#WestBengal: Is it game over for the BJP in Darjeeling?

As the narrow and winding road begins its climb up the Lesser Himalayas towards Darjeeling, with the plains of North Bengal visible through the shimmering haze far below, a succession of posters, banners and flags greets travellers.

Most of them bear the name and, often, the smiling image of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who drove up this road in January to a warm welcome from the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). It was among the more remarkable turnarounds in Indian politics since 2014; in June 2017, soon after Banerjee’s government decided to make teaching the Bengali language compulsory in schools in the state, the hills had erupted in protest against her government, with the GJM leading the charge.

Much water has flowed down the Teesta since then. The GJM, the dominant political grouping of the Gorkhas in and around Darjeeling, now has a new leader in Binay Tamang.

Posters of Mamata Banerjee en route to Darjeeling.

The former chief of the GJM, Bimal Gurung, is officially absconding. He went underground to evade arrest by the state police for crimes including murder and is now rumoured to be somewhere in Delhi or Nepal. The only Lok Sabha seat that the Bharatiya Janata Party won from West Bengal in the 2009 polls was Darjeeling, which Jaswant Singh won with support from the GJM under Gurung.

In 2014, again, it was Gurung who helped the BJP’s SS Ahluwalia, a turbaned Sikh from Asansol in West Bengal, win the seat. With Gurung out of the scene—and his successor now officially an ally of Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress—the BJP’s prospects in Darjeeling suffered a severe blow. The party has been backing hectic efforts to try and arrange a “safe passage” for Gurung. A plea to allow him to return and campaign without risk of arrest was heard in the Supreme Court on March 14, but the attempt was unsuccessful.

“We have voted and supported BJP since 2009. In 2009, Jaswant Singh won this constituency by more than 2 lakh votes margin. In 2014, SS Ahluwalia won by more than 1.76 lakh margin. After 10 years they have done nothing for the people of the hills. Not only Gorkhas but all communities living here are disappointed,” says new GJM chief and current Gorkhaland Territorial Administration chairman Binay Tamang.

“Narendra Modi in 2014 during the polls visited the foothills of Darjeeling and promised so many things. Again in 2016 when Assembly polls for West Bengal were being held, Mr Modi came. He addressed meetings and promised tribal status to 11 communities of Gorkhas. None of these promises was fulfilled during his tenure. The resentment is very high because of unkept promises,” says Tamang.

To add to this welter of resentments, on February 28, Darjeeling MP Ahluwalia said many of those demanding a “bhumiputra” or “son of the soil” to represent the constituency in Parliament were themselves of Nepali origin.

To call an Indian speaker of the Nepali language a Nepali citizen is considered a grave insult in the hills. Within 48 hours, Ahluwalia’s effigies were making a crackling bonfire in the Darjeeling cold. Ahluwalia attempted a clarification, issuing a statement that his comment was aimed only at only two individuals, of whom one’s father had served in the British Army using Nepal citizenship. It was clear who he was aiming at: Binay Tamang’s father served in the British Army. He was quick to take offence. “By questioning my father’s identity and citizenship, the MP has questioned every Gorkha’s identity,” he said.

Identity is the principal issue for the Gorkhas at present, says Tamang. He has worked out an alliance with TMC and attended Banerjee’s big Opposition rally at Kolkata’s Brigade Ground as well as the Opposition rally in Jantar Mantar. His faction of the GJM, and the TMC, have announced the candidature of GJM MLA from Darjeeling, Amar Singh Rai, as their Lok Sabha candidate on a Trinamool ticket—a symbol not exactly popular among the Gorkhas.

A Digital India signboard bearing the photograph of BJP MP SS Ahluwalia.

Tamang says the BJP is wiped out of the hills. “Even if Mr Modi comes and contests here, he will lose,” he says. The BJP, aware of Ahluwalia’s unpopularity and the “bhumiputra” demand, have replaced him with a 33-year old Gorkha businessman from Manipur, Raju Singh Bista. His candidature is being backed by the Bimal Gurung faction of the GJM, and by an organisation that until days ago was a bitter rival of GJM and Gurung.

