Gorkhaland issue: Stakes high for BJP as political restructuring in Darjeeling hills puts onus on Centre to treat decades-old sore

Politics in the Darjeeling hills of West Bengal is in a churn. Even as the statehood issue seems to be reasserting its salience in the regional zeitgeist, especially since the outcome of the April-May parliamentary elections and the Assembly bypolls carried with it the potential of disrupting the status quo, a recent order of the local court declaring fugitive leader and chief architect of the Gorkhaland demand Bimal Gurung a “ proclaimed offender ”, has created fresh stirrings of restiveness.

What cannot be missed is the optics of the local police authorities — whom Gurung has been eluding for nearly two years — putting up posters of copies of the court order for public display in different parts of Darjeeling. The move is being construed by many as an attempt to take the wind out of the sails of his support base which might have reasons to feel buoyant in the post-election scenario.

That Gurung, even in absentia, had, along with newly-found allies, played a pivotal role in the electoral outcome in the hills with the BJP coming up trumps in the contest for both the parliamentary as well as the Darjeeling Assembly seats, cannot be repudiated even by his detractors. Of greater significance, perhaps, is that there can be little denying that the verdict — at least in the hills — was an affirmation of the popularity of the Gorkhaland cause.

How else does one explain the re-emergence of posters in parts of the hills in support of statehood signed by those who had opposed Gurung during the polls and belonging to that faction within the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) which had the support of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee? Or, is it a well-designed manoeuvre on their part to put the pressure on the BJP leadership to deliver on the issue, now that it had got the people’s mandate, knowing only too well that any such move would be inimical to the interests of the party in the rest of West Bengal?

Furthermore, fresh apprehensions following a statement of an outfit representing Assam’s Gorkhas on Sunday that names of some prominent members of the community were found in the recently published additional exclusion list of the National Register of Citizens only puts additional pressure on the BJP in the hills.

To be fair, the BJP has studiously avoided the statehood issue even though it has assured safeguarding “Gorkha identity” and promised a “permanent political” solution to the outstanding problems in the hills. But “Jai Gorkhaland” continues to be Gurung’s refrain echoed in the occasional audio or video clips emanating from his hideouts while he awaits the fate of his anticipatory bail plea at the Jalpaiguri Circuit Bench of the Calcutta High Court. He has been on the run ever since a raft of charges including those under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act was slapped on him in connection with the 104-day June-September statehood agitation which had rocked the hills two years ago around this time.

Even as politics in the region is seemingly at yet another crossroads, whole new constituencies are emerging for a fresh axis aligned to the BJP. And it constitutes Gurung’s faction within the GJM as well as the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), which has been at the vanguard of the statehood campaign in the mid-1980s.

The fortunes of Banerjee’s acolytes in what has been for nearly two years now a proxy contest between her and the BJP have suffered a beating, leaving them licking their wounds from the electoral debacle.

One fall-out of these developments is the tweaking of the rules of the game in the unfolding re-balancing of power. A case in point was the abrupt dissolution by the state government of the Darjeeling Municipality Board on 18 June and the appointment of an administrator for six months. The move came days after 17 out of the 30 municipal councillors switched to the BJP from the GJM’s Binay Tamang camp that enjoys the masked support of Banerjee. Critics of the move have been quick to condemn it as being prompted by political compulsions, neutralising the ascendancy of those opposed to the chief minister, even at the risk of widening the representative democracy deficit already evident in the hills.

Indeed, it was Tamang himself who had been catapulted to the echelons of power, having been hand-picked by Mamata to be chairman of the Board of Administrators of the quasi-autonomous Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) – a post he relinquished in order to contest the May local Assembly bypolls in which he was defeated.

Elections to the GTA, whose elected councillors including Gurung had resigned en-masse in June 2017 in support of the Gorkhaland agitation, are almost two-years overdue. Talk of them being held later this year is now up in the air, given the poor showing of those the chief minister had banked on in the hills to steer the dynamic away from the statehood issue. Such delaying tactics has had a deleterious effect on local self-governance in the region.

Against such a backdrop underlying the much-touted political calm in hills following the 2017 statehood agitation is a sense of unease coming from a perceptible shift in the balance of power. What has once again come to the fore is the degree to which local politics revolves around the Gorkhaland demand that continues to be viewed as a site providing for a sense of identity and autonomous agency for the local population.

For years, it might have functioned as a potent bargaining chip by its votaries in political negotiations with both the state and the Centre, but the statehood issue remains a festering sore in the collective consciousness, even though its red-lining by the state is widely acknowledged.

With the BJP having been given a clear mandate in the Darjeeling hills, the stakes for it in the region most certainly are now a notch higher, to say the least, considering that the party leads a government serving a second term at the Centre.