CJ: Kumar Sarkar
After a brief lull, the hills of Darjeeling threaten to become restive again. The Gorkha Mukti Morcha has now threatened to stop construction work in two hydel power projects being set up by the National Hydel Power Corporation..
THE LEFT Front government’s rejection of the demand for a separate state of Gorkhaland by the Gorkha Mukti Morcha (GMM) has once again signalled unrest in the hills. This time, however, the disruption planned is of a severe nature and could be deemed an anti-social act.
The chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s assurance of greater autonomy for the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) failed to appease the Morcha leadership, which has rejected the offer. It is sticking to its demand for a separate state where it wants the inclusion of the foothill town of Siliguri and the sprawling lush green Dooars, famous for its tea and timber.
The Morcha has embarked on a plan, which is likely to bring it into a direct confrontation with the Centre and the state. The Morcha has threatened to stop work on two power projects under construction in the hills as of June 7. The threat was delivered through a news agency.
The Morcha wants to put a spanner in the works in the Teesta Low Dam projects III and IV. The two projects are being built at a cost of Rs 1,830 crores. Morcha leaders have also threatened to close down the offices of the National Hydel Power Corporation (NHPC) in the hills of Darjeeling district. The Morcha leadership’s contention is that the hydel power projects are being set up drawing on the resources of the hills but they would end up supplying electricity to the plains of West Bengal. The parochial tone of the Morcha leaders seems all but evident, given that no such decision has been announced.
The 111 megawatt Teesta Low Dam Project III being constructed at an estimated cost of Rs 768.92 crores is slated to be completed by the end of this year. The on going 132 mega watt Teesta Low Dam Project IV being built at an estimated cost of Rs 1,061.38 crores is slated for completion by September 2009.
In the course of reviving the movement for a separate state of Gorkhaland, which was first spearheaded by the Gorkha National Liberation Front supremo Subhas Ghisingh over 20 years ago, the Morcha is gearing up to take on the Centre. Ghisingh, was careful not to annoy the Centre. On the contrary, he kept his channels to the Centre open through former Union Home Minister, Buta Singh. During Rajiv Gandhi’s tenure, the Congress government sided with Ghisngh blatantly to needle the Left Front government in West Bengal. Though it had no intentions of carving up West Bengal by creating a separate state of Gorkhaland, political expediency seemed to have demanded that the GNLF remain a thorn in the Left government’s side.
The Morcha, in yet another departure, is seeking to disrupt work in hydel power projects where the central agency, the NHPC, is involved and had earlier threatened that hill residents would stop paying taxes, telephone bills and the like.(Merinews)
MY GORKHALAND Headline Animator
Friday, May 30, 2008
Morcha gives ultimatum
Darjeeling, May 29: The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha today set a June 27 deadline for the Bengal government to dissolve the DGHC and create a separate state comprising Darjeeling, the Dooars and the Terai.
Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri made the announcement following a marathon meeting of the central committee at the party’s head office in Patlabas here.
“We believe that the council that was set up in 1988 has failed to fulfil the aspiration of the hill people… The council had also left out Siliguri, Terai and the Dooars. The central committee has unanimously decided to start an agitation if our June 27 deadline to dissolve the council is not met. The only alternative that we are demanding is Gorkhaland,” Giri.
The general secretary neither spelt out the details of the agitation, nor spoke about the fate of the contractual employees currently working in the council.
However, Morcha president Bimal Gurung told DGHC contractual workers at Darjeeling Gymkhana Club early this morning that none of them would lose their jobs.
“I will not make you fight for Gorkhaland on empty stomach or by dousing your hearth. Rest assured that no matter what, no one would be able to take your jobs. You are all getting a meagre salary but the days are not far when you would be receiving a good salary,” Gurung told the large gathering.
The DGHC employs around 8,000 workers on six-month contracts and pays them between Rs 2,000 and 3,500 a month. Ever since Gurung started talking about the need to dissolve the council, these workers have been afraid of losing their jobs.
In another development, 104 gram panchayat pradhans from across the hills today resigned in support of Gorkhaland. “Of the 112 pradhans in the hills, 104 have resigned. The other seats belong to the GNLF, CPM and other political parties,” said Binay Tamang, the media and publicity secretary of the Morcha.
Although the state government had dissolved the gram panchayats in 2005 and did not hold elections after that, the pradhans were later appointed presidents of village committees overseeing the implementation of the 100-day work scheme. The pradhans/presidents also issue birth certificates.
“For us, nothing is more important than Gorkhaland, “ said Urmila Singh, the pradhan of Bijanbari.
The state government has not reacted to the en-masse resignation yet. (The Telegraph)
Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri made the announcement following a marathon meeting of the central committee at the party’s head office in Patlabas here.
“We believe that the council that was set up in 1988 has failed to fulfil the aspiration of the hill people… The council had also left out Siliguri, Terai and the Dooars. The central committee has unanimously decided to start an agitation if our June 27 deadline to dissolve the council is not met. The only alternative that we are demanding is Gorkhaland,” Giri.
The general secretary neither spelt out the details of the agitation, nor spoke about the fate of the contractual employees currently working in the council.
However, Morcha president Bimal Gurung told DGHC contractual workers at Darjeeling Gymkhana Club early this morning that none of them would lose their jobs.
“I will not make you fight for Gorkhaland on empty stomach or by dousing your hearth. Rest assured that no matter what, no one would be able to take your jobs. You are all getting a meagre salary but the days are not far when you would be receiving a good salary,” Gurung told the large gathering.
The DGHC employs around 8,000 workers on six-month contracts and pays them between Rs 2,000 and 3,500 a month. Ever since Gurung started talking about the need to dissolve the council, these workers have been afraid of losing their jobs.
In another development, 104 gram panchayat pradhans from across the hills today resigned in support of Gorkhaland. “Of the 112 pradhans in the hills, 104 have resigned. The other seats belong to the GNLF, CPM and other political parties,” said Binay Tamang, the media and publicity secretary of the Morcha.
Although the state government had dissolved the gram panchayats in 2005 and did not hold elections after that, the pradhans were later appointed presidents of village committees overseeing the implementation of the 100-day work scheme. The pradhans/presidents also issue birth certificates.
“For us, nothing is more important than Gorkhaland, “ said Urmila Singh, the pradhan of Bijanbari.
The state government has not reacted to the en-masse resignation yet. (The Telegraph)
Darjeeling pradhans resign over statehood
DARJEELING, May 29: To facilitate the Gorkhaland movement, panchayat pradhans and upa-pradhans of all the three Darjeeling hill sub-divisions submitted their resignation before the district authority today. “We are resigning from our respective posts as the panchayat has become an obstacle for attaining statehood,” said Mr Anjum Chauhan, pradhan of Pokhriabong gram panchayat.Elections to the 112 gram panchayats under the DGHC governed areas has been withheld since 2005 after the DGHC administrator Mr Subash Ghisingh raised the issue of dissolving the DGHC following which all the councilors had resigned. “We have been serving our posts voluntarily without honorarium. There was no accountability of funds allotted to gram panchayats during Mr Ghisingh's tenure,” Mr Chauhan alleged.During the past one year though, the state government was implementing the 100-day employment scheme under the NREGS in these areas. “We were appointed president for the NREGS schemes but without any real power. The government managed the funds and the salaries of the workers,” said Mrs Tshering Bhutia, pradhan of Rangbull gram panchayat. Among the 112 gram panchayats, post bearers of 102 affiliated to the GJMM resigned today while the remaining 10 affiliated to the CPRM were absent. Altogether 63 gram panchayats from Mirik, Kurseong, Bijanbari, Sukhia and Takda blocks submitted their resignation before the ADM, Mrs Zimba in Darjeeling today. Remaining 39 gram panchayats resigned before Kalimpong SDO Mr Sherpa. (The Statesman)
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
GJMM calls indefinite strike from 7 June
Statesman News Service DARJEELING, May 27: The Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha will impose an indefinite strike on the NHPC offices and construction sites in the Darjeeling hills starting 7 June. “We have convened the indefinite strike in view of the negligence of the government in these sites,” said Mr Roshan Giri, general-secretary of the GJMM.As part of the agitation for Gorkhaland, the GJMM had imposed indefinite strike on the payment departments of the telephone exchange and the electricity board, which is still on, depriving the state government and the Centre of crores of Rupees. “The governments earn a lot of revenue from this region but do not deliver anything. The condition at Twentynine Mile, Twentyseven Mile and Gale Khola where the NHPC sites are located are deplorable,” alleged Mr Giri.Among the main projects of the NHPC, the Teesta Low Dam Stage III and Stage IV are located along the National Highway 31C. Many inhabitants were evicted from their land to accommodate the projects. “It has been so many years since the project started yet nothing has been done to rehabilitate the people who were evicted,” Mr Giri said.
