Pre-election West Bengal, sometime in May 2011: “Darjeeling can be the Switzerland of India,” Mamata Banerjee declared. Her party, the Trinamool, was then in the Opposition. The ostensibly innocuous remark was really part of the scathing criticism she had unleashed against the Left Front government, then in power, which had been unable to come up with a solution to the decades-old problem in Darjeeling, the world-famous hill station in northern West Bengal, where the Gorkhas, a majority ethnic group with Nepalese ancestry, had been demanding a separate state.