Pradesh's recent policy, backed by statutes, of evicting them from the highlands of the Terai after officially branding them habitual criminals as an extension of the Punjab Governor's secret directive of 1947 (Gurmit Singh, p. 356).
• 17 November 1960: at the opening of the Agricultural University at Rudrapur, Nehru lost his temper when some Sikhs shouted Punjabi Suba Zindabad, called them fools and told them to go to their Punjabi Suba (Gurmit Singh, p. 133).
• 1961 to 1962: Dr Gopal Singh Dardi of the Nationalist Sikhs, the one Sikh body that appeared before the Das Commission according to Gurmit Singh, said later that his memorandum listed eight cases of discrimination, among them the treatment of Sikh farmers in the Terai (p. 148).
• 1 August 1965: the Chief Khalsa Diwan's press note by its secretary Sant Singh said Sikh pioneers had turned the Terai jungles into rich farmland and that, once they had made it a surplus food area, efforts were made to throw them out (p. 425).
• 7 August 1965: Sant Fateh Singh asked Prime Minister Shastri why the case of the Terai Sikhs was still pending, saying that people who had cleared jungles and made barren land productive were being turned into refugees just because they were Sikhs. Shastri told Home Minister Nanda that the grievances of the Terai Sikhs should be looked into (p. 406).
• 1981: the Minorities Commission took up a report in the Spokesman Weekly of 27 July 1981 that Punjabi settlers in the Terai were threatened with eviction. The Uttar Pradesh Government told it that Scheduled Tribes owned 2.28 lakh acres in the Terai before 1947 and 80,000 by 1969; that Section 157-A was inserted into the land reform act in June 1969 and an Ordinance issued in June 1981; and that only about 16,000 acres occupied without authority after 1969 were at stake. It denied that Sikhs were being targeted or made to deposit arms. The Commission said that legally authorised settlers, Sikh or not, had no cause for panic, and that it would consider any genuine grievance (Appendix 51, pp. 482 to 484).

What it means today. Udham Singh Nagar district, which lies in the Terai, had a Sikh population of 9.87 per cent at the 2011 census (Wikipedia). The record above is mostly the Sikh side's account together with the Uttar Pradesh Government's reply of 1981.