Morcha to block low dams
Darjeeling, May 27: The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha has decided to stop all ongoing projects of National Hydroelectric Power Corporation (NHPC) in the Darjeeling hills from June 7 as part of its movement for a separate state.
Binay Tamang, the media and publicity secretary of the Morcha, made the announcement today. “The party has decided to stop all work at the NHPC sites from June 7. We will also close down the corporation’s offices.”
The Morcha has already stopped movement of timber from the hills to the plains as part of its economic blockade programme designed to put pressure on the Bengal government. However, the decision to stop construction work at NHPC’s Teesta Low Dam Project (TLDP)-III and IV is likely to hit the country’s premier hydroelectric utility hard. NHPC is a central government enterprise.
“NHPC will earn crores from the projects but what will the hill people gain from them?” asked Roshan Giri, the general secretary of the Morcha. The party has recently revived the demand for Gorkhaland in the hills.
Although officials of the NHPC could not be contacted, sources said the corporation is looking to complete TLDP-III by the end of this year. The scheduled date of completion of TLDP-IV is September 2009.
While, TLDP-III is a Rs 768.92-crore project (according to estimates made in December 2002), TLDP-IV is estimated to cost Rs 1,061.38 crore. Both the sites are in the Rambhi-Kalijhora area, about 20km downstream from Teesta Bazar in the Kalimpong subdivision.
The two projects are the biggest in the area as TLDP-III is expected to generate 132mw of power and TLDP-IV 160mw.
The media and publicity secretary of the Morcha today confirmed that the party would hold a meeting of the central committee on May 29 to adopt a resolution for the immediate dissolution of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council. Morcha president Bimal Gurung had made the announcement in Siliguri on Sunday.
“We also want the Bengal government to take a decision on the Mirik Municipality where L.B. Rai, the chairman, has resigned from the GNLF. We will ideally want either the Kurseong subdivisional officer or the executive officer of the municipality to take charge of the civic body,” said Tamang.
The state government is expected to issue a notification for holding by-elections in the three vacant wards of the Darjeeling Municipality on May 29. (The Telegraph)
Binay Tamang, the media and publicity secretary of the Morcha, made the announcement today. “The party has decided to stop all work at the NHPC sites from June 7. We will also close down the corporation’s offices.”
The Morcha has already stopped movement of timber from the hills to the plains as part of its economic blockade programme designed to put pressure on the Bengal government. However, the decision to stop construction work at NHPC’s Teesta Low Dam Project (TLDP)-III and IV is likely to hit the country’s premier hydroelectric utility hard. NHPC is a central government enterprise.
“NHPC will earn crores from the projects but what will the hill people gain from them?” asked Roshan Giri, the general secretary of the Morcha. The party has recently revived the demand for Gorkhaland in the hills.
Although officials of the NHPC could not be contacted, sources said the corporation is looking to complete TLDP-III by the end of this year. The scheduled date of completion of TLDP-IV is September 2009.
While, TLDP-III is a Rs 768.92-crore project (according to estimates made in December 2002), TLDP-IV is estimated to cost Rs 1,061.38 crore. Both the sites are in the Rambhi-Kalijhora area, about 20km downstream from Teesta Bazar in the Kalimpong subdivision.
The two projects are the biggest in the area as TLDP-III is expected to generate 132mw of power and TLDP-IV 160mw.
The media and publicity secretary of the Morcha today confirmed that the party would hold a meeting of the central committee on May 29 to adopt a resolution for the immediate dissolution of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council. Morcha president Bimal Gurung had made the announcement in Siliguri on Sunday.
“We also want the Bengal government to take a decision on the Mirik Municipality where L.B. Rai, the chairman, has resigned from the GNLF. We will ideally want either the Kurseong subdivisional officer or the executive officer of the municipality to take charge of the civic body,” said Tamang.
The state government is expected to issue a notification for holding by-elections in the three vacant wards of the Darjeeling Municipality on May 29. (The Telegraph)
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
GJM says it will directly deal with Centre on Gorkhaland
With its proposal for a separate state of Gorkhaland being rejected outright by West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha on Monday said it would now deal directly with the Centre.
GJM General Secretary Roshan Giri said Bhattacharjee's proposal for greater autonomy, made in a meeting with the GJM in Kolkata three days back, was "meaningless and frustrating" because their movement was aimed at statehood and "nothing less".
However, Giri said, "We will keep our doors open for talks to be initiated by the Left Front government."
Meanwhile, GJM president Bimal Gurung yesterday demanded that the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council be dissolved immediately, arguing it had hindered the original demand for a state for the Gorkhas.
"However, as GJM was not officially empowered to dissolve the DGHC, a strategy to make it non-functional would be taken up in the central committee meeting of the party in a day or two."
Giri said all casual workers of the hill body would be asked to quit their jobs. A few permanent employees on deputation would be asked to return to their original postings virtually leaving the DGHC defunct.
Gurung's statement has set alarm bells ringing through the hills as 9,000 people were directly or indirectly employed in the DGHC. (The Hindu)
GJM General Secretary Roshan Giri said Bhattacharjee's proposal for greater autonomy, made in a meeting with the GJM in Kolkata three days back, was "meaningless and frustrating" because their movement was aimed at statehood and "nothing less".
However, Giri said, "We will keep our doors open for talks to be initiated by the Left Front government."
Meanwhile, GJM president Bimal Gurung yesterday demanded that the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council be dissolved immediately, arguing it had hindered the original demand for a state for the Gorkhas.
"However, as GJM was not officially empowered to dissolve the DGHC, a strategy to make it non-functional would be taken up in the central committee meeting of the party in a day or two."
Giri said all casual workers of the hill body would be asked to quit their jobs. A few permanent employees on deputation would be asked to return to their original postings virtually leaving the DGHC defunct.
