Siliguri: “In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the Gorkha and Nepali people voted for the BJP (Bharatiya Janata Party) en masse. But this time it wouldn’t be so,” said Anil Rai, a Trinamool Congress (TMC) supporter who lives in Santrabari, a picturesque village in the Buxa tiger reserve near India’s border with Bhutan. He explained, “Bimal Gurung is carrying out quite an extensive campaign. Nepali and Gorkha votes will split.”
Rai is a beneficiary of the state government’s projects and wants the Mamata Banerjee government to return to power. He bought a car with the help of loan from a self-help group in 2014, repaid it by 2017, and is still making money out of the vehicle as increasing tourist inflow has made transport a thriving sector.
His wife, Monika, receives a monthly stipend of Rs 1,000 for being a Nepali folk singer and often gets to perform at government programmes, where payment of another Rs 1,000 is assured. Both of his daughters have received the Kanyashree stipend of Rs 25,000 and are studying in college.
“No one ever promoted tourism in Buxa like her. Now this area has as many as 20 local youths working as tourist guides,” he said, adding that with more tourists, home stays and eateries have increased in numbers.
Nevertheless, his locality voted overwhelmingly in favour of the BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. According to him, it was because there was a ‘Modi wave’ at that time to re-elect Narendra Modi as the prime minister, something which he believed was absent ahead of the assembly election.
Rai sees no reason why the government in the state should be changed. Therefore, he might overestimate the influence of Bimal Gurung, who is now travelling across the Himalayan foothills and calling upon the people to re-elect Banerjee as the chief minister and teach a lesson to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for doing nothing for the Gorkha and Nepali people who have been voting for the BJP since 2009 at Gurung’s call.
The Himalayan foothills of Bengal are made of two regions – the Bhutan-bordering Dooars and the Nepal-bordering Terai, with the former having more concentration of forested land and tea gardens. People of Nepali, Gorkha and tribal ethnicities dominate the demography. Apart from the three hill assembly constituencies of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Kalimpong, Gurung’s Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) also has influence in the assembly seats in the foothills.
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At Santrabari, Anil Rai’s neighbour Binay Rai, who runs a small eatery, was not as impressed as him. He elaborated how the place got its name – santra means orange in Hindi – from the orange orchards the area was dotted with until 1993, when a landslide and subsequent flood destroyed the gardens. No oranges have grown on the land since.
It was also from around the same time that the administration started strictly preventing locals from using forest produce such as timber.
“From the mid-1990s, the economy went downhill. It is true that the TMC government has done some work but we still have no high school nearby. The nearest is more than 10 km away. In the hills areas, that distance cannot be covered daily. Therefore, those who want to study in high schools live in hostels near the schools,” Binay Rai said, two days ahead of the fourth phase assembly elections on April 10, when his constituency, Kalchini in Alipurduars district, was to go to the polls.
The government had of late started renovating the Buxa Fort near Lepchakha village along the Bhutan border, trying to develop it as another tourist attraction point, but of the 10 km distance from Santrabari to Lepchakha, only 2 km was motorable, as of April 2021. Lepchakha, at an altitude of 2,844 ft, is dominated by Drukpa Buddhists and Nepalis.
Even in these remote villages, Bimal Gurung’s switching of camp – from being in alliance with the BJP since 2009 to joining hands with the TMC in October 2020 – is an issue people are talking about.
“Gurung’s rally in Kalchini on March 16 drew quite a significant crowd,” pointed out Bir Bahadur Subba, a resident of Buxa village where the BJP secured a large majority of the votes in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.
Kalchini had GJM influence since 2011, when the GJM’s Wilson Champramari won from this seat. In 2013, Champramari joined the TMC and won the 2016 elections as a TMC candidate. However, he joined the BJP in 2019 but did not get a re-nomination. Instead, the BJP has fielded Bishal Lama, who was Bimal Gurung’s right-hand-man in Kalchini.
In 2016, Lama was Gurung’s candidate for Kalchini, contesting on a BJP ticket. Even in February this year, when Gurung came to Kalchini to inaugurate a Gorkha Bhavan at Dalsingpara area, Bishal Lama was with him. However, he switched camp soon after, saying that he could not accept Gurung’s decision to support the TMC, and the BJP promptly named him their candidate.
