Dubai
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 and indiscriminate firing 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 in Darjeeling 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 and an attack on the ethnicity of the Gorkhas, GJM and its supreme leader Bimal Gurung are on a war-path, 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 mid-1970s, 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 governments 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.
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 socio-economic norms dominated by those speaking the Nepali language in and around the Darjeeling hills — 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 sensitivity 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 in the name of 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 by a team of six auditors from the state’s finance department — following complaints of embezzlement to the tune of Rs20 billion (Dh1.13 billion) — and her order to 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.
Political observers have already started drawing a parallel between Mamata’s modus operandi with GJM and Gurung and what the erstwhile Left Front Government had done with GNLF and Ghisingh. 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 left nursing his wounds until a firebrand Gurung literally sent his mentor packing from the hills to the plains of Siliguri for good!
With TMC having won 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. Added to that is the fact that just like the way militants within the GNLF had turned the gun on Ghisingh, Gurung too has realised that the knives could be out for him too and soon enough.
And Mamata has raised the stakes at this crucial juncture.
Anticipating the language issue as a likely Gurung plank to create unrest and fan the flames of Gorkhaland afresh, Mamata has already 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 and economically empowered. Darjeeling doesn’t belong to the Gorkhas alone. That is why Gurung raising the bogey of Gorkhaland, riding piggyback on the language issue, may not find much traction with Darjeeling’s ethnic population this time around. His call for indefinite strike in Darjeeling is more out of compulsion to appease the militants within his party than born out of any genuine concern to further the cause of Gorkhaland.
Only this time around, Gurung’s plot is wearing thin.