The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha is the new kid on the block. It rapidly rose to prominence in 2007 on the back of Bimal Gurung’s support for fan clubs of singer Prashant Tamang who was contesting in the television reality show Indian Idol. That show became quite the rage in places such as Darjeeling. Gurung fanned the fan clubs and then leveraged them to launch the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha in opposition to the organisation that started the Gorkhaland agitation in 1986—Subhash Ghising’s Gorkha National Liberation Front. He overthrew Ghising and forced him out of Darjeeling.

After resigning from his chairmanship of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council in March 2008, Ghising went into political hibernation. He eventually died in Delhi in 2015.

The GNLF, however, is still around. It is now led by Subhash Ghising’s son Mann. GNLF Steering Committee member Ajoy Edwards says the party is regaining ground. He was deeply critical of Ahluwalia and the BJP when this correspondent met him before the alliance was announced.

BJP leaders have kept clear of Darjeeling since October 2017 when shortly after the violent agitation of 104 days that started with protests against the West Bengal government’s decision to make Bengali compulsory in the state—the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) areas were exempted even before the protests began—BJP’s Bengal state president Dilip Ghosh arrived there. His cronies were quite literally kicked out of the town all the way down its main thoroughfare and Ghosh himself caught a few blows.

With Bimal Gurung absconding to evade arrest, and the GJM’s new leadership switching to support TMC, it looked like game over for BJP.

“The whole of Darjeeling Hills was in turmoil for 104 days. The man who started it disappeared within the first few days. He abandoned the people to safeguard himself. He started something he could not finish,” says GNLF’sEdwards of Gurung. Gurung’s was a reign of terror, he says, anyone supporting the GNLF would have their home ransacked, suffer social boycott, and be prevented even from buying essentials from shops.

This repression forced the GNLF to tie up with Mamata Banerjee and the TMC. The alliance, according to Edwards, took shape during the 2014 polls when footballer Bhaichung Bhutia stood as the TMC candidate from Darjeeling. The GNLF’s votes in the hills helped the TMC, and the TMC’s position as the ruling party in West Bengal helped the GNLF.

The GNLF’s ties with the TMC came unstuck after peace returned to the hills following the 2017 turmoil. “We requested, since no elections are being held for GTA, please put a non-political person there, put the District Magistrate or someone in charge. They did not pay heed. They threw in their lot with Binay and Anik in GJM,” says Edwards. The CM wanted GJM and GNLF to work together, he says, but that did not work out. The GNLF decided to part ways with TMC.

When attempts at putting up a consensus candidate of all non-BJP, non-TMC parties, small and big, in the hills for the forthcoming LS polls fell through in mid-March, the GNLF did something quite unexpected. It joined hands with its old rival, the Gurung faction of the GJM, and declared support for the BJP, with Gorkhaland being the ostensible excuse. What Banerjee had been unable to achieve—an alliance between the GJM and the GNLF—was somehow managed by the BJP which brought in Raju Bista as candidate.

The sudden switch and the selection of candidate has not gone down well with everyone in either the Gurung faction of GJM or the GNLF. Swaraj Thapa, a key leader of the GJM’s Gurung faction, quit the organisation in protest against Bista’s candidature. In his resignation letter posted on Facebook, Thapa wrote: “I am tendering my resignation from all posts as well as the primary membership of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha. I am doing so in strong protest against the idea of foisting a candidate for the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat who is a rank outsider, has little political background and absolutely no knowledge or interest about the issues regarding Darjeeling, including its core issue of Gorkhaland”.

While Bista is seen as an outsider, the Gorkhaland sentiment is one that works against Tamang too. “Today Binay Tamang is a state government employee, when CM comes he is waving a flag saying ‘welcome, welcome’. That does not fit with our ideology,” GNLF’s Edwards had said. “People are not happy. There is no self-governance. It’s all right for the CM to come and announce universities and roads … but where’s the political respect? It’s as if Bimal Gurung lost, so all the people lost.” Full statehood may not be possible, admits Edwards, but there is resentment that “GTA is being run by the Bengal government right now”.

