Fear in the hills

It is a bright cheery morning and my mother is walking me to school. I am four and have barely begun school a week ago. There is a huge crowd at the town square in Kalimpong, and everyone is gazing up at an electric pole. It takes my mother a split second to figure out what is holding their attention up there. She tries to block my gaze but it is too late. Perched atop the pole, cupped tightly in a basketball net, is a human head. The cold chill of the night has turned it pale and blue but there is no mistaking the beheaded head. 

I was too young to know fear but to this day, two decades since that grisly event, I can’t forget the look in my mother’s eyes. Those were terrible times; we spent nights without light, and days blocking the sun on our windows, dreading the knock of an unwanted visitor.

The very next week, I saw death again. And this time my mother was not around to cover my eyes. Bleeding from the head, a deep cut right across his bald head, a policeman was dragging himself around in the streets. But no one came out to help. All we did was to peer fearfully out of our windows. A woman finally did give him a sip of water and he died gratefully in her lap.

I didn’t know when the agitation was called off, and when the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council was created as a sop to the demand for Gorkhaland. But the fear slowly dissipated and turned into fireside stories. It was the only way we could cherish the peace we now had.

But time has a funny way of repeating events. I have a feeling of deja vu as the cries for Gorkhaland get louder now. There is blood on the streets and arson and fear are back in the hills. Only few weeks ago, West Bengal Chief Minister Buddadhev Bhattacharya declared that Gorkhaland was out of the question. On February 18, the Kurseong police station was ransacked and three police vehicles torched. On February 21, the Sukna police outpost and a vehicle were burnt.

Of course, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (the group spearheading the call for Gorkhaland) condemns the violence. But that does not bring peace.

In 2007 the GJM raised again the call for Gorkhaland and the Darjeeling Hills have again slipped into chaos. Today every house and office, shop and commercial enterprise, in fact any construction, complete or incomplete bears the green Gorkhaland flag. Signboards atop shops read ‘the State of Gorkhaland’ and vehicles bear number-plates that start with GL (Gorkhaland). One could actually be forgiven for thinking that a new state is already up and running. It is as if a parallel government has come up in the Darjeeling Hills.

Only two weeks ago, the vehicles of the District Magistrate and the Superintendent of Police were “banned” from the streets because GJM had not been given permission to hold a rally in nearby Siliguri, a CPM stronghold.

For the last year and a half, the president of GJM, Bimal Gurung has imposed a ‘non-cooperation’ movement on the region. This is why 26-year-old Kalimpong resident Viraj Pradhan asks his grandmother to collect and guard all electricity bills. He - and all other residents of the three towns of Kalimpong, Darjeeling, Kurseong and the surrounding villages — hasn’t paid any electricity or telephone bills.

“I would pay the bills if I could. My fear is that one day we will be stuck with a huge inflated bill. So I ask my grandmother to keep them safe,” says Pradhan. Harkha Bahadur Chhetri, the spokesperson of GJM, says this is only the beginning of troubled times for the hills. If the demands of the agitators are not met, there are bigger troubles ahead.

“We will start a ‘home rule movement’ and stop paying all taxes. The state government will then become completely non-existent for us,” says Chhetri.

‘Home Rule Movement’ and ‘Non-Cooperation’ do sound very Gandhian. But here they evoke deep fears. The GJM has set up a 7,000-strong activist group - the ‘Gorkhaland Personnel’ (GLP). It is supposed to be a “social service organisation”, but not everyone sees them as a bunch of do-gooders. The GLP — which can frequently be seen parading around in town squares - claims to have busted drug cartels. But the kind of six-month training they receive from former Gurkha soldiers does little to calm the nerves of the people they are supposedly serving.

The GJM has had its share of misfortunes. It imposed an alcohol ‘ban’ to choke state government revenues from sales but ended up revoking it in three months. In a region thick with tipplers, this was an unpopular decision.

Then there was the ‘Cultural Revolution’. The people of the hills were asked to get back to the traditional daura sural or bhaku. That specially didn’t sit well with the jean-clad youngsters. The GLP tried to push the rule by blackening the faces of those who defied the diktat and this brought on a big backlash. Their decree that all vehicle number plates in Darjeeling start with ‘GL’ also ran into trouble. The so-called rule worked in the hills, but elsewhere the vehicles were seized.

March 2010 is almost here. It is the deadline that Gurung had once set to achieve Gorkhaland. But today the GJM is wiser. “We have realised that it is not going to be so easy. The central government has jus agreed upon political level tripartite talks on our demands of Gorkhaland, where the centre, state and the Darjeeling hills will be represented by political leaders. Let us see what comes of this first,” says Chhetri, referring to the recent announcement by P Chidambaram.

I tell my mother that I am writing about the turmoil in the hills. She is frightened for me. “Be careful. Don’t forget what you and I saw that day on the road to school,” she says.