Union Home Minister Amit Shah is generally considered to be a go-getter. It was then surprising when he didn’t turn up for an election rally in Darjeeling in support of party candidate Raju Bista, also the incumbent member of Parliament from the constituency.
This was on April 21, only two days after the first phase of voting in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections. A drop in turnout in the opener has already reportedly left creased brows at the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The low turnout could also have spoiled Shah’s meeting, had he managed to make it, at the Lebong race course in the hill station. Local politicians have claimed that nearly half the chairs at the venue were empty.
Shah chose to address the gathering via Bista’s mobile phone, reported the Kolkata-based ‘Telegraph’ daily. Officially, Shah couldn’t make it due to “inclement weather” preventing a chopper ride from nearby Siliguri. However, the report pointed out that the weather was fine, more or less.
While the no-show dampened the spirits of BJP workers, political opponents were quick to allege that Shah’s party has hardly worked on any of its previous promises to voters in the region. Voters who have backed the party for a decade and a half now.
If there is one constituency in West Bengal that has tended to vote differently than the 41 others in the state, it is Darjeeling. Bucking state-wide political trends has become the trend for this northernmost seat of Bengal.
Darjeeling, the famed Queen of Hills, has been known for its tea, tourism, and travails over demands for a separate state. These issues have governed politics there since the mid-1980s and helped give rise to a host of local political outfits whose support has become crucial for mainstream parties looking to score a win.
Such support helped the BJP turn the constituency into its only pocket borough in the country’s fourth-most populous state, winning from there for the last three terms. This time, in a first, it has repeated its incumbent candidate.
Bista is a Nepali-speaking politician and businessman from Manipur who won by a landslide margin of over four lakh votes in 2019. He remains the strongest candidate at the hustings, at least on paper. But a section of political observers expect a keener contest in the offing.
The Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat comprises seven Assembly constituencies: Kalimpong, Darjeeling, Kurseong, Matigara-Naxalbari (reserved for Scheduled Caste candidates), Siliguri, Phansidewa (reserved for Scheduled Tribes), and Chopra.
All but one of these seats are from the erstwhile Darjeeling district (with Kalimpong being carved off as a separate district in 2017) while Chopra is in Uttar Dinajpur. Only the first three of the seven Vidhan Sabha seats are in the hills, but they have often been the deciding bloc, more so in the recent past, tied together by a common pro-Gorkhaland sentiment.
This time, however, ‘Gorkhaland’ seems to be more relevant in its absence than presence in the agenda of the chief contestants. Even the BJP has skipped it over in its manifesto despite committing to “work towards finding a permanent political solution to the issue of Darjeeling Hills, Siliguri Terai and Dooars region” in its 2019 manifesto.
Back then, it had also promised to “recognise the 11 left out Indian Gorkha sub-tribes as Schedule Tribes”. Predictably, the Trinamool Congress has called the saffron party out on this and promised in its 2024 manifesto that “the 11 Gorkha Sub-Communities will be granted ST status.”
Eventually, Amit Shah, in his telephonic speech, had to vow commitment towards the issue. But that has not put the issue to rest. On Wednesday, as campaigning drew to a close, ‘Cord Bharat’, a hill-based platform released a video highlighting how ‘Gorkhaland’ has disappeared from the electoral discourse. “The video has become quite popular in less than a day,” S Deep (name changed on request) a professor said.
The demand for a separate state for the Nepali-speaking people in West Bengal is not new anymore. Its proponents cite a 1907 memorandum submitted to the British Raj by a formation called the Hillmen’s Association as the first sign of this aspiration.
It was, however, in the mid-1980s, when the issue really became a political hot potato stewarded by Subhash Ghising’s Gorkha National Liberation Front. A violent agitation, which claimed over a thousand lives, culminated in the formation of the semi autonomous Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council in 1988. Separatism gained traction again under Bimal Gurung who formed the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha in 2007.
