For Sewa Singh of Rameshpur, which lies on the Rudrapur-Kichcha highway, the mountains have never been more threatening. They now seem to sit like a rock upon his chest. Today, he wants his freedom. Let the mountains be, let Uttaranchal come into being, but he wants no part of it.

"We have no enmity with the supporters of Uttaranchal. We consider them our brothers. But our way of life is different. We want to live as we always have in this guldastan created out of the wilderness through the 50 long, hard years since my father came here after Partition," he says.

As the zilla parishad president of the Samajwadi Party, he plays something of a leadership role here. The village, with its tractors, Marutis and jean-clad youth,could be in Punjab. But again it's the mountains that remind the visitor that though this strip of terai land, 22 km in width and 175 km in length, on which the village rests may bear the name of Udham Singh Nagar, it was a part of Nainital district just three years ago.

About 70 km away from here, 35-year-old Mahesh Pande, political activist and writer, sits in the Nagar Palika chairman's office in Nainital and passionately defends the idea of Uttaranchal.

"Four governments have committed themselves to creating Uttarakhand and those now opposing it didn't say a word. Now they claim they are culturally different. But don't they know that when Guru Nanak did tapasaya in these very hills, our villagers rushed to honour him? Don't they know that when anti-Sikh riots were raging everywhere else, this region didn't witness such ugliness?" he asks.

The questions fall thick and furious like the monsoon rain outside. Each side has its share of bitter accusations against the other. Meanwhile the tensionlevels keep rising. Last week, Udham Singh Nagar's district headquarters, Rudrapur, was shut down by the Udham Singh Raksha Samiti and the local vyapar mandal, as part of their campaign against the merger.

Next Tuesday, a BJP-supported rally is being planned with the slogan, Uttaranchal banao, Udham Singh Nagar milao (make Uttaranchal, merge Udham Singh Nagar). On August 1, students from the Kumaon University are planning to do their bit by calling for a Kumaon bandh.

Stoking these fires are an assortment of local, state and national politicians, smelling opportunity in the air. The tragedy is that there is no public figure interested in cooling tempers.

Soon it may be too late to do even this, as the hotheads on both sides sense the power of their rhetoric. "Yeh khoon ki sangarsh hoga (this will be a bloody encounter), a battle of the hills versus the plains," predicts Kamal Srivastav, social activist and member of the Rudrapur municipal board.

There are many who wouldlike to prevent such an eventuality, including Kamlesh Shukla, president of the UP Rice Millers Association, who owns one of the 250-odd rice mills in this district. "To avoid a situation like Assam or Kashmir, we must sort it amongst ourselves like brothers," says Shukla.

But there are many who feel that it is already too late. Dhorilal Sagar, a Dalit leader of Bajpur and a strong proponent of Uttaranchal, is one of them.

"The fact is that the Terai has witnessed daylight robbery. Powerful landed interests have stolen thousands of acres, through various tricks."

To illustrate his case, he points to the villages of Taranganj and Bikrampur in Bajpur, where one family is believed to own all the land in the village -- once inhabited by the Buxhas, the local tribal community.

"Take the Escort Farm in Kashipur, whose owners -- powerful people living in Delhi and Bombay -- cleverly tried to circumvent land ceiling provisions by claiming that it was a cooperative farm. It comprised nearly 1,100 acres."

Hecontinues, "Farms owned by film stars and politicians here have swimming pools, dish antennae and appliances catering to every creature comfort --even as the original owners end up as labourers on their land. No wonder these people don't want to be part of Uttaranchal -- they are worried that all their ill-gotten land will be confiscated," says Sagar.

But Kulbir Singh Hooda, an advocate and agriculturist, who owns the well-known Haryana Farm in Bajpur, responds angrily to such accusations, "Legally, no one is a big landlord here. We all come under the laws governing land ceiling and surely our fears must be addressed."

He believes that once Udham Singh Nagar is merged with Uttaranchal, his land will be requisitioned for industrial purposes. "There may even be laws passed giving only hill folk the right to purchase land. No senior leader of any party has tried to clarify these issues. That's why the panic here."

High up in the hills, Sanjay Kumar, the young chairman of the Nainital Nagar Palika, doesn'tdispute this.

"It's true that the fears of people in the plains have remained unaddressed. There is no trust and such issues cannot be sorted out without it. Unfortunately, we don't have leaders who can create trust."

Even more unfortunate, it is the timber, liquor and land mafia who have stepped into the breach.

(Tomorrow: Uttaranchal -- rocky climb ahead)