| NORTH
INDIA >> UTTAR PRADESH |
At the same time it included Oudh into the state. The
new state was called the North Western Provinces of Agra
and Oudh, which in 1902 was renamed as the United Provinces
of Agra and Oudh. It was commonly referred to as the United
Provinces or its acronym UP. In 1920, the capital of the
province was shifted from Allahabad to Lucknow.
The high court continued to be at Allahabad, but a bench
was established at Lucknow. Allahabad continues to be
an administrative base of today's Uttar Pradesh and has
several administrative headquarters.
Uttar Pradesh continued to be central to Indian culture
and politics and was especially important in modern Indian
history as a hotbed of both the Indian Independence Movement
and the Pakistan Movement. The city of Allahabad was home
to prominent nationalists such as Motilal Nehru, Purushottam
Das Tandon.Allahabad was also home to a record four Prime
Ministers of India: Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, ,
Vishwanath Pratap Singh and Rajiv Gandhi.
After independence, the state was renamed Uttar Pradesh
("northern province") by its first chief minister,
Govind Ballabh Pant.
Pant, who was well known to Jawaharlal Nehru, was popular
in the local party and left his mark in Lucknow before
December 27, 1954, when Nehru called him to Delhi to make
him Home Minister. He was succeeded by Dr. Sampoornanand,
a university professor and classicist. A Sanskrit scholar,
he was in office till 1957 before becoming governor of
Rajasthan
Sucheta Kripalani was sworn in in October 1963, and became
India's first woman chief minister, until a two-month
long strike by state employees in March 1967 caused her
to step down. The confusion and chaos ended only with
the defection of Charan Singh from the Congress with a
small set of legislators. He set up a party called the
Jana Congress which formed the first non-Congress government
in U.P. and ruled for over a year.
Fellow socialist Hemvati Nandan Bahuguna of the Bharatiya
Lok Dal was Chief Minister for part of the 1970s, and
was dismissed, along with several other non-Congress chief
ministers, shortly after the imposition of the Emergency,
when Narain Dutt Tewari - later chief minister of Uttarakhand
- became chief minister. The Congress Party lost heavily
in 1977 following the lifting of the Emergency, but roared
back to power in 1980, when Mrs. Gandhi handpicked the
man who would become her son's principal opposition, V.P.
Singh, to become Chief Minister.
In 2000 the Himalyan portion of the state — the
Garhwal and Kumaon divisions — were formed into
a new state called Uttarakhand (meaning the northern part
of the state).
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