Plain truths from the
WAR PLAN With the GNLF and the Trinamool Congress eyeing the hills of northern Bengal, GJM chief Bimal Gurung is busy organising his defences
I’m a tea garden worker’s son. My mother’s day used to start at 3am. At 8.30am, I used to take some food to her. When she would eat, my job was to keep plucking leaves to protect her wages. I could never reach school by 10.30am. I used to while away the day in a forest. Now, I take care of 800 boys — their education, food, shelter, everything.
Bimal Gurung,
Gorkha Janmukti Morcha chief and chief executive of Gorkhaland Territorial Administration
We went to the same teacher for tuition. We fell in love, married, and spent the next 40 years together. The day he was killed at a public square in Darjeeling was when he went out early without even waking me. My only memory of that day is his lifeless body, decked up in flowers. Bharati Tamang,
Akhil Bharatiya Gorkha League president & wife of slain leader Madan Tamang
SILIGURI/KALIMPONG/DARJEELING: The era of middle class and westernised Nepali leaders with their humble followers has all but faded away in the northernmost territories of West Bengal but violence still seethes in the three hill sub-divisions — Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong. The key to making sense of it all lies between the stories of Bimal Gurung and Bharati Tamang, along a continuum that rises from salt-of-the-earth politics to peaks of frightening violence.
Madan Tamang was a suave businessman, and the rebel voice who owned a piece of the Berlin Wall. He was more exception than rule, and the manner of his death only exposed the dark side of aspirational Gorkha politics, as did the lack of aftermath.
Bharati is still in a state of shock. After her husband’s violent death on May 21, 2010, people trooped in with their condolences, but no one raised a voice against the killing. “I ask them why they kept mum when Madan’s neck was almost severed with a khukri and the culprits are still roaming around? They have no answer.”
At one level, Tamang’s brutal death was but a spike in Gorkha discontent. It was in the mid-1980s that the discontent among the tea garden workers and the long suppressed opposition to ‘Bengali colonialism’ — the ‘babus’ took over when the ‘sahibs’ left — first found its voice in a former army man who sought a separate state for Gorkhas — all those who live in the hills, not just Nepalispeakers.
Subhash Ghising had burst upon the scene. The Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) leader found a support base among the urban youth, who had no job opportunities other than the tourism industry, and the organised labourers in tea gardens.
Ghising’s road ahead was quite clear, since by the time the GNLF emerged, the CPI(M) trade unions had lost much of their clout. Subnationalism took centrestage.
Gurung, says one Darjeelingbased political observer, is the real political successor of Ghising, although it is he who drove the GNLF patriarch from the hills on July 26, 2008. Ghising died a broken man on January 29 this year, “in exile” in Siliguri.
Gurung, the new Alpha male, saw his opportunity when Ghising accepted a ‘mock state’ — only an autonomous district administration. Gurung formed his own party, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, on October 7, 2007. The Gorkhaland flag kept flying.
The demands are the same, the sentiment identical. Even the path is similar, if not exactly parallel. What’s different is the man at the top. Gurung is accessible, the big brother always ready to listen, but one who can turn extremely aggressive if things are not to his liking.
But Gurung is a worried man these days. On September 30, the GJM’s youth wing held a huge rally in Kalimpong. The trigger: the resignation of Kalimpong MLA Harka Bahadur Chhetri from the party. One of the GJM’s three MLAs, Rohit Sharma, had quit the assembly. Another one, Trilok Kumar Dewan, quit both the assembly and the party. But Chhetri just quit the party and retained his assembly seat. That’s why the rally, and it’s location in Chhetri’s home turf.
Gurung wanted his three MLAs from Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong to resign from the assembly to protest against CM Mamata Banerjee’s increasing interference, from controlling funds to setting up separate development boards for not only non-Nepali ethnic groups but also some Nepali-speaking subgroups.
Why should separate boards