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25 June - There was a time when these lyrics from an old school song we sang as children captured the ethos of Darjeeling, the place where I was born and brought up in the foothills of the Himalayas. Not any more.
My old home town, famous around the world for the finest of teas, unparalleled mountain vistas and hill people's hospitality, is burning. Armed soldiers and paramilitary forces are patrolling the streets, and blood has been shed as the masses rise to revive a long-running demand for "Gorkhaland" - a state of their own within India, named after the majority population of Gurkhas, and separate from the state of West Bengal, which has ruled the hills from the city of Calcutta for decades.
I was living a life of relative privilege and peace in Hong Kong in May, 2010, when I received shocking news from Darjeeling. A prominent local politician was hacked to death by thugs from the dominant Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM) party at one of the town's busiest crossroads. The killers butchered him using khukris, the traditional short, curved swords that are as famous and feared around the world as the Gurkha soldiers who wield them. Tourists, passers-by and even police watched, frozen in horror, or fled the scene.
The murdered man's name was Madan Tamang. He was a gentleman and family friend. He was also an intellectual and a fiery orator, with a fearless streak that ultimately cost him his life.
Tamang's family and supporters say he was silenced permanently because he went too far with his dogged reminders of the GJM's failure to deliver Gorkhaland. He warned that party leader Bimal Gurung had sold out on the demand for a full-fledged state and was settling for a semi-autonomous interim administration that he would himself head. Just weeks before Tamang was murdered, a March deadline that Gurung had publicly set to either deliver on his statehood promise or kill himself came and went with no Gorkhaland in sight.
The idea of a separate state for Nepali-speaking people within the borders of India surfaced nearly a century ago, but was brought to the forefront by Subhash Ghising, a former soldier and teacher, in the 1980s. He formed the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) and launched a violent insurgency that was branded as anti-national by the authorities and ruthlessly suppressed by security forces.
The bloody struggle for statehood between 1986 and 1988 set the hills on fire and claimed 1,200 lives. I was in school in Darjeeling at the time. It was quite common for us, on the way to school, to discuss a corpse someone had just seen dumped by the roadside, or a head mounted on a spear. "I'll reduce your height by six inches," was a regular threat, whether in grim jest or dead seriousness, referring to the decapitation of "enemies" that went on in all that violence around us.
The insurgency ended in 1988, when Ghising forged a deal with the state government in Calcutta and the central government in Delhi for the formation of the Darjeeling Hill Council, a semi-autonomous body he would head until 2008.
Talk of Gorkhaland died down after Ghising settled into his new role. Many felt that he had betrayed them in exchange for government funds that were pumped into the Hill Council for the development of Darjeeling. Public resentment grew as Gurkha leaders were seen to be pocketing money meant for improving people's livelihoods.
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It went on for years until Gurung stepped into the limelight. A former GNLF foot soldier and Ghising protegé, he rebelled against his boss and eventually had him kicked out of town as he relaunched the Gorkhaland movement with a bigger popular mandate.
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