Gorkhaland: Road to nowhere?

Darjeeling, Thimphu, Gangtok and Siliguri are a tight cluster on any map even in a large atlas. Because of the recent standoff with China over Doklam, the strategic importance of the area, the saliency of the Siliguri Corridor, cannot be overlooked. Is New Delhi taking an interest in the demand for a Gorkha homeland from this perspective?

Similar bandhs and marches have brought life to a grinding halt for the past three months – and continuing. The inordinate extension of the bandh is causing all the leaders of the Gorkha Movement Coordination Committee to miss heart beats with alarming frequency. West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who is always inclined to see agitations, however legitimate, as an affront to her, has slapped countless cases against leaders, including Bimal Gurung, President of GJM, the main political party.

Since all leaders in the coordination committee were pushed from the precipice into a total bandh by the GJM leader Bimal Gurung, they are privately cursing him but are unable to publicly say anything that would make their resolve for Gorkhaland look weaker. But some of them are keeping a sly eye on any escape route which they can sell to the agitating populace as an advance towards their cause.

New Delhi habitually goes into a freeze when confronted with something new, particularly where strategic concerns are involved. Gorkha/Nepali speaking people from Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan are already keeping New Delhi busy. Gorkhaland would be a new distraction. The straightforward political game the BJP can play to endear themselves to the Gorkhas is by opening up debate on something less than Gorkhaland – say, a Union Territory. Gorkhas would accept it. Darjeeling would come directly under New Delhi. Mamata would of course throw a ginger fit.

After a meeting of Gorkha leaders with Mamata on August 29, Vinay Tamang, Joint Secretary of the Morcha, and Anit Thapa, member of the Executive Committee, took the leaders and the agitators by surprise by asking them to end the bandh because positive but unidentifiable developments were expected by September 12. By that time the next round of meetings with Rajnath Singh and Mamata would have been held, they said. Well, September 12 too has come and gone and there is no sight of the bandh coming to an end.

Little wonder most of the Gorkha leaders, Bimal Gurung, Vinay Tamang, Anit Thapa, are on a rapidly declining popularity graph. The leader whose graph is up is R B Rai, twice MP, President of the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxist, Central Committee. He is universally accepted as politically savvy and an incorruptible and respected leader. He believes "tripartite talks" are a promising enough outcome to end the bandh.

Apparently, Rajnath Singh has dropped hints that New Delhi-Kolkata- Darjeeling tripartite talks on Gorkhaland are possible. But will Mamata agree?
Rai is cross with the amateurishness of Bimal Gurung for playing "the ultimate card of a total bandh without having a back-up plan. We should have started with Mohalla marches, struck work for a few hours, tested the political reaction in Kolkata and New Delhi, planned jail bharo andolans, gauged the plantation workers capacity to survive long strikes without wages. And so on."

There was no plan, he laments. It is a fruitless bandh but it can only be called off when people see some real promise, he says. So, until God comes riding a thunderbolt by way of a solution, Gorkha leaders are condemned to remain suspended on the last rung of a very high staircase leading to nowhere.

By Saeed Naqvi