Gurung's statement has set alarm bells ringing through the hills as 9,000 people were directly or indirectly employed in the DGHC. (The Hindu)
LF wants resolution to Darjeeling crisis
SILIGURI, May 26: The Left parties CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc have demanded an all-party meeting and the involvement of the Centre in the negotiation process for a viable solution to the Darjeeling tangle. “The issue is serious and the state government is not the exclusive authority to decide things. An all-party meeting should be convened and the Centre must be involved in the process without further delay,” the leaders of the LF constituents demanded. While the RSP is toying with the idea of reviving the Darjeeling ZP, all the three parties favoured a Constitutional amendment for a permanent solution. Welcoming the recent negotiation between the chief minister and the GJMM leadership in Kolkata the CPI said the seriousness of the issue required immediate involvement of the Centre. “A Constitutional amendment may be necessary in the direction of evolving a solution within the framework of the state. The Centre's involvement is required in the dialogue,” Mr Pijush Guha, a CPI state committee member said. “An all-party meeting should be convened and all the viewpoints should be heard. The Centre's role is vital,” the FB Darjeeling district secretary Mr Smritish Bhattacharya said. Taking a distinct stand on the issue the RSP floated a proposal of reviving the Darjeeling ZP after repealing the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council and the Siliguri mahakuma marishad. nSNS
BBBBS demands identification of Indian Nepalis before talks
Statesman News Service SILIGURI, May 26: The Bangla O Bangla Bhasa Bachao Samiti has demanded identification of the Indian Nepalis before negotiations between the state government and the representatives of the Darjeeling hill-based political outfits. “The Bengali populace of Siliguri would not give credence to any negotiation to untangle the Darjeeling crisis until the foreigners and the Indian Nepalis are differentiated,” Dr Mukunda Majumder, the president, BBBBS affirmed.“We suspect that some of the negotiators representing the hills are not from this country. Only the genuine Indian Nepalis are entitled to take part in the negotiations,” Dr Majumder said.He further said that 1950 should be declared the cut-off year for the identification of the Indian Nepalis and the antecedents of those having come into India after that year should be thoroughly looked into.“It is queer that there is yet no government instrumentation to distinguish the genuine citizens from the mere settlers. Taking advantage of government nonchalance, thousands of people from a neighboring country have been getting into India, settling down and then claim they were Indian citizens,” the BBBS leader affirmed.Terming the 1950 Indo-Nepal treaty a ‘bane’ for India and a ‘boon’ for Nepal, he demanded an immediate abrogation of the treaty. “It puzzles us why the Centre is not interested in reviewing the treaty, though the Nepali Maoist leader Prachanda has publicly advocated for its review from the end of Nepal's new dispensation,” he said.
Anti- Gorkhaland body to meet CM over GJMM’s use of DGHC property
Statesman News ServiceSILIGURI, May 25: The controversy over the unabated use of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council tourist resort ‘Pintail Village’ in Siliguri by the Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha for political purposes has been resented by a Siliguri based anti-Gorkhaland apolitical body. The body has decided to meet the chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on the issue.Named Janajagarana - the anti-Gorkhaland body, has worked out a delegation, which would meet the CM at the Writers’ Buildings in Kolkata. “We have approached the chief minister's office for an appointment and once we avail that, the delegation would leave for the Writers’,” said Mr Ashok Hore, joint secretary of the newly formed body. Expressing resentment at the ‘indiscriminate’ use of the ‘Pintail Village’ by the GJMM for political purpose, the Janajagarana leader said: “Mr Bimal Gurung is holding Press conferences at the resort regularly as if it was his party office. Despite this open misuse of a public property, the administration is keeping mum.”Janajagarana, which surfaced recently to campaign against the Gorkhaland demand revived by the GJMM, has also condemned Mr Gurung's call for dissolution of the DGHC. “He does not have any proven mandate to give such an undemocratic call and to risk the livelihood of thousands of individuals employed with the DGHC. In our meeting with the CM, we would also urge him to take a strong stand against such undemocratic gestures,” Mr Hore said.Meanwhile, the hill based political party, the All India Gorkha League too has criticised the GJMM for using the ‘Pintail Village’ for political purpose. “On one hand, Mr Bimal Gurung is calling for the dissolution of the DGHC, while on the other, his party is actively involved in the implementation of several development projects initiated by the Council in the hills. He is also using the ‘Pintail Village’ frequently. Are these not contradictory?” the AIGL president, Mr Madan Tamang questioned.However The DGHC Jalpaiguri divisional commissioner, Mr BL Meena did not have a say on the GJMM's use of ‘Pintail Village’.
Morcha to spare workers
Darjeeling, May 26: The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha has sought to reassure the contractual employees of the DGHC that their interests would be safeguarded even if the party decides to stick to its demand for the immediate dissolution of the hill council.
Morcha president Bimal Gurung had yesterday sent shockwaves across the hills when he said the central committee of the party would be adopting a resolution demanding the council’s dissolution. The DGHC employs more than 8,000 workers on six-month contracts.
“We want the immediate dissolution of the DGHC because whenever someone demands Gorkhaland, the Bengal government speaks about upgrading the council and the talks end in a stalemate. We no longer want this council. However, we have the welfare of the contractual workers on the top of our mind,” Binay Tamang, the media and publicity secretary of the Morcha, told The Telegraph today.
At a recent meeting with the Morcha in Calcutta, Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had shot down the party’s statehood demand and instead asked it to focus on greater autonomy for the hill council.
Tamang, however, refused to elaborate on how the Morcha planned to safeguard the interests of the contractual workers.
“We will hold a central committee meeting soon. Things will be clear after that and we don’t want to spell out everything now,” he said.
While the chief minister is unlikely to agree to dissolve the council, giving new jobs to all the contractual workers, along with the permanent ones who are on deputation from the state government, would be difficult, said observers. (The Telegraph)
Morcha president Bimal Gurung had yesterday sent shockwaves across the hills when he said the central committee of the party would be adopting a resolution demanding the council’s dissolution. The DGHC employs more than 8,000 workers on six-month contracts.
“We want the immediate dissolution of the DGHC because whenever someone demands Gorkhaland, the Bengal government speaks about upgrading the council and the talks end in a stalemate. We no longer want this council. However, we have the welfare of the contractual workers on the top of our mind,” Binay Tamang, the media and publicity secretary of the Morcha, told The Telegraph today.
At a recent meeting with the Morcha in Calcutta, Bengal chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee had shot down the party’s statehood demand and instead asked it to focus on greater autonomy for the hill council.
Tamang, however, refused to elaborate on how the Morcha planned to safeguard the interests of the contractual workers.
“We will hold a central committee meeting soon. Things will be clear after that and we don’t want to spell out everything now,” he said.
While the chief minister is unlikely to agree to dissolve the council, giving new jobs to all the contractual workers, along with the permanent ones who are on deputation from the state government, would be difficult, said observers. (The Telegraph)
Monday, May 26, 2008
Time to Think for Gurung: Issues Gorkhaland
The print media reported today that Bimal Gurung has threatened State government to dissolute the DGHC and the core committee of his party were ignorant about it.
The GNLF chief (Subash Ghisingh) was known to take decisions on his own without consulting his party members. Now Bimal Gurung is adapting the same character he had inherited from his mentor. One cannot delineate himself from his roots. The habits make the character and character is manifested in actions. He is again back to the same thinking which his mentor had.
“It is now the final battle, a battle for existence. The hill council has for the past 21 years been our main hurdle to achieving Gorkhaland. We are determined to achieve statehood and the state government will have to face the consequences of ignoring the demand,” Gurung said.
The public has the right to know why DGHC has become a hindrance to Gorkhaland. Is dissolution of DGHC is the only solution? The reported employee in print has rightly said ‘it would be difficult to fight for Gorkhaland in empty stomach’. If so does GJMM has alternative strategy to address this issue? If the kitchen stops in the houses Bimal Gurung will find no one to run after him. In earlier movement Sikkim was a great help but she is merged in her own problems, she may not be able to accommodate Darjeeling this time. Nor Nepal as Prachanda may not like it.
Is Morcha leadership panicking? Why are they showing their desperation? Earlier by removing Subash Ghisingh GJMM allowed a bureaucrat to administer the DGHC now whom does he want to bring in? The strategy of GJMM could be good but its effect is not in favor of the Hills. In the democracy if Bureaucrats are allowed the free hand the freedom automatically gets suppressed. Instead of making DGHC defunct why not GJMM remove the administrator and install some one who really knows the Hills and sympathetic to the movement?
