Mamata’s Acid Test

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’.

Politicians like playing with fire and dousing it for short spells. They bought peace in the Darjeeling Hills in 1988 after several years of violent agitation that took several hundred lives. A Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) was set up as a token, and several departments were ‘transferred’ to the Council, which was expected to look after the local needs of the people in the three hill districts of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong. By a conservative estimate, a sum of Rupees six thousand crores was transferred to the DGHC between the years 1988 and 2008. But no election to the Council was held after 1999 and no audit was carried out for some reason.

Another period of instability and violence, during which the DGHC chairman Subhas Ghising, whose word was once law in the hills, was forced to take refuge in the plains, ended with a tripartite agreement — between the centre, the state and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, which had taken over the popular agitation— in July, 2011, and the formation of the Gorkhaland Territorial Authority (GTA). GJM leaders voiced their happiness over the fact that “Gorkhaland” had for the first time found a place in official government records. The GTA, they declared, was the semi-final. The final would be played out, they believed, as and when the centre decided to create Telangana, which had already been announced in 2009. A beaming Mamata Banerjee, who had taken over as chief minister in May, was asked about the significance of conceding ‘Gorkhaland’ for the first time. “ What’s in a name?” she had replied.

The West Bengal chief minister, who likes to describe herself as “rough and tough”, had an unpleasant time in the hills in January this year. At a function, where the GTA chief Bimal Gurung was also present, she made the mistake of repeating that there was no question of another division of Bengal. “Darjeeling Hamara Hissa Hai ( Darjeeling is a part of us)," she had declared, immediately provoking the audience to raise slogans in support of Gorkhaland. She had to beat a hasty retreat after vainly trying to tell the audience that it was a government function and it was not proper to raise political issues and slogans. But the GJM was quick to point out that it was she who had raised the political issue first.

Neither Mamata Banerjee nor the CPM are likely to agree to the formation of Gorkhaland. For both, division of the state is an emotive issue and giving in to the demand is fraught with a political price that neither is willing to pay. But while the mainstream political parties make common cause against the demand and while the centre is more than likely to let the state government deal with the demand with a heavy hand, the situation is unfortunately far more complex than what it appears from New Delhi or even from Kolkata.

People may not recall it immediately but the Sikkim Assembly had passed a somewhat unusual resolution while unanimously endorsing the demand for a separate Gorkhaland. Agitation on Darjeeling hills affect Sikkim as well since 50 of the 96 Kilometres of National Highway No. 31 A, which connects Sikkim to the rest of the country, pass through Kalimpong district. Prolonged bandhs and road blocks, and violent agitations, affect tourism in both Sikkim and the Darjeeling Hills, hitting the people where it hurts the most. A high-handed use of force may buy some breathing time and a temporary truce but is unlikely to bridge the gulf between the hills and the rest of West Bengal.

Mamata Banerjee, or her colleagues in her party, or for that matter the CPM leaders, may not like the question, but one suspects they do not have any answer either to how many Nepali speaking Gorkhas are working in the Writer’s Building, the state secretariat in Calcutta. Little or no effort has been made by either the Left Front government in the state or by Banerjee in the last two years to correct the anomaly. There is practically no presence of Gorkhas in state government offices in the plains. Little effort has been made to involve them in the affairs of the state. Nobody in West Bengal feels the need to learn Nepali as a third language. And while Mamata Banerjee-led government disburses a staggering 200 state awards every year, in all probability not a single Gorkha has been a recipient so far.

Similarly, the number of students from Darjeeling Hills in the state universities is unlikely to be significant. Nor the number of teachers. While the state government could have created posts of Nepali language teachers in schools in the rest of the state, the thought has clearly not occurred to people in the Writer’s Building.

The argument that the demand is not tenable because the three hill districts together has a population of just about two million, is a feeble one. Because there are small states like Goa, Puducherry, Mizoram, Nagaland and even Meghalaya, where the population does not exceed a few million. What is more, if landlocked Sikkim could serve its people well, there is no reason why Gorkhas would fail.

Will Gorkhaland weaken New Delhi’s strategic interests in the area, if the new state comes into being ? The answer should be in the negative, in view of the large number of Gorkhas who have served the Indian Army with distinction.

While the Gorkhaland proponents fall back on history and documents such as the memorandum submitted by the undivided Communist Party of India to the Constituent Assembly, in order to bolster their claim, the failure of West Bengal to integrate the hills as an integral part of the state should be a good enough reason to deal with the demand dispassionately, if not sympathetically.

The question is whether Mamata Banerjee and West Bengal’s elite and political class can rise to the occasion and take decisions wisely. They can certainly plead for another opportunity and more time. But they need to be honest in their intent and far more specific in their plans and proposals to cut any ice. The GJM leaders, on their part, will be more successful if they remain reasonable and patient. The temptation for them to launch a violent agitation is immense but if they manage to restrain their more militant supporters, they might just help their own cause and economy better.