In a seemingly innocuous move, the union government issued a notification on April 27 ‘disbanding’ the YOL Cantonment, located 10 km southwest of Dharamshala in the Kangra district of Himachal Pradesh. The notification is not to be found on the official websites and no Press release seems to have been issued explaining the reason for the move.
This bucolic township gets its name from the Young Officers Living (YOL) facility established by the British around 1849. Now the headquarters of 9 Corps of the Indian Army, it served as a Prisoner-of-war camp for the German and Italian soldiers in the two World Wars respectively, and later hosted the hapless Tibetan escapees from China.
Its history notwithstanding, the disbandment of a tiny cantonment with a population of 12,028 as per the 2011 census is not such a big deal in itself, but the union government’s action assumes significance as it is seen by many as the beginning of the end for the remaining 61 cantonments located across the country, from Badami Bagh in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir to Kannur in the state of Kerala, and Amritsar in Punjab to Jalapahar in West Bengal. Nobody is, however, sure what the end game is to be.
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