Why the Darjeeling model failed
gled in the worst quagmire of Bengal’s bureaucracy. The famous Sadar hospital was under the DGHC but the chief medical officer came from the government; the tourism department remained with the DGHC and the revenue fetching tourism corporation with Kolkata. For every small project, the investment proposal and plan allocation officials had to go to Kolkata. Both the DGHC and GTA euphemistically became ‘helicopters with tractor engines’.
In order to have absolute political control, leaders systematically demolished institutions and took shelter in a wrongly inserted constitutional provision in 1992 to discard the crucial three tier-panchayati raj.
In critical areas, like the Gorkhas’ Indian identity, Darjeeling’s membership in the North Eastern Council, bringing foreign direct investment and international development agencies, constitutional sanction to the GTA, devolution of the state’s planned resources, minimum wages to tea workers, setting up of panchayat and newer institutions, and the scheduled tribe status, the Bengal government just did not move. It consciously injected a perceptible demographic shift in the plains and ghettoised the three hill sub-divisions. The idea was to limit the statehood movement to a segregated geography.
The historical hill towns witnessed mushrooming of concrete structures, a collapse of educational and heath amenities and a sharp increase in political crimes. ‘No system’ became the system. In the absence of accountability, audit and evaluation in both the DGHC and GTA, the government concentrated more on assuaging the leaders rather than addressing the plight of people. Leaders became a source of terror and public apathy. Hunger deaths in tea gardens coexisted with the illgotten opulence of these leaders. The Trinamool government unabashedly went a step further and created and funded several ‘castebased development boards’ and registered them under NGOs. This ‘divide and rule’ policy was a ploy to protract internal colonialism. Today it has boomeranged on its architect.
Bengal has lost the rare opportunity of proving the Darjeeling model as the celebrated instrument of conflict resolution. Its leaders have been warned not to compromise this time. The statehood status to Darjeeling and Dooars is inevitable today.