Subhash Ghisingh, the founder-leader of the movement for a separate homeland for the Gorkhas in northern Bengal, passed away on Thursday at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital in New Delhi. He was 80 and is survived by two sons and a daughter.
“Mr. Ghisingh was admitted to the hospital five days ago and… was being treated for liver cirrhosis,” hospital sources told The-Hindu . His body will be taken to Darjeeling on Friday, said Prakash Dahal, a close confidante of the leader.
Mr. Ghisingh was born in a tea estate in Darjeeling and later joined the Army’s Gorkha Rifles. “When he first started talking about a separate State, no one in the Darjeeling Hills was with him,” recalled Abhijit Majumdar, a Central Committee member of the CPI-ML in Siliguri. “But he was a genuine leader who slowly mobilised people, selling them the idea of a separate identity and self-rule.”
Mr. Ghisingh’s politics was based largely on the alleged discrimination that Darjeeling Hills suffered at the hands of a government that ruled from Kolkata, nearly 600 kilometres south. The movement slowly drew in hundreds of thousands of people belonging to various ethnic groups, predominantly the Gorkhas, residing in the hills. He became their undisputed leader.
For almost 20 years — from 1988 to 2007 — Mr. Ghisingh headed the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC). However, in 2007, his political disciples led by Bimal Gurung formed a separate outfit, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). Eventually, it became difficult for the legendary Gorkha leader to operate from the hills and he was forced to shift to Siliguri in the plains of north Bengal.