Gurung paid another visit to Kalchini soon after to ensure Lama did not take many of his followers along.
Whether Gurung manages to swing Nepali and Gorkha votes towards the TMC remains to be seen but, as of mid-April, he was leaving no stones unturned to prove that he continued to remain population among the Gorkha and Nepali people, no matter whether they lived in the hills or the foothills.
A battle for survival
Bimal Gurung’s battle in 2021 is for survival, to prove that he is not a person of the past, and that the people in the hills and the foothills still favour him. Unlike the other faction of the GJM, led by Binay Tamang and Anit Thapa who have kept their campaign to the three seats in the hills, Gurung is spending a substantial amount of time in Terai and Dooars.
Terai, in Darjeeling district, has two assembly constituencies – Matigara-Naxalbari and Phansideoa. Dooars, spread across the districts of Jalpaiguri and Alipurduars, has Kalchini, Madarihat, Kumargram, Falakata and Alipurduars seats in Alipurduar district, and Mal, Nagrakata and Dhupguri and Maynaguri in Jalpaiguri district.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the BJP had massive leads over the TMC in these constituencies: Kumargram 24,000 votes; Kalchini 47,000 votes; Alipurduar 37,000 votes; Falakata 27,000 votes; Madarihat 44,000 votes; Nagrakata 50,000 votes; Mal 24,000 votes; Dhupguri 28,000 votes; Maynaguri 14,000 votes; Matigara-Naxalbari 99,000 votes and Phansideoa 53,000 votes.
A Buddhist temple in Madarihat. Photo: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
Going by these statistics, the TMC should not have a chance in any of these seats but Bimal Gurung’s change of stance and the prospect of a triangular contest in some of these seats have made the elections look interesting, according to local residents.
In the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, all these seats witnessed a bipolar contest where the Left and the Congress’s vote share was reduced to negligible.
But now, the two seats in Terai, Matigara-Naxalbari and Phansideoa, are expected to witness triangular contests, as the incumbent Congress MLAs in these seats enjoy a good personal image.
“In 2019, the Congress had no winnability. Therefore, Congress’s Darjeeling Lok Sabha candidate Shankar Malakar hardly got any vote in his own assembly segment, Matigara-Naxalbari. However, Malakar as an assembly election candidate would surely pull much more votes,” said a local TMC leader who did not want to be named. Phansideoa’s incumbent Congress MLA, Sunil Tirkey, enjoys his own popularity as well.
In Naxalbari, how the TMC is depending on Gurung to swing votes in its favour became evident after the party changed its candidate even after the campaign had started on his name. The original candidate, Nalini Ranjan Roy, is a Bengali, while the new candidate, Rajen Sundas, is a Nepali, and a retired government officer who is known to be close to Gurung.
According to Lekhnath Chhetri, a Nepali-language journalist based in the hills who have been following Gurung for several years, Gurung’s focus on the Terai and the Dooars region was quite striking. It appeared that Gurung was trying to prove his influence beyond the hills to earn a greater bargaining power, Chhetri said.
“He was expected to spend more time in the hills because it’s a matter of saving his bastion. However, he has spent almost equal time in the hills and in the foothills. He has repeatedly claimed that he can influence the result in as many as 17 seats. However, we do not see more than 10-12 seats where he could have an influence,” said Chhetri, who has also authored Phulange, a well-praised political fiction on the Darjeeling hills.
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Gurung has already held meetings and rallies in all these constituencies in the foothills. Local residents said that Gurung’s biggest challenge was to win back his supporters who have joined the BJP since he went underground in 2017, and especially after he joined hands with the TMC last year.
“In Gurung’s absence, most of the local GJM leaders were working with the BJP. These Nepali and Gorkha voters had been quite deeply influenced by the BJP due to the GJM’s alliance with them since the 2009 Lok Sabha elections and they got more involved with the BJP during Gurung’s absence. He is now facing a Herculean task of getting these supporters back to his own fold,” said Shambhunath Shaw, a resident of Rajabhatkhawa area in Kalchini.
The TMC’s Kalchini block unit president Ganesh Mahali, however, was upbeat about Gurung’s presence by their side, and so were the TMC’s Kalchini candidate Pashang Lama and Madarihat candidate Rajesh Lakra.