Today, Gurung said, the Morcha was not willing to hold further dialogues with Bhattacharjee. “Since the chief minister has ignored our demand, we will now sit for discussions only with the central government,” Gurung said. However, he said, the talks should be tripartite and representatives of the state government would have to be present.
This is again diabolical; he does not want to talk with state but wants tripartite talks. First of all will Center heed his voice without the state’s interference?
If Bimal Gurung acts and thinks in this line people may raise question about his leadership. The way he is leading I don’t think he is leading in the correct direction. GJMM looks without focus. They have been busy in fighting with GNLF in the grass root to strengthen their base. This is OK but when they talk about the bigger goal of formation of Gorkhaland building of base and fighting with GNLF should be secondary. Once they are ahead with the movement success the base will automatically gets strengthen. The bigger picture of Gorkhaland is fine but GJMM should produce some tangible result. Till date what are the tangible results have they shown?
Subash Ghisingh was ousted from the chair of administrator. Impact of this act: Bureaucrat is installed.
Wanted to organize public meeting at Siliguri and had to fight with Ashok Bhattacharjee. Result: Organized the meeting. Impact: could show the strength of the demand.
Movement collaboration with KPP and Greater Coochbehar Democratic party. Impact: Not seen much.
Meeting with Chief Minister after CM told that he did not know it officially. Result: CM rejected the demand. Impact: started talking what ever it came in his mind without the knowledge of his core committee also.
Any positive breakthrough? I am not able to see.
What appears to me is that the GJMM has no focus and no concrete road map for Gorkhaland. Long term goal of Gorkhaland is fine but they should deliver some short term results which will harness people’s energy and create trust among people on his leadership. No leader has ever told that this is the way we are going. Every body talks about Gorkhaland but How no answer. Fasting is Ok, Rally is fine but where are the results? Without results who will follow him? Is it because of no impact intelligentsia, Media, businessmen, tourism people are not coming up openly?
Simply blaming state government will not give us Gorkhaland nor will the fast unto death bring minister to Hill to talk. Why have GJMM stopped the economic blockade? Why are people still paying taxes? Why do GJMM still promote tourism when all are suppose to be in the battle field? Yesterday in Kolkata TV 30 minutes of programme was telecasted on Darjeeling. Why are ministers allowed to inaugurate development projects when they are suppose to be opposed? When Bengal Government is playing an intellectual game why Gurung wants to show his muscle power by threatening to dissolute DGHC? This way he will be in loss from both sides (public as well as from Government).
Time to think for Gurung.
The GNLF chief (Subash Ghisingh) was known to take decisions on his own without consulting his party members. Now Bimal Gurung is adapting the same character he had inherited from his mentor. One cannot delineate himself from his roots. The habits make the character and character is manifested in actions. He is again back to the same thinking which his mentor had.
“It is now the final battle, a battle for existence. The hill council has for the past 21 years been our main hurdle to achieving Gorkhaland. We are determined to achieve statehood and the state government will have to face the consequences of ignoring the demand,” Gurung said.
The public has the right to know why DGHC has become a hindrance to Gorkhaland. Is dissolution of DGHC is the only solution? The reported employee in print has rightly said ‘it would be difficult to fight for Gorkhaland in empty stomach’. If so does GJMM has alternative strategy to address this issue? If the kitchen stops in the houses Bimal Gurung will find no one to run after him. In earlier movement Sikkim was a great help but she is merged in her own problems, she may not be able to accommodate Darjeeling this time. Nor Nepal as Prachanda may not like it.
Is Morcha leadership panicking? Why are they showing their desperation? Earlier by removing Subash Ghisingh GJMM allowed a bureaucrat to administer the DGHC now whom does he want to bring in? The strategy of GJMM could be good but its effect is not in favor of the Hills. In the democracy if Bureaucrats are allowed the free hand the freedom automatically gets suppressed. Instead of making DGHC defunct why not GJMM remove the administrator and install some one who really knows the Hills and sympathetic to the movement?
Today, Gurung said, the Morcha was not willing to hold further dialogues with Bhattacharjee. “Since the chief minister has ignored our demand, we will now sit for discussions only with the central government,” Gurung said. However, he said, the talks should be tripartite and representatives of the state government would have to be present.
This is again diabolical; he does not want to talk with state but wants tripartite talks. First of all will Center heed his voice without the state’s interference?
If Bimal Gurung acts and thinks in this line people may raise question about his leadership. The way he is leading I don’t think he is leading in the correct direction. GJMM looks without focus. They have been busy in fighting with GNLF in the grass root to strengthen their base. This is OK but when they talk about the bigger goal of formation of Gorkhaland building of base and fighting with GNLF should be secondary. Once they are ahead with the movement success the base will automatically gets strengthen. The bigger picture of Gorkhaland is fine but GJMM should produce some tangible result. Till date what are the tangible results have they shown?
Subash Ghisingh was ousted from the chair of administrator. Impact of this act: Bureaucrat is installed.
Wanted to organize public meeting at Siliguri and had to fight with Ashok Bhattacharjee. Result: Organized the meeting. Impact: could show the strength of the demand.
Movement collaboration with KPP and Greater Coochbehar Democratic party. Impact: Not seen much.
Meeting with Chief Minister after CM told that he did not know it officially. Result: CM rejected the demand. Impact: started talking what ever it came in his mind without the knowledge of his core committee also.
Any positive breakthrough? I am not able to see.
What appears to me is that the GJMM has no focus and no concrete road map for Gorkhaland. Long term goal of Gorkhaland is fine but they should deliver some short term results which will harness people’s energy and create trust among people on his leadership. No leader has ever told that this is the way we are going. Every body talks about Gorkhaland but How no answer. Fasting is Ok, Rally is fine but where are the results? Without results who will follow him? Is it because of no impact intelligentsia, Media, businessmen, tourism people are not coming up openly?
Simply blaming state government will not give us Gorkhaland nor will the fast unto death bring minister to Hill to talk. Why have GJMM stopped the economic blockade? Why are people still paying taxes? Why do GJMM still promote tourism when all are suppose to be in the battle field? Yesterday in Kolkata TV 30 minutes of programme was telecasted on Darjeeling. Why are ministers allowed to inaugurate development projects when they are suppose to be opposed? When Bengal Government is playing an intellectual game why Gurung wants to show his muscle power by threatening to dissolute DGHC? This way he will be in loss from both sides (public as well as from Government).
Time to think for Gurung.
Gurung demands DGHC dissolution
Statesman News Service SILIGURI, May 25:
The Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha (GJMM) president, Mr Bimal Gurung, has demanded an immediate dissolution of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC), which came to existence in 1988, facilitating limited autonomy to the hill areas of Darjeeling district. Addressing a Press conference at the DGHC resort ‘Pintail Village’ in Siliguri this afternoon, Mr Gurung also said that the GJMM would soon launch a severe movement to realise the demand. “DGHC is an ‘hindrance in the way of achieving a separate Gorkhaland state and hence, it needs to be dissolved at once. Our central committee would be meeting in a day or two to discuss a resolution on that and also to chalk out a detailed agitation on the issue,” the GJMM president said. Mr Gurung's statement comes three days after the chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told a GJMM delegation at Writers’ on 22 May that a separate Gorkhaland state was simply not possible and proposed giving further autonomy to the DGHC instead. Peeved at the rejection of the statehood demand, Mr Gurung, who was earlier all praises for the chief minister, today took a dig at him as well. “The CM only looks mild and handsome, but he is very ugly at heart,” he said, adding that in future the GJMM would not sit for any dialogue with Mr Bhattacharjee. Clarifying more, the GJMM president said, henceforth, his party would like to discuss the Gorkhaland issue directly with the Centre and demanded that the UPA government intervene in the matter immediately. Meanwhile, the demand for dissolution of the DGHC is bound to evoke a major impact in the Darjeeling Hills.Including the casual staffs, the DGHC employs about 9,000 individuals across the hills and dissolving the Council would hit their livelihood directly. The GJMM general secretary, Mr Roshan Giri, has however said that the party would take the DGHC employees into confidence before going ahead with the agitation on the demand for dissolution of the DGHC.
