At a garrison town in Dehradun, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami walked into a festival that is equal parts celebration and statement — and left no doubt about where Uttarakhand's Gorkha community stands in the state's vision. On Sunday, November 1, 2026, Dhami attended the Gorkha Dashain-Diwali Mahotsav and State Fair 2026 at Garhi Cantt, Dehradun, organised by the Veer Gorkha Kalyan Samiti — weaving together festival greetings, border diplomacy, and a string of concrete policy announcements.

A soldier community's motto and its meaning

Dhami opened with the spiritual symbolism of the twin festivals — Dashain as the victory of dharma over adharma through the worship of Maa Durga, and Diwali as the triumph of light over darkness. But it was his invocation of the Gorkha motto that landed hardest: 'Kayar hunubhanda marnu ramro' — 'It is better to die than to live as a coward.' The Chief Minister cited this as the purest expression of the community's 'indomitable courage and self-respect,' and praised Gorkha warriors for their 'unparalleled bravery, loyalty, and sense of duty' in defending India's borders.

He framed the Gorkha community not merely as a pillar of Uttarakhand but as a pride of the entire nation — pointing to centuries of sacrifice in defence, and significant contributions to education, sport, art, literature, and social service in the state.

Nepali language, Pancheshwar, and the India-Nepal bond

Dhami drew on personal experience — growing up in a border district — to describe the India-Nepal relationship as one grounded not in geography alone but in shared culture, family ties, and what he called the 'roti-beti' bond stretching back generations. He announced that Uttarakhand Open University in Haldwani is running diploma and certificate courses in Nepali language, and that the state is moving to bring the Nepali Academy under the umbrella of the Uttarakhand Language Institute — a bid to give the language institutional momentum and connect younger generations to their heritage.

On infrastructure, Dhami pointed to the Pancheshwar Multipurpose Project on the Mahakali River at the India-Nepal border as a shared priority of both the central and state governments — a project conceived under the 1996 Mahakali Treaty that promises hydropower generation, irrigation, and regional development when it finally moves from proposal to construction.

UCC, 30% reservation, and 3 lakh Lakhpati Didis

The festival also became a platform for Dhami's women's empowerment agenda. He reiterated that Uttarakhand became India's first state to implement the Uniform Civil Code — enacted in 2024 — calling it a landmark step toward equal rights and justice for women. The state has also introduced 30 percent horizontal reservation for women in government jobs.

On the economic front, Dhami said the Lakhpati Didi scheme — designed to make self-help group members financially independent — has reached more than 3 lakh women across the state, strengthening both household economies and the broader state economy. The scheme's scale, he said, reflects the government's belief that the real progress of family, society, and state flows through women's advancement.

A Gorkha festival, a border project, a language academy, a civil code, and three lakh women who now count themselves as Lakhpati Didis — Dhami's address at Garhi Cantt was less a speech and more a manifesto, delivered to the community that has always stood, in his own words, at the frontier of both courage and culture.