Gorkhaland blues

Cynical politics overwhelms serious economic issues

Considerable attention to the escalating unrest in Darjeeling has been focused on the cynical electoral machinations of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Trinamool Congress. These tricks have been maximised by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), the dominant unit among the myriad local power players in this three-decade-old movement demanding a separate state called Gorkhaland. In the process, all the actors are ignoring the mounting economic crisis that is likely to fan the conflict in lasting ways. The May-end diktat imposing Bengali in school curricula — the proximate reason for this current outburst of popular protest — has been so ambiguously modified as to scarcely allay embedded fears of forced acculturation. The upcoming elections to the Gorkha Territorial Administration (GTA) — the semi-autonomous administrative body set up in 2012 for the region — is undoubtedly adding fuel to this simmering ethnic fire. 

Ms Banerjee’s aggressive promotion of her party with its overt Bengali identity has had the effect of uniting the hopelessly divided Gorkha movement against the state government. Now, her extreme reaction to the current protests — slapping criminal cases against critics, including school principals, calling out the army and jamming cellphone services — raises the spectre of a Kashmir-style crisis and suggests that her options are narrowing. The irony is that the BJP, too, finds itself in a bind. Having presided over the creation of three new states — Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand — its strategy of drawing on GJM help to win the region’s sole Lok Sabha constituency in return for the promise of statehood has stymied its larger plan to bag West Bengal in 2019. Gorkhaland may resonate with a segment of the population that accounts for the majority in an area that covers one parliamentary seat and two Assembly constituencies, but it is unlikely to be popular among inhabitants in the plains of Bengal. Thus, even as prominent BJP spokespeople faithfully promised the formation of Gorkhaland, the issue was absent in the party’s 2014 election manifesto. And the party’s Bengal unit chief has roundly contradicted the Centre’s stance.

No solution to festering ethnic resentments can be found in these calculations. If, however, Ms Banerjee sincerely seeks a lasting solution, it can be found in resolving the brewing crisis in the two principal employers in the region. The output of the Darjeeling tea industry, which reportedly accounts for direct employment of over 50,000 people and many more indirectly, has been declining for the past few decades. Today, 80-odd gardens remain from some 180 at the time of Independence and production since 1991 has halved, owing to declining soil health, ageing tea bushes, high costs and the inability to get good prices. Tourism, the other major earner, is closely related to tea. It has been growing, but chronically poor infrastructure and regulation have meant that its opportunities have not sufficiently compensated for the decline of the tea industry. Ms Banerjee would do better to focus her attentions on tackling these issues rather than ramming through a cultural agenda that will benefit neither Bengal nor India.