Down with DGHC: Morcha - Council: a stumbling block to statehood (The Telegraph)
Siliguri, May 25: The Gorkha Jammukti Morcha as part of its “final battle” wants the DGHC to be dissolved. Party president Bimal Gurung today threatened to give a call in the hills to disregard the council, as it has become a stumbling block to attaining a separate state.
The decision, if ratified by the Morcha central committee, would lead to the boycott of all DGHC activities, Gurung added.
The threat follows the chief minister’s response to the Morcha demand for Gorkhaland. A four-member Morcha delegation had met Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee last week and presented him with a map of the proposed areas — Darjeeling, Siliguri, the Dooars and the Terai — of the new state. The chief minister rejected the statehood demand and instead asked the Morcha to sit for talks so that DGHC could be strengthened through amendments.
Home secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti, who was present at the meeting, had said the chief minister had also asked the Morcha to steer clear of organisations like the Kamtapur Progressive Party and the Greater Cooch Behar Democratic Party. Both want Cooch Behar district to be declared a state and are supporting the Morcha in its Gorkhaland demand.
The chief minister’s rejection of the statehood demand had not gone down well with the Morcha, which also wanted the Centre to be a part of the talks.
Today, Gurung said, the Morcha was not willing to hold further dialogues with Bhattacharjee. “Since the chief minister has ignored our demand, we will now sit for discussions only with the central government,” Gurung said. However, he said, the talks should be tripartite and representatives of the state government would have to be present.
“We are going to hold our central committee meeting in the next three-four days in Darjeeling. After passing a resolution, we will ask all workers on contract at the council to resign from their jobs,” Gurung said at a hurriedly called news conference at Pintail Village, 5km from here, this afternoon.
The Morcha chief alleged that the chief minister had not given much importance to the party’s demand for Gorkhaland. “He told the delegation members that there would be problems if the demand was met,” Gurung said.
To the Morcha, Bhattacharjee’s statement had triggered the call for the “final battle”.
“It is now the final battle, a battle for existence. The hill council has for the past 21 years been our main hurdle to achieving Gorkhaland. We are determined to achieve statehood and the state government will have to face the consequences of ignoring the demand,” Gurung said.
Statesman News Service SILIGURI, May 25:
The Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha (GJMM) president, Mr Bimal Gurung, has demanded an immediate dissolution of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC), which came to existence in 1988, facilitating limited autonomy to the hill areas of Darjeeling district. Addressing a Press conference at the DGHC resort ‘Pintail Village’ in Siliguri this afternoon, Mr Gurung also said that the GJMM would soon launch a severe movement to realise the demand. “DGHC is an ‘hindrance in the way of achieving a separate Gorkhaland state and hence, it needs to be dissolved at once. Our central committee would be meeting in a day or two to discuss a resolution on that and also to chalk out a detailed agitation on the issue,” the GJMM president said. Mr Gurung's statement comes three days after the chief minister Mr Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee told a GJMM delegation at Writers’ on 22 May that a separate Gorkhaland state was simply not possible and proposed giving further autonomy to the DGHC instead. Peeved at the rejection of the statehood demand, Mr Gurung, who was earlier all praises for the chief minister, today took a dig at him as well. “The CM only looks mild and handsome, but he is very ugly at heart,” he said, adding that in future the GJMM would not sit for any dialogue with Mr Bhattacharjee. Clarifying more, the GJMM president said, henceforth, his party would like to discuss the Gorkhaland issue directly with the Centre and demanded that the UPA government intervene in the matter immediately. Meanwhile, the demand for dissolution of the DGHC is bound to evoke a major impact in the Darjeeling Hills.Including the casual staffs, the DGHC employs about 9,000 individuals across the hills and dissolving the Council would hit their livelihood directly. The GJMM general secretary, Mr Roshan Giri, has however said that the party would take the DGHC employees into confidence before going ahead with the agitation on the demand for dissolution of the DGHC.
Down with DGHC: Morcha - Council: a stumbling block to statehood (The Telegraph)
Siliguri, May 25: The Gorkha Jammukti Morcha as part of its “final battle” wants the DGHC to be dissolved. Party president Bimal Gurung today threatened to give a call in the hills to disregard the council, as it has become a stumbling block to attaining a separate state.
The decision, if ratified by the Morcha central committee, would lead to the boycott of all DGHC activities, Gurung added.
The threat follows the chief minister’s response to the Morcha demand for Gorkhaland. A four-member Morcha delegation had met Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee last week and presented him with a map of the proposed areas — Darjeeling, Siliguri, the Dooars and the Terai — of the new state. The chief minister rejected the statehood demand and instead asked the Morcha to sit for talks so that DGHC could be strengthened through amendments.
Home secretary Asok Mohan Chakrabarti, who was present at the meeting, had said the chief minister had also asked the Morcha to steer clear of organisations like the Kamtapur Progressive Party and the Greater Cooch Behar Democratic Party. Both want Cooch Behar district to be declared a state and are supporting the Morcha in its Gorkhaland demand.
The chief minister’s rejection of the statehood demand had not gone down well with the Morcha, which also wanted the Centre to be a part of the talks.
Today, Gurung said, the Morcha was not willing to hold further dialogues with Bhattacharjee. “Since the chief minister has ignored our demand, we will now sit for discussions only with the central government,” Gurung said. However, he said, the talks should be tripartite and representatives of the state government would have to be present.
“We are going to hold our central committee meeting in the next three-four days in Darjeeling. After passing a resolution, we will ask all workers on contract at the council to resign from their jobs,” Gurung said at a hurriedly called news conference at Pintail Village, 5km from here, this afternoon.
The Morcha chief alleged that the chief minister had not given much importance to the party’s demand for Gorkhaland. “He told the delegation members that there would be problems if the demand was met,” Gurung said.
To the Morcha, Bhattacharjee’s statement had triggered the call for the “final battle”.
“It is now the final battle, a battle for existence. The hill council has for the past 21 years been our main hurdle to achieving Gorkhaland. We are determined to achieve statehood and the state government will have to face the consequences of ignoring the demand,” Gurung said.
