Recent weeks and months have seen powerful protests and rallies in the hill regions of Bengal. Agitating Gorkhas are demanding a separate state of Gorkhaland. There have been several bandhs and rasta rokos organised by the protesting people. On June 13, hundreds of Gorkha youth marched through the streets of Kolkota to highlight their aspirations, and win the support of people and political forces of Bengal for their demand.
The current agitation comes almost exactly two decades after the earlier phase of the agitation demanding that a state of Gorkhaland be established out of the hill divisions of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong in West Bengal. That agitation in the mid eighties had been called off following the West Bengal government agreeing to establish a Gorkhaland Hill Development Council in 1988, within the state of West Bengal. The GHDC was expected to be able to take steps to improve the conditions of the Gorkha people. The fact that the agitation has picked up with renewed vigour twenty years later show that the Hill Council has failed to fulfil the aspirations of the people of the hills.
British colonialism forcibly annexed this region in the nineteenth century and attached it to the then British ruled province of Bengal. During colonial times, Darjeeling was developed as an area for rest and recreation for the colonial rulers during the hot summer months. It also became a world famous center for tea. Timber was another major product from the region. Workers came from Nepal and from other parts to work in the tea plantations, as well as coolies for the colonialists.
Sixty years after independence things have not changed much for the people of Darjeeling. There is great resentment over the fact that despite the establishment of a Hill Development Council twenty years ago, and the incorporation of the Nepali language into the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution, the conditions of the Gorkha people as a whole have not improved.
The area has remained backward and neglected. The wealth from tea, tourism and timber has not been deployed to improve the conditions of the working people, who are mostly Gorkha, as also Tibetan and other hill communities. No substantial investment has been made in new industries in the area, which could provide livelihood for the youth The people continue to be denied the right to live in dignity..The Indian big bourgeoisie continus to savagely exploit and plunder the hill regions of North Bengal, in the same manner as the colonialists did till sixty years ago.
This is the background to the strong feeling that has developed amongst the Gorkhas of Darjeeling that they need their own state within the Indian Union to defend their interests.
The stand of the CPIM and the Left Front Government in West Bengal has been extremely provocative. The Left Front Government has refused to negotiate with the agitating people and their organisation over the demand for a separate state, declaring that nothing shall be done that threatens the territorial integrity of West Bengal! It has declared that the maximum it is willing to grant is "more powers" to the hill council! This at a time when the Hill Council is totally discredited! Meanwhile, the CPIM is trying to isolate the Gorkha people and attack their agitation as "anti national" and "anti Bangla". In Siliguri and some other areas, CPIM has provoked physical attacks and clashes amongst people on ethnic basis. Gorkha girls and boys studying in schools and colleges in the plains in Darjeeling district and nearby districts have been forced to flee home. Bangla chauvinism is being deliberately whipped up.
The people of Darjeeling hill area, are demanding statehood with the hope that this way, they would become masters of their own destiny, and ensure a better future for the coming generations. Similar demands for statehood are being raised by people in other regions of India as well.
There are two reactions to such demands. One is to raise the specter of danger to unity and territorial integrity, to organise ethnic clashes, and to justify state repression. The other is to address the political issues involved in a political manner. CPIM is following the former course. It does not behove communists to do so.
Our subcontinent is home to numerous nations and peoples. Some are small in terms of population, and others are vast. Some are divided – like the nations of Bengal and Punjab. Even the languages of many peoples are not recognized. And neither the existence of numerous nations and peoples, nor their rights are acknowledged in the Indian Constitution. Right from 1947 various nations and peoples have raised the demand for self determination. The Indian Union has invariably responded to this demand with forcible suppression.
All the peoples of India face exploitation and oppression. The source of this is the capitalist system, and the Indian state which is a colonial legacy, which is organised in such a manner as to discriminate between one nation and another, and deny all the people their rights. In such a situation, demands for autonomy, for statehood, as well as for self determination upto secession have arisen and will continue to arise again and again.
It may be argued that creation of a separate state within the present Indian Union will not address the problems of exploitation and oppression. This is true, and communists make no such claim. But this certainly does not mean that communists take up the banner of the reactionary big bourgeoisie and its baton of “national unity and territorial integrity” to oppose the demands for separate statehood. The demand of a people to constitute themselves as a distinct political entity —as a state within the Union, or for that matter without the Union — cannot be dismissed on such basis.
The demands raised by the Gorkha people once again poses the question that Indian Union is sorely in need for reconstitution. The present Indian Union must be replaced by a voluntary union of consenting peoples, in which all the numeorus peoples who constitute our country, big and small, will have the right to self determination, and no one will feel discriminated against. It is the task of Communists to popularise and fight for a new Indian Union organised on such a basis. It is definitely not the task of communists to raise the tattered banner of the Indian ruling class of "defending unity and territorial integrity"—a banner under which the blood of so many of our people all over the country has been shed.
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