In NDTV’s programme “We The People” on Sunday, one of the panelists, journalist Swaraj Thapa, Assistant Editor with The Indian Express, made a telling point. Even a person like union minister Jairam Ramesh, he recalled, had enquired whether he was from Nepal. “ It hurts”, he admitted and said ‘Gorkhas from Darjeeling Hills and elsewhere are repeatedly asked from which part of Nepal they have come’. Many of them are treated like aliens and illegal migrants and harassed and that identity crisis, Thapa articulated, was at the root of the demand for a separate Gorkhaland. Nobody in West Bengal, he added, would accept him as a ‘Bengali’.