Darjeeling’s Dilemma

IN OCTOBER 2020, a car with a suspicious passenger pulled up outside a building in Kolkata’s Salt Lake area. This was the Gorkha Bhavan, a large grey building controlled by the administration that runs the Darjeeling hills, the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA), in the northern part of West Bengal. Within minutes, the region was abuzz with the news. Gorkha leader Bimal Gurung was back.

With some 150 police cases against him, including charges under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, and after over three years on the run—a period when he was speculated to be hiding everywhere, from the mountainous terrain in nearby Sikkim, to some jungle in Nepal, to a secret location in Delhi, and when his disappearance was total except for video messages he frequently put up online to attack Mamata Banerjee and her allies in the hills—he now lay in the backseat of this car, a mischievous smile upon his face. There were more surprises. The police present outside this building were not arresting him. And soon, at a hurriedly convened press conference, Gurung was announcing his unconditional support for Banerjee in the upcoming elections.

It was the strangest political development. In a season marked with desertions from the Trinamool Congress (TMC) to BJP, the one individual who had arguably most troubled Banerjee until BJP showed up in her backyard was now returning to her fold. Such a turnaround wasn’t going to be smooth. And it showed that day. The policemen banged the gates of the building, now controlled by Gurung’s rivals in GTA, and made several phone calls. But no one showed up to let Gurung in.

The hills of Darjeeling lie in a strategically important area. It is close to several international borders, from Bhutan and Nepal to Bangladesh and China. It also overlooks what is referred to as the ‘Chicken’s Neck’, that narrow stretch of Indian territory that connects the Northeast to the rest of India. Even several parts of the highway that leads to Sikkim fall within these hills, resulting invariably in Sikkim getting cut off every time there is a strike in this region. The people here make up a vast number of communities, caste groups and ethnicities, a majority of whom speak Nepali.

Historically, this area was never part of Bengal; it was leased by the British from the kingdom of Sikkim in 1835. This historical distinction coupled with what is viewed as neglect and discrimination from Kolkata had fuelled demands for a Gorkhaland state. But the most crucial ingredient in this mix has been the issue of identity. The suspicion that most inhabitants of this region are foreigners from across the Nepal border (even though their history here predates independent India) breeds a kind of insecurity that has been the driving force for the statehood demand. Several political parties, both local and national, have played with this issue for electoral gains for years.

Deadly violence has often erupted as a result. An armed agitation first took place, led by Subhash Ghising of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), in the late 1980s. It ended with the setting up of a semi-autonomous governing body known as the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC). And several strikes and movements have taken place after Gurung, with his Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), overthrew Ghising; most recently, the 104-day-long strike in 2017 that turned violent and crippled daily life in the hills.

Darjeeling now finds itself in a tussle between TMC and BJP. North Bengal accounts for 54 of Bengal’s 294 Assembly constituencies and eight of 42 Lok Sabha seats. BJP did remarkably well here in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, winning seven seats. To return to power, TMC will have to put up a big fight here. While the hills constitute three Assembly seats, the Gorkha community also lives in several other constituencies in north Bengal. “In around 15 to 17 seats, the Gorkha vote is important,” estimates Roshan Giri, a close confidante of Gurung. “We are going to have a say in who wins in these parts.”
As the voting kicks off in north Bengal, with the hills going to the polls on April 17th, the intense competition between BJP and TMC is rearranging political dynamics yet again, leading to new alliances and rivalries in the hills, with the issue of a new state, while not being explicitly mentioned, simmering underneath.

BIMAL GURUNG IS a liar. He is a betrayer,” says Keshav Raj Pokhrel, the Darjeeling candidate of the GJM faction that broke off from Gurung’s party. “He used to be a synonym for Gorkhaland in the past. Now people have seen through him. He is a synonym for violence now.”

The charge of betrayal has followed Gurung through this election season ever since his return. He has been at pains to explain his changed stance at every rally. According to him, he decided to break his alliance with BJP, a party which has won every parliamentary election here through his support since 2009, because he realised they are unreliable. Banerjee in comparison, he says, remains true to her words.

According to Giri, who was on the run along with Gurung, their party became disillusioned with BJP when the Union home ministry revised the agenda for the tripartite talks between the Centre, the West Bengal government, GTA and members of other local parties in 2020. The ministry had then called for a meeting to ‘discuss issues related to Gorkhaland’, and after Banerjee had objected to the term ‘Gorkhaland’, the ministry had revised the notification to ‘discuss issues related to the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration’. “We realised then that BJP just could not be trusted. They have done nothing for the hills,” Giri says.

