Darjeeling protests
Revival of call for a Gorkha state in India is born out of desperation |
On June 9, as bombs were hurled barely 200 metres away from the Governor’s House in Darjeeling, where West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee was holding a Cabinet meeting, it was a throwback to the late 1980s when violence ruled the hills and slopes of the pristine, colonial-era hill station in the Himalayas, bordering the northern fringes of the state. Since the second week of this month, Darjeeling has been crippled by an indefinite general strike called by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), protesting what the party terms as “police atrocities” against GJM.
“We have demanded Central Government intervention. Police atrocities are being used to portray this as a law-and-order problem, when the problem is actually political in nature,” GJM leader Roshan Giri told Gulf
News from Darjeeling last Saturday. Police raids on the GJM headquarters earlier this month and the subsequent recovery of a cache of arms have further queered the pitch between GJM and the state government.
Demanding more power for the Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) and citing the state government’s decision to introduce Bengali as a “compulsory” language in state schools as a sign of cultural usurpation, GJM and its supreme leader Bimal Gurung are on a warpath, trying to desperately revive the old agitation for a separate Gorkhaland state within India.
“There has been a deliberate misinformation campaign on this language issue to foment trouble in the hills,” Baichung Bhutia, former captain of the Indian football team and a Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate from Darjeeling in the 2014 parliamentary elections, told Gulf
News earlier this month. The much sought-after tourist destination among a large number of Indians and, until the mid1970s, even among a section of foreign travellers, was literally under a lockdown as Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF) leader Subhash Ghisingh’s clamour for a separate state turned into a bloody, messy and no-holds-barred movement against the establishment in the 1980s. According to official estimates, 1,200 people lost their lives between 1986 and 1988, as the Gorkhaland agitation resulted in a complete breakdown of the law-and-order machinery in what is popularly referred to as ‘Queen of Hills’. A tripartite treaty in 1988, signed between the Union and state govern- ments and GNLF, paved the way for the formation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC), which ensured a lull in the violence for the next three decades, though there was no commitment from the government on the formation of Gorkhaland.
Hint of a mist
Ghisingh is no more and even after having ‘ruled’ Darjeeling as the chairman of DGHC for almost two decades, his party GNLF itself has been reduced to just a hint of a mist.
In the ensuing years, the baton of leadership in the hills — based on a parochial churning of the ethnic Gorkha sentiment and anchored in a rigid interpretation of socioeconomic norms dominated by those speaking the Nepali language in and around the Darjeeling — has been snatched from Ghisingh by his one-time trusted aide Bimal Gurung, whose GJM, a breakaway faction of the erstwhile GNLF, emerged as the dominant political force in Darjeeling, Dooars and Terai. It was Gurung’s rise and Ghisingh’s steady eclipse that saw the state administration in Bengal junk the earlier avatar of a DGHC and rubber-stamp a new entity called GTA in 2011, with Gurung at its helm. Never failing to pick which side of the toast is buttered, Gurung’s hobnobbing with Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the Centre and TMC at the state level has helped ensure that it is not just the Unesco World Heritage ‘Toy Train’, but Gurung’s GTA gravy train keeps chugging along as well.
Neither Ghisingh nor Gurung ever had a clear assurance from any of the governments at the Centre or state with regard to the formation of a separate state. Given the geopolitical sensitiv-
ity of Darjeeling — with China, Bhutan. Nepal and Bangladesh borders in the vicinity — such a possibility is virtually zilch.
Yet, Ghisingh and Gurung were both happy with what they had got in the bargain — a corpus of huge state funds to manage DGHC and GTA, respectively.
“It was all hunky-dory — until Mamata came up with a series of masterstrokes,” Biswajit Bhattacharya, a senior journalist based in Kolkata, told Gulf News. “Mamata’s decision to hold Cabinet meetings in Darjeeling — for the first time in 44 years — her move to have the GTA’s accounts audited — following complaints of embezzlement to the tune of Rs20 billion (Dh1.13 billion) — and have three senior Indian Police Service officers moved from Kolkata to Darjeeling to counter the current security challenge have practically taken the wind out of Gurung’s sails,” he said.
In 2003, based on ground reports that Ghisingh was fast losing popularity in the hills, the Left Front government led by Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee pushed elections to the fourth DGHC to the back burner, on the pretext of first formalising the Sixth Schedule tribal council in the hills. The fourth elections to DGHC were never held and Ghising was sidelined.
With TMC winning the recent election to Mirik Municipality, the first party from the plains to do so in the last 30 years, Gurung has sensed an imminent slide in support at the grass-roots level. Moreover, just like the way militants within GNLF had turned the gun on Ghisingh, Gurung too has realised that the knives could soon be out for him too.
And Mamata raised the stakes at this critical juncture.
Anticipating the language issue as a likely Gurung plank, Mamata has tried to drive a wedge through Gorkha hegemony in the hills by forming 19 tribal councils. Her aim is clear: Let the Tamangs, Bhutias, Lepchas ... too feel socially empowered. That is why Gurung raising the bogey of Gorkhaland may not find much traction with Darjeeling’s ethnic population this time around. His call for an indefinite strike is more out of compulsion to appease the militants within his own party than being born out of any genuine concern to further the cause of Gorkhaland.
But this time around, Gurung’s plot is wearing thin.