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Dr. Binayak Sen (collected voices)
THE EDITORIAL, Times of India May 22, 2008
The detention of Binayak Sen, a respected doctor and civil rightsactivist, by the Chhattisgarh government is a blot on our democracy.The Chhattisgarh police arrested him a year ago under theChhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 on charges of aidingMaoists.The police have charged Sen, winner of the 2008 Jonathan Mann awardfor global health and human rights instituted by the Global HealthCouncil, of acting as a courier for Maoists. His appeal for bail hasbeen turned down despite appeals from many public intellectualsacross the world, including 22 Nobel laureates. Clearly, the courtand police are unwilling to consider his exemplary record as a healthand civil rights activist in one of the most underdeveloped regionsof the country.The Chhattisgarh government's stance on the issue compromises itsresponsibility to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Everycitizen has a right to speech and association and the governmentought to protect these rights. Even if one assumes that Sen issympathetic to Maoist ideology, as alleged by the police, he has aright to uphold his views unless proven to have violated the law inthe process. He also has a right to a speedy and fair trial. Sen isheld guilty by association and the government is unwilling torecognise its mistake despite pleas from all around.The Chhattisgarh government has a hard task at hand, no doubt.Maoists are a powerful threat and have stretched the resources of thegovernment. Unfortunately, the government's policies to counter themare bad in law and practice. Security measures like Salwa Judum andharassment of political and civil rights activists have only erodedthe credibility of the government. A strong civil society thatvouchsafes political and economic rights is necessary to exposeextremist ideologies like Maoism.As India sets out to expand its influence in global affairs, itsrecord on civil rights will increasingly be under scrutiny. Nogovernment can claim special powers and suspend civil rights likefreedom of speech and association. Extremist political groups likeMaoists don't thrive because of a liberal legal framework, but theycertainly would benefit from its absence.Sen's trial has now started after a year spent in prison. Scores ofsimilar undertrials languishing in Indian jails fare worse. It justdoesn't do any good to India's brand image as a country that protectscivil rights. Democracy enhances India's soft power potential on theworld stage. However, disregard for democratic rights will take thesheen off India's patchy but promising record as a liberal democracy.
THE EDITORIAL in THE ECONOMIC TIMES:
Shift the terror paradigm22 May, 2008, 0000 hrs IST, TNN
The dominant discourse on terrorism in India is bogged down bydetails of instrumentalities. The responses the Jaipur blasts haveevoked indicate that. None of those responses — whether it is thePM's stress on the need for a new federal agency, or the ChiefJustice of India calling for a new legal framework to tackleterrorism, or the BJP's clamour for 'tough' anti-terror laws — haveaddressed the fundamental question of political processes thatunderpin state apparatuses.In such circumstances, one instrumentality would be as good or bad asany other. India, clearly, needs to shift its state-centric counter-terrorism paradigm to one that focuses primarily on politics on theground. The point is not that the state has no role in tacklingterrorism. But that the effectiveness of its institutions, agenciesand instrumentalities would be a direct function of their legitimacy,which can be expanded and reinforced only through politicalengagement with various social constituents.Community policing, which would ensure accurate intelligencegathering and credible investigation, cannot be effective unless thesterile politics of either terrorising religious minorities and othermarginal groups in the name of majoritarian and elitist prejudices,or patronising and ghettoising them in the name of secularism andsocial justice is replaced with a new politics. One that engages andempowers those groups and transforms them into constituents of modernsociety.It is precisely the absence of such politics that has deprivedmarginal groups of agency. That, needless to say, has beenresponsible for the failure of the system to deliver effectivejustice in cases like the massacre of Muslims by UP PAC in Hashimpurain 1987, the 1992-93 Mumbai riots and post-Godhra riots of 2002.Worse, institutional partisanship has found the requisite politicalwill to express itself through legislation such as theunconstitutional Chhattisgarh State Public Security Act, which hasled to the year-long detention of reputed civil and medical rightsactivist Dr Binayak Sen on flimsy grounds. It would be hard toimagine how social groups would want to willingly cooperate with asystem that has alienated and coerced them thus.
ENEMIES OF THE STATE - Women and men who choose the margins
Cutting Corners Ashok Mitra (The Telegraph) 23/5/08
She was born Krishna Chandavarkar. Love for music ran in the family. She had, even as a tiny tot, a deep, rich, sonorous voice. Rigorous training undergone in the early teens strengthened its texture; it also helped her to negotiate effortlessly the hills and valleys the scales encompassed. The cadence of sensitivity was, however, her very own. Demand for her renditions was intense in the neighbourhood. Another Kishori Amonkar, many thought, was about to emerge. She disappointed them. The prowess of her will nudged her away from music to pursuits of the intellect. There was, in addition, an innate concern for social issues.
Ideology is not an inherited property, it is a gift of the environment one breathes in. In Krishna’s case it was perhaps the influence of an uncle or a cousin coming home full of radical ideas after a term in prison. The stirrings were yet vague, but Krishna had already sorted out in her mind the dilemma of choices and decisions. She opted for economics; the intent was to use the knowledge acquired from this branch of study to advance the cause of the nation’s under-privileged. Krishna turned out to be a star student in the Bombay School of Economics and Sociology and began her teaching career there. She married a fellow economist, Ranganath Bharadwaj, and the two of them decided to travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for further research. The wife was indisputably more brilliant than the husband. This could have been a factor, or it could have been something else; they separated soon after their daughter, Sudha, arrived. Krishna got her PhD, returned to Bombay and kept winning laurels for her forays into hitherto unexplored frontiers of economic theory. Simultaneously she continued work on issues of income inequalities and the production function in Indian agriculture.
While all this was happening, a curious incident took place. The economist, Piero Sraffa, friend and confidant of both Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, was a recluse in Cambridge, England, silently toiling away on editing the works of David Ricardo. He was widely known for both the profundity of the wisdom he tucked into himself and his reluctance to transcribe this wisdom into writing. It was general knowledge though that he was trying to build a halfway house between Marx and Ricardo. His little volume, crammed with insight, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, got published in the early Sixties and took the world of economics by storm. Few could grasp its implications and long critiques were written here and there, with the object of interpreting Sraffa’s point of view. Sachin Chaudhuri, editor of Bombay’s Economic Weekly, had an unerring instinct for discerning who could do what most effectively. He gave the review copy of Sraffa’s book to Krishna Bharadwaj. The review article Krishna wrote created a flutter in the academic dovecots: the world now knew what Sraffa meant. Krishna’s piece became a classic, perhaps the only instance of a review article being set down as compulsory text in university curricula.
Krishna moved from Bombay to the Delhi School of Economics and, after a few years, to the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She lectured, researched, produced papers and, during sabbaticals, dug roots in Cambridge to edit the collection of Sraffa’s writings. Sraffa, who had become Krishna’s close personal friend, had meanwhile passed away, but she took upon herself the Sraffa quest of establishing a bridge between Ricardo and Marx. Her life was, however, cut short in the early Nineties, by the virulence of a malignant brain tumour.
It is not so much of Krishna, but of her daughter, Sudha, that one wants to talk about though. Sudha was a prodigy in every sense of the term. For instance, while still barely seven or eight, she would engage in debates on logical positivism, mercilessly laying bare the entrails of the doctrine. The only child of a busy, divorcée mother, she had to create her own world and build her own hypotheses. She sat through all her examinations with an easy nonchalance, topping in each of them. Her five years at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, were a repetition of the story. A piping first class resting in her pocket, the world was at her feet, more so since, by virtue of the place of her birth, she was the possessor of an American passport.
She could have gone away to the US, earned academic plaudits and plenty of money in a university position. She could have joined a transnational corporation as some sort of a technical apparat. She could have become a management guru in India itself, or travelled high along the totem pole of the Indian administrative service. She did none of these. Once she reached the age of 18, she walked to the US embassy in New Delhi, disowned her American nationality, and returned her passport. Sudha then slipped away into the wilderness of the Chhattisgarh forests.
She was, for a time, associated with Shankar Guha Neogi’s devoted group at Bhilai, fighting against the rampant corruption indulged in by middle- and low-level bureaucrats and local contractors. To wrest proper wages for the toiling workers in the mines and plants located in the region was a major item on her agenda. She soon branched out to the wider issues of Dalit and tribal rights. Sudha began living with the adivasis, and learnt fast to think in the manner they do. She and her husband adopted an adivasi child as their daughter. It has been a life of relentless struggle: to establish and protect the rights of the Dalit and tribal population, the right for land, the right for education, for health and for security against marauding landlords and rentiers.