According to him, their faction of the party is not giving up on the demand for a state. “We are clear. We will support whichever party backs the demand for a new state in 2024 (Lok Sabha elections),” he adds.

Among all current leaders, Gurung had been most closely linked with the demand for a state, until his latest turnaround. A stoutly built man with a forceful voice, he was seen as a tough pair of hands in his youth in Ghising’s GNLF. Fortuitously for him, when a Gorkha youth, Prashant Tamang, began to rise in the 2007 edition of the music reality TV show Indian Idol, becoming in the process a poster boy for the Gorkha identity movement, Gurung shrewdly rode on that momentum to overthrow an ageing Ghising in the hills and to become, with his new party GJM, the region’s new chief.

After Gurung and Banerjee came together to replace DGHC with GTA in 2011, Banerjee had declared she had resolved the Gorkhaland issue. But within a few years, the situation got worse.

Many view Gurung’s decision to ally with Banerjee now as one taken for his political survival. After his departure from the hills, Banerjee is widely believed to have engineered a split in GJM; the new and more amenable faction led by Gurung’s former lieutenants Binay Tamang and Anit Thapa has been put in charge of GTA. While the taint of being associated with TMC has hurt this new faction’s image, says a political analyst based in this region who requested anonymity, many of Gurung’s loyalists have been crossing over to this faction. Banerjee has also created and pumped in money to several development boards for various communities, even when Gurung was around, with the aim, it is claimed, to divide the Gorkha community and wean some of them away from the Gorkhaland demand. “With so many cases still pending against him, and this new GJM faction continuing, Gurung had to make peace with TMC and come back,” the analyst says.

After BJP’s dominance in north Bengal in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, this region has got a renewed focus under Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee and Prashant Kishor whose Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) is running the chief minister’s campaign. Several surveys conducted in this region show that Gurung still holds sway among Gorkha voters, according to the analyst, leading to the coming together of Gurung and TMC.

According to Upendra Pradhan, the editor-in-chief of the news portal The Darjeeling Chronicle, unlike elections in the hills in the past, no party can claim to be truly representative of the aspirations of this region. “Politics in the hills has always been black and white. There was always one good guy and a villain. Ghising was good and CPM (Communist Party of India-Marxist) was bad in the past. Or Gurung was good and Mamata was bad. Now everyone is seen as a bit compromised,” he says.

TMC’s decision to leave all three seats in the hills open for ‘friends’ without choosing between the two GJM factions has only increased the hostility between the two groups. Both factions can currently only contest as independent candidates on paper, although they can indicate which faction they represent because the case of who owns the party and its symbols is still undecided in court. Pokhrel, from the Tamang faction of GJM, claims their group isn’t disappointed that TMC is also supporting Gurung. “It’s politics. Such things happen. We have done good work in GTA and we are campaigning on this performance,” he says.

According to Raju Bista, the BJP Member of Parliament from Darjeeling who was supported by Gurung in 2019, the two factions are a front for TMC. “Both these factions are just the B-team and C-team of TMC. They will be remotely controlled by TMC,” he says. “People in the hills know that there is no hope or future with these two factions or their mother party TMC. Moreover, both factions have failed to run GTA and turned the semi-autonomous body into a hub of corruption. Darjeeling and Kalimpong hills are the only place in India where there is no grassroots democracy. Here panchayat elections have not been conducted since 2001. Elections to GTA have not been held since 2017 and it is being run by TMC minions. Darjeeling Municipality is being run by a bureaucrat and not elected representatives since June 2019. There is no democracy in the hills,” he goes on. “With BJP at the helm, Bengal is poised for transformation. Especially north Bengal and our hills, which have remained neglected for so long under TMC, CPM and Congress, are set to enter a new era under BJP.”

Harka Bahadur Chettri, a retired school teacher and a former member of GJM who started his own political outfit, Jan Andolan Party, believes there was a need for the two GJM factions to come together. “It is strange. Both are allied with TMC, but are at each other’s throat,” he says. “It is always important for local parties to represent a region. When a local party comes to power with a strong mandate, it is only then that the Centre is compelled to listen to them. The two factions should have come together, put up a united stand and got a strong mandate.”

“But this rivalry only benefits BJP,” he goes on. “You never know, BJP could win here.”

Assembly Elections 2021Bimal GurungDarjeelingGorkha Janmukti MorchaWest Bengal