Ghisingh goes global

The lawyers from Nepal had first tried to involve the Nepal Government in their effort. They belong to the Nepal Gorkha Rashtriya Mukti Morcha, a fraternal outfit Ghisingh helped set up in that country.

Last July, leader of the Nepal outfit, Nagendra Lama, approached the Nepal Governmentto take up the issue of Darjeeling’s status at the international court.

After the Nepal Government refused to oblige, some of NGRMM leaders came to Darjeeling and met Ghisingh. Soon, the Darjeeling leader publicly lent his support to the cause. At a function in Darjeeling, he even promised to support China and Pakistan if these countries helped him internationalise the Darjeeling issue. And, when the elections were announced, he seized the opportunity to drive it home.

He now shows no interest in the elections, saying he is too busy with the case at The Hague. He has turned down proposals from Mani Shankar Aiyar and Sudip Bandyopadhyay, two leaders of Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress, that he support their candidature from Darjeeling. He brushes aside all questions about the polls and would not spell out if his party, the Gorkha National Liberation Front, will once again boycott them. Boycott calls have come too easily for Ghisingh ever since he launched his crusade for a separate Gorkhaland statecomprising the hills of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong. During the 1982 Assembly elections, voters in some parts of the hills sent empty ballot boxes for the first time in response to the GNLF’s boycott call to press its demand for a separate State.

Ghisingh repeated the boycott calls during the 1984 parliamentary polls and the 1987 Assembly polls. By the time the 1987 Assembly polls came, the Gorkhaland agitation was at its peak and Ghisingh had sent all other political parties in the hills, including the ruling CPI(M), scurrying for cover. His total command of Darjeeling politics was proved when the three hill subdivisions returned 460 empty ballot boxes out of a total of 510. Only diehard CPI(M) activists cast their votes in the party’s last few strongholds.

By the time the next elections came, Ghisingh had settled for a truce, having signed the Dargeeling accord with the Centre and the West Bengal Government in August 1988. But the statehood demand never quite died down. It has been thecornerstone of Darjeeling’s politics since the early 1950s. In fact, the first poll boycott call, in support of the statehood demand, was given way back in 1968 by the Blue Flag party.

All this time Ghisingh was claiming that Darjeeling was never part of West Bengal and should now be made a separate state. But at the time of the 1991 general elections he went one step farther. Darjeeling, Kalimpong and the Dooars region in Bengal and Assam, he now said, had no legal and constitutional validity to be part of India. His argument runs like this. The East India Company got Darjeeling from the Nepal Government by virtue of the 1815 Treaty of Segouli. But when the Indo-Nepal Friendship Treaty was signed in 1950, it “cancelled” all previous treaties. So Darjeeling, to him, is a “no-man’s land” and he has repeatedly urged the Union Government to properly “incorporate” Darjeeling into the Indian Union.

Similarly, he argues that Kalimpong and the Dooars regions continue to be “leasehold” lands becauseBhutan ceded these territories to the British Government only on lease in the 1865 Treaty of Sinchula. Bhutan still retained sovereignty over these territories and received annual payments from India for the lease.

Ghisingh says he has tried to serve the national interest by focussing on the issue. He set ultimatums to successive Union Governments to take up the issue but received no response. When he moved the Supreme Court on the issue in 1994, the apex court turned down his plea, calling it a political issue.

In disgust, he asked three GNLF MLAs from the hills to resign from the West Bengal Assembly. They had been elected from the three constituencies of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong when the GNLF took part in the Assembly polls of 1991. That year and also in 1989, the GNLF supported Congress candidate Inderjit from the Darjeeling parliamentary constituency. But in 1996 the GNLF boycotted the polls again in protest against the Centre’s “failure” to clarify the “status” of the Darjeelinghills.

Every time the boycott call benefited the CPI(M). With the GNLF not in the fray, the Marxists practically had a walkover, the Congress being merely a signboard in the hills.

But the CPI(M) too has had its share of problems in Darjeeling. The party split several times and its MP in the last Lok Sabha from Darjeeling, R.B. Rai, was expelled from the party after the latest show of rebellion of the hill comrades. The party has this time put up veteran Ananda Pathak who will take on another old warhorse of the region, Dawa Narbula, who left the Congress and joined the Trinamool Congress. Still hoping to strike a deal with Ghisingh, the Congress has not yet announced its candidate.

Curiously, no political party or group has spoken up against Ghisingh for taking the Darjeeling issue to the international court. Both the CPI(M) and the State Government have repeatedly gone out of their ways to avoid another confrontation with him. The party’s poll campaign so far has also steered clear of the issuesraised by him.

During a visit to Calcutta last month, Nepal’s Foreign Minister Kamal Thapa described Ghisingh’s issues as a “load of rubbish”. Although the Indo-Nepal treaty of 1950 would now be reviewed, Thapa was emphatic that there was no question of the new treaty addressing Darjeeling or any other territorial issue.

His critics say Ghisingh has kept these issues alive to divert the people’s attention from the failures of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council of which he has been the chairman since its inception in December 1988. They have also levelled charges of corruption at the council. The other view is that he has sought to attract international attention only to cover his old demand for the separate state. Ghisingh has consistently compared the present status of Darjeeling with that of Goa and Sikkim before these two were incorporated into the Indian Union. Their statehood followed their incorporation into India. After all, there has always been a method in the maverick Gorkha’s madness.