Gorkha was a Nepalese principality whose king, Prithvi Narayan Shah

All areas of old Assam identified for autonomy are now separate States. GJM leader Bimal Gurung believes that that is also Darjeeling’s future.

Addressing a victory rally in Darjeeling last week, Mr Bimal Gurung of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha triumphantly compared the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration with the Bodoland Territorial Council. In time, he is confident that Gorkhaland will be a full-fledged state like Nagaland. That is his “ultimate goal” he declared while Ms Mamata Banerjee was assuring people that “there is nothing to fear, Bengal is not being divided”.

The nomenclature — Bodoland, Nagaland, Gorkhaland — implies what is not. Bodos and Nagas are sons of the soil. The Nepalese are not, not even when their leaders reinvent them as Gorkha which, too, is not an indigenous word. Gorkha was a Nepalese principality whose king, Prithvi Narayan Shah, conquered other fiefdoms to create the kingdom of Nepal in 1769.

Everyone comes from somewhere. Identity depends on when you came and how you see yourself. The original Gorkha League constitution called Nepal the “motherland” though the Nepalese never forgave Morarji Desai for dismissing their claim for inclusion in the Eighth Schedule because it was a foreign language.

Mr Subash Ghising, whose Gorkha National Liberation Front the GJM supplanted, was more honest about his people’s dilemma. The Gorkhaland of his dreams would, he felt, “solve the ‘identity problem’ of the nine million Gorkhas in the country”. Today, that “identity problem” prompts some unnecessarily vociferous posturing. Two points in particular are stressed on the basis of folk memory but in defiance of history and ethnography. First, that the Nepalese have always lived in Darjeeling. Second, though this is implied rather than explicitly stated, that no other community can claim that right.

The first point is easily disposed of. Darjeeling was part of the kingdom of Sikkim until around 1780 when Nepalese troops invaded and conquered much of the territory. Nepal might have annexed Darjeeling if the Chogyal of Sikkim had not appealed to the East India Company which invaded Nepal and forced the cession of a large chunk of territory under the Treaty of Sugauli signed in 1815. Darjeeling was restored to Sikkim and remained Sikkimese until 1835 when a mix of force and trickery persuaded the Chogyal to lease it to the East India Company for a sanatorium for British officers.

Sikkim never relinquished its title to the territory (for which the Company and then New Delhi paid an annual rent) and in 1947 submitted a 10-page memorandum drawn up by a Bengali jurist, Sardar DK Sen, to independent India’s new Government. It argued that Britain’s withdrawal automatically nullified the transfer and restored the status quo ante. It’s a different matter that the last thing today’s Sikkimese want is to be swamped by the Darjeeling Nepalese.

On the second point, Mr Dipak De, a member of Amnesty International, has sent out a number of petitions, arguing that Darjeeling being a Buddhist name and site, its transformation into Gorkhaland violates Articles 18(1) and 27 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights which guarantee “freedom of thought, conscience and religion” and the rights of “ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities”. He makes the valid point that other communities are also stake-holders in Darjeeling. The Lepchas were the original inhabitants; then came the Bhutiyas. Some hold that even the Magar, Tamang, Rai, Limbu, Tsong and Sherpa peoples are not Nepalese. Protests by the Greater Cooch Behar People’s Association, the Adivasi Vikash Parishad and other groups covered by the Integrated Tribal Development Programme support Mr De’s charge that even Darjeeling’s three hill sub-divisions are not demographically monolithic.

It seems that way because political instability and economic insecurity drove the Nepalese out of their country for generations to fan out across the Terai and Dooars and occupy large tracts of Sikkim and Bhutan, resulting in upheavals of one kind or another in both places. This migration gained additional impetus under official auspices after the British acquired Darjeeling. They imported the Nepalese to blast mountains, lay roads, build houses, plant tea and because “these hereditary enemies of Tibet” were the best guarantee of British Indian security, wrote the ethnographer and civil servant, HH Risley. “Hinduism will assuredly cast out Buddhism, and the praying-wheel of the lama will give place to the sacrificial implements of the Brahman. The land will follow the creed.”

Mr Ghising hoped to give a sense of rootedness to Nepalese immigrants whether strung out along the Terai, working in Mumbai and Chennai or wearing the uniform of India’s seven Gurkha regiments. He promised an equivalent of Israel’s Law of Return, ie, the right to a homeland in Darjeeling even to those who had never set foot in the place.

Mindful of the Nepalese contribution to the country, especially to its military, and given the votes at stake, Indian politicians shied away from taking a stand. The delay until 1992 in including Nepalese in the Constitution’s Eighth Schedule exposed their ambivalence. Though Jyoti Basu dismissed the GNLF as “divisive, anti-people, anti-national and anti-state”, he could hardly forget that the undivided CPI sent a memorandum to the Constituent Assembly asking that “the three contiguous areas of Darjeeling district, southern Sikkim and Nepal be formed into one single zone to be called ‘Gorkhastan’.”

Carefully choosing its words, the BJP, whose Mr Jaswant Singh still represents Darjeeling in the Lok Sabha, promised to “sympathetically examine and appropriately consider the long pending demands of the Gorkhas, the Adivasis and other people of Darjeeling district and Dooars region”. The Congress lurches from one ad hoc position to another, and Trinamool Congress appears to be doing the same.

They have forgotten Rajiv Gandhi’s warning on the eve of another acclaimed agreement, “Don’t the leaders of the CPI(M) know that regional autonomy is the stepping stone to another State?” He did not need to add that all the areas of the old Assam State identified for autonomy under the Constitution’s Sixth Schedule are separate States.

Mr Gurung may be justified in believing that that is also Darjeeling’s future. But one wonders whether in their eagerness to claim a major triumph for Trinamool in its first few weeks in office, either Ms Banerjee or Mr Palaniappan Chidambaram thought things through before the deed was done. Or is it precisely because they are so acutely aware of the logical consequences of their action that the principals did not commit themselves by putting pen to paper? Curiously, the signatories were junior non-political representatives.

FROM THE PIONEER

BY SUNANDA K DATTA-RAY