The agreement arrived at by the West Bengal government and the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) suggesting that the newly elected administrative body being proposed for the Darjeeling hills be called the “Gorkhaland Territorial Administration” is being considered by the latter a “moral victory” for more than a single reason.
Not only has the draft of the “memorandum of agreement” been signed by the two sides without the GJM having to drop its demand for a separate ‘Gorkhaland' State; implicit in the inclusion of the term ‘Gorkhaland' in the nomenclature for the new set-up is an acknowledgement by the State government of what the GJM has been highlighting as the aspirations of the local people for a “separate Gorkha identity.”
“We view the signing of the draft as a moral victory. The connotations of a separate identity are also reflected to an extent in the name that has been agreed upon for the new administrative arrangement,” Roshan Giri, GJM's general secretary, told The Hindu over telephone from Darjeeling on Sunday.
“At the same time, we have not dropped our ultimate demand for a Gorkhaland State,” he added.
For the sake of expediency, the State government seems to have chosen not to give much importance to the ramifications of incorporating the term “Gorkhaland” to the proposed name for the set-up agreed upon.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee is scheduled to visit Darjeeling early next week.
The signing of the draft agreement comes at a time when the major political players in the region have reconciled themselves to a reality in which one does not see a separate Gorkhaland State being created anytime in the near future, particularly as the State government is far from being amenable to the idea.
But even as the GJM leadership has, in recent times, been soft-pedalling the separate statehood issue and focussing instead on the setting up of an administrative set-up for the region, political compulsions govern its intent to keep alive its demand for Gorkhaland, particularly in the face of its detractors accusing it of settling for less than what was promised.
While its leaders have maintained that the setting up of a new body will be a step forward in realising its demand for creation of a separate State, the GJM, by ensuring that the term “Gorkhaland” forms part of the nomenclature, is looking at assuaging the misgivings within its constituency for having failed to make any substantive progress in the direction of statehood.
The non-GJM political groupings in the Darjeeling Hills have already started crying foul. “The GJM is cheating the people, trying to confuse them by getting the State government to agree to include “Gorkhaland” in the nomenclature for a body that can be equated to gram panchayat being named a district,” said R.B. Rai, chairman of the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists.
