New Dawn In Darjeeling: Recent Developments Hint At Flourishing Of Multi-party Politics In The Hills

For decades, thousands of tourists to Dar­jeeling have woken up in the wee hours to hurriedly reach the sunrise viewpoint at nearby Tiger Hill and witness the spectacle of the morning sun paint rainbow colours on the fabled Kanchenjunga, the wor­ld’s third-highest peak. But for years, the peo­ple of Darjeeling have been kept waiting for a new dawn in local politics. Caught between a desire for planned development, ethnic pre­s­tige, the demand for statehood and the alleged authoritarianism of the hilly region’s political forces, the ‘Queen of the Hills’ has been a deeply-troubled land for years.

But recent developments indicate that a new dawn might not be far away. Two new political parties, launched less than a year ago, have tak­en effective control of Darjeeling’s political administration. Observers feel it will lead to a pha­­se of Calcutta-Darjeeling cooperation and flourishing of multi-party politics in the hills.

What is more significant is that neither of these two parties has an aggressive pitch for Gorkhaland statehood, which is a departure from the general trend in these hills, where parties pushing hard for a separate state have enjoyed popular support since the mid-1980s.  

The first political surprise came from the Hamro Party (HP), which was laun­c­hed in November last year. In March, they captured the Darjeeling municipality by winning 18 of the total 32 seats. Nine seats went to the Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha (BGPM)­—formed in September last year—which became the main opposition.  

Of the remaining five seats, three went to Bim­al Gurung’s Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). In 2011, it had won all 32 seats uncont­ested, and returned to power in 2017 with 31 of 32 in a contest with the Trinamool Congress (TMC). This time, though, the GJM contested in alliance with the TMC, which won the two remaining seats. The BJP-Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) alliance, which won the Darjeeling and Kurseong assembly seats a year ago, drew a blank.

Then, in June, as the BJP, GNLF and GJM boycotted the semi-autonomous Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA)’s election on multiple grounds, the BGPM swept the polls, bagging 27 out of 45 seats, while Hamro Party came second, bagging eight seats. The TMC won five. Independents, allegedly backed by those who officially boycotted the elections, won another five seats.  

The GTA elections were more important than the civic polls, as apart from some areas of Sili­g­uri sub-division, the whole of Kalimpong dist­r­ict and the Darjeeling and Kurseong sub­-­div­isions of Darjeeling district come under it.    

In a matter of three months, two new political parties promising to usher in development through cooperation with the state governm­ent are at the helm of affairs in the hills, which have belonged to political dictators for nearly three decades—two decades of the GNLF’s Sub­ash Ghising, followed by a decade of Bimal Gurung.  

“The BJP-GNLF-GJM alliance swept the 2019 Lok Sabha and assembly by-elections by promising a permanent political solution for Darjeeling. This is the domain of the Union government, which has to take necessary steps. But they have done nothing since then. As long as the Union government takes no step towa­rds what they called a permanent political sol­u­tion, the two new parties—BGPM and HP­—­are going to rule the hills,” said Manoj Bogati, a Nepali language poet and journalist based in Kalimpong.  

The BJP has never defined “permanent pol­i­ti­c­al solution” as “statehood” because supporting the bif­urcation of West Bengal could harm their pro­s­pects in the rest of the state. But it was exp­ected to offer greater autonomy than what is currently enjoyed under the GTA. No wonder then that in October 2020, GJM’s Gurung dum­ped the BJP, accusing it of doing nothing to keep their promise, and joined hands with the TMC.  

“There is no gain in running into a conflict with the state government. We have to make the local development needs our focus. We have had enough of politics of sentiment. Now, it’s time for pragmatic politics,” BGPM head Anit Thapa said after the GTA election victory. He was sworn in as the GTA chief executive on Tuesday at an event attended by Chief Mini­s­ter Mamata Banerjee, who had also congratulated him over the phone soon after the results were out.  

Hamro Party chief Ajoy Edwards has made it clear that statehood is their long-term goal, but it is to be pursued only through peaceful means and never through strikes and violence—modes preferred by the GNLF and the GJM, respectively. In both the Darjeeling municipal elections and the GTA polls, HP’s campaign focused on basic needs—health, water and tourism.  

A complex political history

The late Subash Ghising-led GNLF ruled the Dar­jeeling hills and its neighbourhood with an iron hand since the mid-1980s. Ghising ran the semi-autonomous Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Cou­n­cil (DGHC), which was formed in 1988 after the GNLF led a violent movement for a sep­ar­ate state of Gorkhaland, until Bimal Gurung’s rebellion in 2007, accusing his guru Ghising of having struck a compromise with the state government.  