Binay and Anik Thapa, the current GJM general secretary, were part of the earlier regime under Gurung, said Edwards. “They are turncoats and are now with the government, but the people have suffered under their hands. People are angry with them. Binay was the one who started the 104-day strike, then turned and joined hands with the state government. Except for people who are working with them or getting contracts from them, no one else will vote for them.”

The search for a consensus candidate of the non-BJP, non-TMC opposition was meant to include the Congress and CPI(M), who were also in discussions for a broader alliance in West Bengal. That didn’t materialise. Apart from the two big parties, there were also several smaller parties involved, of which the Jan Andolan Party led by former MLA Harka Bahadur Chhetri was a significant one.

There is also an old Leftist presence in Darjeeling constituency, which in the hills is mainly represented by the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists whose chairman is veteran communist leader and former MP Ratna Bahadur Rai, who announced his candidature before withdrawing. The CPI(M) became extremely unpopular in the hills during the years of the Gorkhaland agitation when it was in power in Kolkata, but its candidate for the seat, Saman Pathak—a tea labour union leader and son of former Darjeeling MP Anand Pathak—had polled 1.67 lakh votes when he contested in 2014. He will be in the running again.

From the hills to the foothills

Darjeeling constituency is not just the hills. There’s also the Darjeeling foothills, known as the Darjeeling Terai, and the Dooars, an adjoining plains area that is the gateway to the mountains. The biggest city in North Bengal, Siliguri, a city of 7 lakh people, is down there. It is a bustling town with large populations of people from the neighbouring hills and plains. Its multicultural character includes Nepali speakers from the hills, Bengalis from the plains, and Biharis from the neighbouring state. There are also Rajbongshis, who have their own statehood movement for a Kamtapur state that would include parts of North Bengal and adjoining Assam.

The Kamtapuri aspiration for statehood, like the Gorkha one, typically neglects the largest group in the tea estates that surround Siliguri: the Adivasis. These people, from tribes known as tea tribes in Assam, are plains tribals from Bengal itself and from Jharkhand and parts of Central India who were brought in in large numbers by the British as tea garden labour. It was among these people that the sparks of revolution were lit in 1967 in a village called Naxalbari, 22 km from Siliguri city, by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, the founders of what came to be popularly termed Naxalism.

Naxalbari today is a village in the midst of becoming a town. A spiffy new four-lane highway, the Asian Highway 2, leads out of Siliguri towards it. The village lies just off the highway. It is the usual mass of chaotic concrete constructions typical of most Indian small towns. The most visible political presence here too is of the Trinamool Congress, but just past the railway station on the outskirts of the village is a small single-storeyed building with a board that bears images of former prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, current prime minister Narendra Modi, and Bharatiya Jan Sangh founder Shyama Prasad Mukherjee, among others. The board, in Bengali, announces itself as the Naxalbari, Darjeeling office of the Bharatiya Janata Party.

The most visible political presence in Naxalbari is of the Trinamool Congress.

Dilip Barai, a small, mild-mannered fertiliser merchant with a murder case, who is the party’s Naxalbari block president, is the old-timer in the local BJP. “I joined during Atalji’s time in 1999,” he says. He was one of the first two panchayat members from the party in the area. “Those were difficult times for us. The CPI(M) used to treat us like untouchables. My shop is next to the CPI(M) party office, I used to have good relations with many comrades, but they stopped talking to me after I joined BJP”.

The BJP has grown manifold since then, Barai says. Amit Shah, Narendra Modi and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat have all visited nearby areas since 2016, and Bhagwat even stayed for three days. The BJP and Sangh push into the area have drawn the ire of the TMC, according to Barai. He alleges that he was implicated in a false case of murder, for the death of his own brother who died in hospital in 2017 after being ill since 2011. Barai went into hiding and returned to Naxalbari only after securing bail six months later.

Barai’s father moved to Naxalbari from Dhaka district in 1964. He says it was becoming unsafe for Hindus in what was then East Pakistan and so his father decided to move. Barai himself was a Congress party worker in his youth. “A local Congress leader used to come to my shop drunk every evening and say no one can defeat me from here,” he says. After months of this, Barai decided to quit the Congress and stand against the man. He considered standing as an independent; however, no one had managed to open an account for the BJP in Naxalbari until then, and the party was rising nationally. Barai decided to go to the BJP. Local RSS workers soon indoctrinated him into the party’s ideology.

