Gorkhas demand Darjeeling – The queen of Hills - as their homeland

The Queen of Hills - which has carved a niche for itself for world famous tea and the most googled travel destination in India, situated in northern part of West Bengal, is being demanded as a homeland for the Gorkha community living in India. While the origin of Darjeeling is steeped in the imperial legacy of the British Raj, the Gorkha, a colonial construct is ironically used as a means to challenge the contemporary political regression and neo-colonisation of Darjeeling.

Although the Gorkha identity is deemed as representative of the Nepali community residing in India, it acquires special meaning and importance in the Darjeeling hills, where majority of the people suffer low wages, unemployment, underdevelopment and poverty. In spite of a large working force in the tea estates, economic underdevelopment and political disempowerment is voiced through the assertion of ethnic rather than a class-based identity. Through an examination of the interaction between class and ethnicity, the Gorkha identity will highlight the malleability of ethnicity to extend itself to any situation and the emergence of an ethnic identity from class relations and grievances. The demand for a separate state for the Gorkha within India is more than 100 years old. The name "Gorkhaland" is claimed to have been coined by Gorkha National Liberation Front founder late Subhash Ghisingh on April, 1980, who spearheaded the Gorkhaland movement in the 1980s.

In the 1980s, a saying was popular in Darjeeling — “Upar Mahakal and niche Subhas Ghising (God is up there and down here we have Subhas Ghising)”. Ghising, who spearheaded the Gorkhaland movement in the 1980s, articulated the feelings, sentiments and emotion of the common Gorkha, became the mouthpiece of the downtrodden and sold the dream of a separate state of Gorkhaland to his people. In 1968, Ghising set up a political outfit, Nilo Jhanda, to espouse the cause of the hill people. During an agitation on April 22, 1979 — for the first time — he raised the demand for a separate state for the Nepali-speaking people of the Darjeeling hills. MORE UNI BM SJC