Gurung’s rebellion for statehood led to the formation of the GJM, which replaced the GNLF as the hills’ principal—and in effect, sole—political force. However, it agreed to a compromise in 2011, soon after the TMC topp­led the 34-year-old Left Front regime. This led to the formation of the GTA, with greater auto­nomy than what the DGHC enjoyed. The GTA was formed as a result of a tripartite agreement between the state government, the Centre and the GJM. With Gurung’s support, the BJP easily won the Darjeeling Lok Sabha in 2009 and 2014. In 2017, Gurung’s GJM, after running the GTA for almost the entire tenure of five years, denounced it as lacking autonomy and laun­c­hed a violent movement demanding stateh­ood, leading to a 105-day-long bandh in the hills.  

The bandh led to a split in the GJM, with Anit Thapa and Binoy Tamang launching a rival fact­ion ready to cooperate with the state governm­ent to restore peace and development. This wea­­kened the GJM and allowed the GNLF, now led by Subash’s son Man Ghising, to make a comeback.  

In 2019, the BJP swept the Darjeeling Lok Sabha polls and Darjeeling Assembly by-election, thanks to the support from Gur­ung and GNLF and other smaller hill parties. The Thapa-Tamang faction, which joined hands with the TMC, was routed. This happened along expected lines of voting in the hills, where people tend to vote against the party ruling in Calcutta.  

However, ahead of the 2021 assembly election, Gurung—who had been underground since 2017 after being booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act—came out of hiding in October 2020 and sided with the TMC. The assembly election gave first hints of a departure from the previous trend of one-party dominance—former Gurung-faction spokesperson B.P. Bajgain, who joined the BJP ahe­ad of the election, won from Kurse­ong; GNLF’s Neeraj Zimba retained Darjeeling on a BJP ticket; and the Thapa-Tamang faction’s Ruden Lepcha won from Kalimpong.  

All this political churning started taking con­crete shape in the second half of 2021. After Binoy Tamang left the Thapa-Tamang faction, Thapa launched the BGPM in September. Tam­ang joined TMC thereafter. In November, GNLF leader Ajoy Edwards, owner of the iconic restaurant Glenary’s, launched the Hamro Party.  

The Darjeeling municipal election in March was the first local election held in the hills since the 2017 statehood agitation. The successful conduct of the civic polls encouraged the government to conduct the GTA elections that were due since 2017. The statehood agitation had broken out just before the completion of the GTA’s first tenure. Now, even though the GNLF moved the Calcutta high court seeking to stop the government from conducting the GTA elections—calling the body unconstitutional—the court gave the government the go-ahead for the polls.   

The GNLF and the BJP boycotted the elections, refusing to give legitimacy to the body. Gurung boycotted it too, as he was seeking the elections to be deferred. The elections had a low 56 per cent turnout, but a record number of 277 candidates contested for 45 seats, with as many as 171 independents in the fray. It was a rare scene for elections in the hills.  

According to Kurseong resident Chepal Sherpa, a former scholar at New Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), the 2022 GTA elections were different in many respects. “Earlier, elections under GNLF and GJM regimes used to be one-party affairs. This time, people were free to vote for anyone, and there were many choices, with an unprecedented number of independent candidates in the fray,” he says.   

In his observation, this election also showed how the BJP and the Centre had let the people down by not fulfilling their promise of a permanent political solution. “The results show that for the time being, people have settled for the GTA’s development plank, as lofty promises of a permanent political solution seem to offer no concrete results,” Sherpa says.  

Now, the state government is expected to oversee elections for two other hill municipalities—Kalimpong and Kurseong—whose terms are coming to an end soon.  

Still more twists may be awaiting the hills, as yet another party is all set to be launched, and promises to press for statehood through non-violent means. It is being initiated by Mahe­n­dra P. Lama, a development economist and professor of international relations at JNU. He is originally from Darjeeling and was the founding vice-­cha­n­cellor of Sikkim University. Lama had contes­ted the 2014 Lok Sabha election as an inde­pe­ndent and secured 55,000 or 5 per cent of the votes and later joined the Jan Andolan Party, a currently-­inactive breakaway faction of the GJM.  

“We don’t see Gorkhaland as a state belonging solely to the Gorkhas, a mistake committed by earlier movements that pitched it as a land for Gorkhas alone. It will belong to the Bengalis, Mar­waris and whoever else lives in these parts. In our understanding, statehood is more of a question of geography than ethnicity. Statehood will help Darjeeling prosper, and a prosperous neighbour would also benefit West Bengal,” Lama, who also serves as Sikkim’s chief economic advisor, tells Outlook.     

Political vacuums have repeatedly sprung surprises in these hills. Whether the present state of peace is just another lull before a new storm remains to be seen.

(This appeared in the print edition as "Sunrise Over Tiger Hill")

Snigdhendu Bhattacharya in Kolkata