Gurung allied with the BJP and in 2009 Jaswant Singh, from faraway Rajasthan, won the seat for the BJP. Before that, the saffron party’s electoral success in the state was restricted to a few wins in Dumdum and Krishnanagar constituencies during the reign of Atal Bihari Vajpayee.
After Mamata Banerjee replaced the Left Front in Bengal in 2011, another semi-autonomous body, the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA), was formed which has continued to govern the hill tracts. GJM won seats in the first GTA polls of 2012 but in 2017 they resigned alleging that the instrument had failed. The state government then reconstituted the board with rebel GJM leader Binoy Tamang at the helm followed by Anit Thapa.
The second election to GTA was held only in 2022. Before that the BJP had two of the three hill seats in the Assembly elections a year before, with Kalimpong going to Thapa’s Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha (BGPM). In the GTA polls, however, BGPM emerged winner with newly formed Hamro Party coming a distant second.
In the current elections, BGPM is backing Trinamool Congress candidate Gopal Lama, a former administrator who is widely known in Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts. Hamro Party, with considerable support in the Darjeeling urban areas, has offered support to Munish Tamang of Congress who is also backed by the Left Front. Both are locals, unlike Bista.
There have been regular reports of resentment in the local BJP unit over “outsider” Bista’s candidacy. At one point, diplomat Harsh Vardhan Shringla’s name was floating around as a probable claimant to the BJP ticket. “One morning, the former foreign secretary even landed at a popular tea stall on Hill Cart Road, which is frequented by the who’s who of Siliguri,” said a member of the Siliguri Welfare Association (SWA) who did not wish to be named.
Though Bista secured the BJP nomination, the party’s Kurseong legislator, Bishnu Prasad Sharma, is contesting against him as an Independent candidate. Another Independent contestant, advocate Bandana Rai, also enjoys a degree of popularity due to her activities in propagating the Gorkhaland cause in New Delhi and elsewhere.
All these factors have the potential to eat into BJP’s hill votes despite a show of strength by Gurung, several observers pointed out, though not to the extent of losing.
Hill politics is now controlled mostly by contractors close to GJM who bag the deals for several centrally funded projects, pointed out a labour activist who closely follows politics in the region. They employ local youth, who in turn are expected to mobilise voters on polling day. “The rural hills are comprised of small hamlets. If someone doesn’t go out to vote, it would be known soon and essential services to her household may be stalled,” the SWA member claimed.
Mamata Banerjee has formed several boards and the GTA also has done some work, but she can’t match the central funds, said Debasish Chakraborty, who works in the community tourism sector there. But the narrowing of margin is a real threat for Bista, which has turned the focus this time on the plains after several elections.
Though Trinamool controls the Siliguri Municipal Corporation by a wide margin as well as several Gram Panchayats in the area, it lost all Assembly seats in the Darjeeling district to the BJP. It could manage a victory only in Chopra.
The addition of Sankar Ghosh (formerly with the Communist Party of India-Marxist), the sitting Member of Legislative Assembly from Siliguri, is also expected to help the BJP draw a section of Bengali voters.
The Saffron party is anyway expected to do well in the reserved Assembly segments. “Not many know, but the advent of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in a big way in Bengal can be traced back to a 1998 ‘chintan shivir’ in quaint Naxalbari,” the SWA member said, pointing out how entrenched in the region is the ideological fountainhead of the BJP.
“There’s not a single Trinamool flag in the Hills, you know,” said Animesh Bose, an environmental activist working in the region, referring to the fact that the BGPM is expected to carry the CM’s party through there. “The thrust of the campaign is in the Plains this time, he added.”
The trend has led to old timers recalling how the CPM would earlier win the Darjeeling seat despite running short in the highlands, by virtue of a strong performance in the plains.
At the same time, ‘Gorkhaland’ has not moved out of sight completely and may not be cropping up in the election discourse so much. “Even the Trinamool candidate knows this,” Chakraborty said.