Which is to say, Sudha is engaged in the same kind of activities Binayak Sen was more or less engaged in, again in Chhattisgarh. The authorities have a particular way of sizing up individuals like Binayak Sen and Sudha Bharadwaj: these people mix too much with the tribals, therefore they are dangerous. Any person or group of persons working for the cause of tribals is officially ordained enemy of the State, any agitation to establish tribal rights is reckoned as insurrectionary activity. Sen was taken in precisely on this ground. His sphere of work was providing health facilities, and the dissemination of information about such facilities, among the tribal population. He was therefore a marked man and was arrested. Conceivably, Sudha’s fate will be no different.
For every 9,999 young Indians from affluent families who either fly away to the US or join a trans-national corporation or choose to be a programming boss in an IT outfit or aspire to be top brass in the government system, there will still be a Binayak Sen or Sudha Bharadwaj. This is bound to be so since, every now and then, rationality, which is an integral element of the human mind, tends to assert itself against the rampant asymmetry of the human condition. True, not all rational minds always think rationally. One or two nonetheless do. The 9,999 young Indians who choose the primrose path will, it goes without saying, roll in money. A Binayak Sen or a Sudha Bharadwaj will live a hard, marginal existence. A question will still keep nagging. If economists and mathematicians succeed in arriving at a common measure for accretions to national welfare on the basis of today and what would accrue in the future and are, at the same time, able to assign comparable weights to contribution by individual citizens, will not the contributions of Binayak and Sudha far outflank those by the rest of the crowd?
The detention of Binayak Sen, a respected doctor and civil rightsactivist, by the Chhattisgarh government is a blot on our democracy.The Chhattisgarh police arrested him a year ago under theChhattisgarh Special Public Security Act, 2005 on charges of aidingMaoists.The police have charged Sen, winner of the 2008 Jonathan Mann awardfor global health and human rights instituted by the Global HealthCouncil, of acting as a courier for Maoists. His appeal for bail hasbeen turned down despite appeals from many public intellectualsacross the world, including 22 Nobel laureates. Clearly, the courtand police are unwilling to consider his exemplary record as a healthand civil rights activist in one of the most underdeveloped regionsof the country.The Chhattisgarh government's stance on the issue compromises itsresponsibility to the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Everycitizen has a right to speech and association and the governmentought to protect these rights. Even if one assumes that Sen issympathetic to Maoist ideology, as alleged by the police, he has aright to uphold his views unless proven to have violated the law inthe process. He also has a right to a speedy and fair trial. Sen isheld guilty by association and the government is unwilling torecognise its mistake despite pleas from all around.The Chhattisgarh government has a hard task at hand, no doubt.Maoists are a powerful threat and have stretched the resources of thegovernment. Unfortunately, the government's policies to counter themare bad in law and practice. Security measures like Salwa Judum andharassment of political and civil rights activists have only erodedthe credibility of the government. A strong civil society thatvouchsafes political and economic rights is necessary to exposeextremist ideologies like Maoism.As India sets out to expand its influence in global affairs, itsrecord on civil rights will increasingly be under scrutiny. Nogovernment can claim special powers and suspend civil rights likefreedom of speech and association. Extremist political groups likeMaoists don't thrive because of a liberal legal framework, but theycertainly would benefit from its absence.Sen's trial has now started after a year spent in prison. Scores ofsimilar undertrials languishing in Indian jails fare worse. It justdoesn't do any good to India's brand image as a country that protectscivil rights. Democracy enhances India's soft power potential on theworld stage. However, disregard for democratic rights will take thesheen off India's patchy but promising record as a liberal democracy.
THE EDITORIAL in THE ECONOMIC TIMES:
Shift the terror paradigm22 May, 2008, 0000 hrs IST, TNN
The dominant discourse on terrorism in India is bogged down bydetails of instrumentalities. The responses the Jaipur blasts haveevoked indicate that. None of those responses — whether it is thePM's stress on the need for a new federal agency, or the ChiefJustice of India calling for a new legal framework to tackleterrorism, or the BJP's clamour for 'tough' anti-terror laws — haveaddressed the fundamental question of political processes thatunderpin state apparatuses.In such circumstances, one instrumentality would be as good or bad asany other. India, clearly, needs to shift its state-centric counter-terrorism paradigm to one that focuses primarily on politics on theground. The point is not that the state has no role in tacklingterrorism. But that the effectiveness of its institutions, agenciesand instrumentalities would be a direct function of their legitimacy,which can be expanded and reinforced only through politicalengagement with various social constituents.Community policing, which would ensure accurate intelligencegathering and credible investigation, cannot be effective unless thesterile politics of either terrorising religious minorities and othermarginal groups in the name of majoritarian and elitist prejudices,or patronising and ghettoising them in the name of secularism andsocial justice is replaced with a new politics. One that engages andempowers those groups and transforms them into constituents of modernsociety.It is precisely the absence of such politics that has deprivedmarginal groups of agency. That, needless to say, has beenresponsible for the failure of the system to deliver effectivejustice in cases like the massacre of Muslims by UP PAC in Hashimpurain 1987, the 1992-93 Mumbai riots and post-Godhra riots of 2002.Worse, institutional partisanship has found the requisite politicalwill to express itself through legislation such as theunconstitutional Chhattisgarh State Public Security Act, which hasled to the year-long detention of reputed civil and medical rightsactivist Dr Binayak Sen on flimsy grounds. It would be hard toimagine how social groups would want to willingly cooperate with asystem that has alienated and coerced them thus.
ENEMIES OF THE STATE - Women and men who choose the margins
Cutting Corners Ashok Mitra (The Telegraph) 23/5/08
She was born Krishna Chandavarkar. Love for music ran in the family. She had, even as a tiny tot, a deep, rich, sonorous voice. Rigorous training undergone in the early teens strengthened its texture; it also helped her to negotiate effortlessly the hills and valleys the scales encompassed. The cadence of sensitivity was, however, her very own. Demand for her renditions was intense in the neighbourhood. Another Kishori Amonkar, many thought, was about to emerge. She disappointed them. The prowess of her will nudged her away from music to pursuits of the intellect. There was, in addition, an innate concern for social issues.
Ideology is not an inherited property, it is a gift of the environment one breathes in. In Krishna’s case it was perhaps the influence of an uncle or a cousin coming home full of radical ideas after a term in prison. The stirrings were yet vague, but Krishna had already sorted out in her mind the dilemma of choices and decisions. She opted for economics; the intent was to use the knowledge acquired from this branch of study to advance the cause of the nation’s under-privileged. Krishna turned out to be a star student in the Bombay School of Economics and Sociology and began her teaching career there. She married a fellow economist, Ranganath Bharadwaj, and the two of them decided to travel to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for further research. The wife was indisputably more brilliant than the husband. This could have been a factor, or it could have been something else; they separated soon after their daughter, Sudha, arrived. Krishna got her PhD, returned to Bombay and kept winning laurels for her forays into hitherto unexplored frontiers of economic theory. Simultaneously she continued work on issues of income inequalities and the production function in Indian agriculture.
While all this was happening, a curious incident took place. The economist, Piero Sraffa, friend and confidant of both Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, was a recluse in Cambridge, England, silently toiling away on editing the works of David Ricardo. He was widely known for both the profundity of the wisdom he tucked into himself and his reluctance to transcribe this wisdom into writing. It was general knowledge though that he was trying to build a halfway house between Marx and Ricardo. His little volume, crammed with insight, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities, got published in the early Sixties and took the world of economics by storm. Few could grasp its implications and long critiques were written here and there, with the object of interpreting Sraffa’s point of view. Sachin Chaudhuri, editor of Bombay’s Economic Weekly, had an unerring instinct for discerning who could do what most effectively. He gave the review copy of Sraffa’s book to Krishna Bharadwaj. The review article Krishna wrote created a flutter in the academic dovecots: the world now knew what Sraffa meant. Krishna’s piece became a classic, perhaps the only instance of a review article being set down as compulsory text in university curricula.
