By Satis Shroff
The 126 year old cobalt blue coloured narrow-gauge Darjeeling Himalayan Railway train chugged and snorted its way from Kurseong to Darjeeling via Ghoom along the serpentine route, against the silvery backdrop of the 8598m Kanchenjunga Range, past the tea gardens, shanty tea-shops and tin-roofed huts. And painted across white-washed hillside walls you could still read the words: “Jai Gorkha! Jai Gorkhaland! Jai Hind!”
Hind is an anachronistic, pre-partition name for India, namely Hindustan: the land of the Hindus. After independence India became a secular state, because it didn’t have much of a choice due to the Muslims, Jains, Sikhs and other religious communities who all started demanding their own rights under the constitution. And the 750,000 Gorkhas in the 70 odd tea-gardens of Darjeeling District (north Bengal) also made it clear that they didn’t have autonomous ambitions like: the Sikhs and their fight for Khalistan, and the Nagas with their Nagaland claims. The Gorkhas, who are ethnic Nepalese, only wanted a Gorkhaland within India’s framework and the recognition of Nepali, pardon me, Gorkhali, as one of the languages of the secular Indian Constitution.
After a 28-month fight which began in the spring of 1986, the GNLF (Gorkha National Liberation Front) submitted their arms, and pledged to join India’s mainstream.
Darjeeling (2123m), like in the hey-days of the British Raj, has remained a cool mountain resort for rich Indians and a few foreigners with its fresh air, British fashioned public schools, churches, Planter’s Club, Gymkhaha and the blue-domed Governor’s summer residence. The English schools bear names like: Victoria, Dow Hill, St.Joseph’s, Goethals, St.Helen’s, St.Paul’s…reminiscent of a nostalgic era of colonial British establishment. My parents had sent me to the Kindergarten at St. Helen’s, near Kurseong and I have pleasant memories of that convent school. The morning prayers, breakfast with porridge and toast-marmalade and the sumptuous Indian cuisine at lunch, because we were Hindus and didn’t prefer to eat at the English refectory, where they served beef.
Darjeeling is a dying Queen of the Hills, ignored and neglected after the British left the Raj. Its streets have become mean and violent, and you see the economic decline on the faces of the Nepalis living in the small towns and the sprawling tea gardens. The obsolete infrastructure is corroding. It never received the much-needed financial shot-in-the-arm (like Sikkim did from the Central Government) from the ego-centric, troubled and arrogant West Bengal government.
”The British sahibs have gone. And now we have Indian brown sahibs who try to be more English than the English”, said a Gorkha waiter at the Glenary’s near Chowrasta.
Today, a visitor to this restricted area in the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas will be witness to a sad, depressing scenario. The houses look dirty, rusty, poor, dilapidated and neglected. And the tea garden worker has a hard time trying to make ends meet. The wages are low. Even the mono-culture tea-production in Darjeeling went from 25,503 hectares in 1935 to 19,739 hectares in 1983. The Gorkhaland conflict reduced tea harvests by about 65%.The breakdown of the Soviet Union market has caused a total slump in tea-export. The price for Darjeeling tea was never so low, due to the heavy reliance on the Soviet consumers.
In the past Darjeeling has been neglected by the Central government in Delhi. And Sikkim received top priority. The administrative offices are all occupied by the Bengalis. The Newar community in the Darjeeling district has been pushed out by the clever Behari businessmen and shrewd Marwari money-lenders from the plains of India. The Gorkhalis attend the schools and colleges, but the only university of the district still lies in Siliguri in the plains, and they have to compete with the Bengalis, Beharis and the rest of 1000 million Indians for seats in the different faculties. And for jobs.
In the jungle of Indian bureaucracy, where corruption, nepotism and communal feeling is rampant, the common, honest Gorkha hillman cuts badly and gets a bad deal. No wonder the Gorkhas were enraged. Their very existence was being endangered. Their demands were apparently justified, for they only wanted to stay inside the Indian Union on better terms.
”The longstanding friction between the Nepalis and the Bengalis was always there”, said my school-friend Sushil Basnet, a burly Gorkha hillman with a public school background, over a cup of excellent Darjeeling tea at his home. Read the rest of this entry »
March 1: Gorkha Janmukti Morcha president Bimal Gurung today said his party would not allow Subash Ghisingh to enter Darjeeling till he stepped down as the hill council’s caretaker chairman even as Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee saw an end to the ongoing row.