He says there’s great support for the party in the area, especially after the IAF airstrikes in Pakistan. “When I walk in the street now, people who did not talk to me earlier now call out and say, ‘we are with you’.” Even people from rival parties openly appreciate the move, he says, and only the use of the local police prevents people from openly supporting BJP. “The local thanadar acts like the Trinamool block president,”  says Barai. He himself is not entirely lacking in friends from security agencies; he called the local Intelligence Bureau man to drop by and meet this correspondent.

Despite Barai’s claims, the main party locally in the Naxalbari area, going by existing MLA, is still the Congress. The sitting MLA for the Matigara-Naxalbari Assembly seat is Sankar Malakar of the Congress, who will be contesting for the Lok Sabha seat this time. There are seven Assembly segments in Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency. With the votes in the three Assembly segments in the hills likely to be divided between Gorkha candidates backed by the TMC and BJP, as well as Jan Andolan Party leader Harka Bahadur Chhetri who is contesting as an independent, the four assembly segments in the plains become vital.

In 2014, the BJP was able to secure the bulk of votes in these segments. Abhijit Majumdar, Darjeeling District Committee Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation—which is one of the two principal inheritors of the legacy of Naxalbari—pointed out that Ahluwalia was number one in three out of four assembly constituencies in the plains that are part of the Darjeeling constituency. Only one, Chopra, which has a large Muslim population, did not vote BJP in 2014, said Mazumdar.

In a dispassionate and professorial analysis, Majumdar, who teaches English in Siliguri College, says: “Everyone is saying the same thing, we need a bhumiputra, outsiders have betrayed us”. However, he reckons that Bimal Gurung is still seen as the only leader who did not capitulate. Majumdar thinks that with his support the BJP, despite everything, still has a chance of winning Darjeeling once again.

Siliguri is the last big municipal corporation in Bengal that is still ruled by the Left. There is also some class politics visible in the tea gardens. Elsewhere, identity politics is predominant, says Majumdar. With the CPRM announcing the withdrawal of former MP R.B.Rai’s candidature, the Left vote is saved from a split, which should benefit the CPI(M)’s Pathak.

In ethnic terms, the tea garden workers are predominantly from the Adivasi community. The principal organisation of the Adivasis in the area, the Adivasi Vikas Parishad led by Birsa Tirkey, supported the TMC in the 2018 panchayat polls. One important Adivasi leader from the general area, John Barla, also associated with the Adivasi Vikas Parishad, is however the BJP’s candidate from the nearby Alipurduar seat.

In the predominantly Adivasi village of Hatighisa near Naxalbari, just off Asian Highway 2, signs of the many strands of change in life and in politics that are running through this complex region are visible. Digital India signboards with the photo of Ahluwalia were hanging from trees next to the narrow village road that runs past a church and a madrasa en route to the house of Kanu Sanyal, one of the founders of the Naxal movement, only a few hundred metres away. The simple bamboo and mud hut where he lived and died is now under renovation. Old and despairing, Sanyal committed suicide in this hut in 2010.

Kanu Sanyal’s hut in Hatighisa.

The three Darjeeling hills assembly segments traditionally dominate the Lok Sabha constituency despite being outnumbered by the four plains constituencies owing to block voting in the hills. That is unlikely to happen this time. The plains votes tend to be split; in 2014, the BJP, TMC and CPI(M) all picked up large numbers of votes from three of the four plains assembly segments. The sole exception was Chopra Assembly segment which has a largely Muslim population. There, according to Election Commission data, the bulk of votes were split almost equally between the Trinamool and the CPI(M) with BJP pulling in at a distant third.

In a close and fluid contest where politics of religion, ethnicity and class will all collide with the hard realities of money and muscle power, every one of the major players in the fray is in with a chance.

The poll story this election season in Darjeeling has already seen more twists and turns than the winding road that runs up the hill from Siliguri. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is scheduled to hold a rally in Siliguri today. Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee will be ascending to Darjeeling again on April 10.

As the story heads towards its climax, there could be more twists in the tale yet.