TMC’s Kalchini candidate Pashang Lama (in white shirt with TMC badges). Photo: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
“Nearly one-third of Kalchini’s voters are of Nepali and Gorkha ethnicity. Their votes will swing,” Mahali said.
Lakra, who is locally known as ‘Tiger’, had his background in the Adivasi Bikas Parishad, an organisation that sprung up from oblivion in 2007-08 to oppose the GJM’s demand for inclusion of areas in the Dooars regions into the territory of their proposed state of Gorkhaland. Later, one of the key leaders of the Parishad, John Barla, joined the BJP. Barla, who hold a significant influence on the local tribal population, went on to become Alipurduar’s BJP MP in 2019. Lakra belonged to Barla’s opponent faction of the Parishad.
The local leaders
Candidates and grassroots level leaders often matter in the tea garden areas more than the party symbols. It is because of this that the region has been a fertile ground for political poaching since 2011 and the poaching war has intensified in recent times, as the BJP and TMC showed signs of desperation.
In Phansideoa, the TMC candidate Chhotan Kisku is a turncoat from the CPI(M). He won the 2006 assembly election and lost the 2011 election to the Congress’s Tirkey by a nominal margin. In 2016, the CPI(M) supported Congress’s Tirkey. Now, Kisku is fighting Tirkey on a TMC ticket. The BJP candidate Durga Murmu had switched from the CPI(M) to the BJP and contested the 2016 elections on a BJP ticket, but he joined the TMC soon after the elections. He returned to the BJP in 2019 and has now bagged the party’s ticket again.
At Sonali tea garden in the Mal area of Jalpaiguri district, the family of Baijanti Oraon said they had no idea about who gave them cooking gas, who increased the gas price so much so that they are back to cooking using logs, who sent money to their bank account during the COVID-19 lockdown or who is still providing them with ration. The area falls within Bagrakot gram panchayat jurisdictions.
The family of Baijanti Oraon at Sonali tea garden in Malbazar. Photo: Snigdhendu Bhattacharya
The residents complained of a lack of healthcare facilities – the nearest government health centre was 10 km away at Odlabari – malpractices in tea gardens and lack of employment opportunity for the youth. Non-payment of provident funds even months after retirement is a common allegation tea garden workers raise. Besides, the state government-fixed new daily wage of Rs 202 has not yet been implemented in several gardens, who are paying the workers at the old rate of Rs 176 per day.
“Most of those who are in their late teens and their 20s are migrating to south Indian states for work,” Elthreus Oraon, a Christian, said. He himself spends the better part of a year in Bengaluru, working as a cooking assistant.
There also are grievances about the malpractices perpetrated by the TMC in the 2018 panchayat elections.
Asked which government worked better for them, (Mamata) ‘Didi’’s or (Narendra) Modi’s, the family had no answer. They would vote for whoever local leader Sanya Oraon asks them to. Sanya was a TMC leader as on the date of this conversation in the second week of April. Elthreus Oraon explained: “We need these local leaders for so many things that it is better to listen to them on matters related to vote.”
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Under such circumstances, Alipurduar’s former TMC district unit president Mohan Sharma’s recent joining in the BJP is likely to further complicate Gurung’s equations. Sharma yields good influence in the tea gardens for years – he had been a Congress trade union leader before joining the TMC – and has his followers in all tea gardens in Alipurduar district. He changed camp after the TMC denied tickets to candidates of his preference.
The BJP had grievances over the selection of candidates in several seats, including Kalchini and Mal, and the state leadership was still trying to sort out the issues.
Gurung’s men have been holding meetings in Mal Bazar area since November 2020. Even though the TMC did not field the candidate of Gurung’s preference, Gurung visited several areas of Mal since December 2020, urging people to elect the TMC candidate.
He has spent significant time in Madarihat, too. In 2016, thanks to the GJM’s support, the BJP’s Manoj Tigga won from Madarihat as one of the BJP’s only three winning candidates. He has been re-nominated. The BJP’s comfortable lead over the TMC in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections should have kept Tigga assured of a victory. However, Gurung has claimed that the BJP’s vote share was high due to his support. But turning the tide against Tigga, who has built his own influence and reputation over the past five years, could be one of his biggest challenges.