Krishna moved from Bombay to the Delhi School of Economics and, after a few years, to the Jawaharlal Nehru University. She lectured, researched, produced papers and, during sabbaticals, dug roots in Cambridge to edit the collection of Sraffa’s writings. Sraffa, who had become Krishna’s close personal friend, had meanwhile passed away, but she took upon herself the Sraffa quest of establishing a bridge between Ricardo and Marx. Her life was, however, cut short in the early Nineties, by the virulence of a malignant brain tumour.
It is not so much of Krishna, but of her daughter, Sudha, that one wants to talk about though. Sudha was a prodigy in every sense of the term. For instance, while still barely seven or eight, she would engage in debates on logical positivism, mercilessly laying bare the entrails of the doctrine. The only child of a busy, divorcée mother, she had to create her own world and build her own hypotheses. She sat through all her examinations with an easy nonchalance, topping in each of them. Her five years at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, were a repetition of the story. A piping first class resting in her pocket, the world was at her feet, more so since, by virtue of the place of her birth, she was the possessor of an American passport.
She could have gone away to the US, earned academic plaudits and plenty of money in a university position. She could have joined a transnational corporation as some sort of a technical apparat. She could have become a management guru in India itself, or travelled high along the totem pole of the Indian administrative service. She did none of these. Once she reached the age of 18, she walked to the US embassy in New Delhi, disowned her American nationality, and returned her passport. Sudha then slipped away into the wilderness of the Chhattisgarh forests.
She was, for a time, associated with Shankar Guha Neogi’s devoted group at Bhilai, fighting against the rampant corruption indulged in by middle- and low-level bureaucrats and local contractors. To wrest proper wages for the toiling workers in the mines and plants located in the region was a major item on her agenda. She soon branched out to the wider issues of Dalit and tribal rights. Sudha began living with the adivasis, and learnt fast to think in the manner they do. She and her husband adopted an adivasi child as their daughter. It has been a life of relentless struggle: to establish and protect the rights of the Dalit and tribal population, the right for land, the right for education, for health and for security against marauding landlords and rentiers.
Which is to say, Sudha is engaged in the same kind of activities Binayak Sen was more or less engaged in, again in Chhattisgarh. The authorities have a particular way of sizing up individuals like Binayak Sen and Sudha Bharadwaj: these people mix too much with the tribals, therefore they are dangerous. Any person or group of persons working for the cause of tribals is officially ordained enemy of the State, any agitation to establish tribal rights is reckoned as insurrectionary activity. Sen was taken in precisely on this ground. His sphere of work was providing health facilities, and the dissemination of information about such facilities, among the tribal population. He was therefore a marked man and was arrested. Conceivably, Sudha’s fate will be no different.
For every 9,999 young Indians from affluent families who either fly away to the US or join a trans-national corporation or choose to be a programming boss in an IT outfit or aspire to be top brass in the government system, there will still be a Binayak Sen or Sudha Bharadwaj. This is bound to be so since, every now and then, rationality, which is an integral element of the human mind, tends to assert itself against the rampant asymmetry of the human condition. True, not all rational minds always think rationally. One or two nonetheless do. The 9,999 young Indians who choose the primrose path will, it goes without saying, roll in money. A Binayak Sen or a Sudha Bharadwaj will live a hard, marginal existence. A question will still keep nagging. If economists and mathematicians succeed in arriving at a common measure for accretions to national welfare on the basis of today and what would accrue in the future and are, at the same time, able to assign comparable weights to contribution by individual citizens, will not the contributions of Binayak and Sudha far outflank those by the rest of the crowd?
Some hope for Darjeeling's water woes
Press Trust of India
Sunday, May 25, 2008 (Siliguri)
Besides political turmoil, the Queen of the Hills, Darjeeling, has been crippled for decades by a water crisis, but this may end with the completion of a number of projects.A problem was that the West Bengal government could not take any initiative as water was a subject of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, an autonomous body that runs the administrations in the three hill subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalmpong and Kurseong.Just a year ago, former hills strongman, Subhas Ghising, allowed the Public Health Engineering Department to take up a Rs 55 crore project aimed at lifting water from the river Balasan in Siliguri in three phases for supply to Darjeeling and Kurseong after treatment.If everything went according to plan, the hills were sure to get the water by the end of 2009, said Minister for Public Health Engineering, Goutam Deb.He also urged the Centre to increase its share of the project cost of Rupees 10 crore to twenty crore which would accelerate the project.
Sunday, May 25, 2008 (Siliguri)
Besides political turmoil, the Queen of the Hills, Darjeeling, has been crippled for decades by a water crisis, but this may end with the completion of a number of projects.A problem was that the West Bengal government could not take any initiative as water was a subject of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, an autonomous body that runs the administrations in the three hill subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kalmpong and Kurseong.Just a year ago, former hills strongman, Subhas Ghising, allowed the Public Health Engineering Department to take up a Rs 55 crore project aimed at lifting water from the river Balasan in Siliguri in three phases for supply to Darjeeling and Kurseong after treatment.If everything went according to plan, the hills were sure to get the water by the end of 2009, said Minister for Public Health Engineering, Goutam Deb.He also urged the Centre to increase its share of the project cost of Rupees 10 crore to twenty crore which would accelerate the project.
Pranab happy with Congress poll performance
KOLKATA: External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee on Saturday said that he was happy with the Congress performance in the West Bengal panchayat elections, but he would not offer any instant reactions. “ Unlike instant coffee, there are no instant reactions that can be given,” he said avoiding any comment on the Left’s performance.
Looking visibly pleased he said: “I am happy with the results of the Congress as well as the Trinamool Congress which has done very well. This sort of Opposition is good for democracy”, he said while talking to reporters.
Mr.Mukherjee said that there was need to analyse the election results and the West Bengal Pradesh Congress chief was right now collecting report from various places which will be analysed. “Elections reflect people’s verdict and there is a need for the political parties to analyse the results and then try to take lessons.” He refused to be drawn into any discussion as to whether the results were a verdict on the Left’s land acquisition process.
To a question on the nuclear deal, he said that while he had no idea of what had transpired at the meeting called by the Left parties to discuss the issue among themselves, a UPA-Left meeting has been called on May 28 to discuss the nuclear deal, he said.Food crisis
Earlier inaugurating the annual conference of the National Institute of Personnel Management, he said that in view of the world food crisis, India would need to produce not only for herself but for her neighbours too.
He mentioned that India’s wheat production was 20 million tonnes against a target of 14 million tonnes.
This was revealed at a recent meeting of the group of ministers.
On the conference theme on human capital, he said that while the economy’s rate of growth had to be ensured to absorb more people gainfully, there was also a need to increase investment in education through public-private partnership models.
“Beginnings have already been made through a 11th plan programme to upgrade 309 industrial training institutes in 29 States. This project is likely to be completed by the terminal year of the plan,” he said. (The Hindu)
Looking visibly pleased he said: “I am happy with the results of the Congress as well as the Trinamool Congress which has done very well. This sort of Opposition is good for democracy”, he said while talking to reporters.
Mr.Mukherjee said that there was need to analyse the election results and the West Bengal Pradesh Congress chief was right now collecting report from various places which will be analysed. “Elections reflect people’s verdict and there is a need for the political parties to analyse the results and then try to take lessons.” He refused to be drawn into any discussion as to whether the results were a verdict on the Left’s land acquisition process.
To a question on the nuclear deal, he said that while he had no idea of what had transpired at the meeting called by the Left parties to discuss the issue among themselves, a UPA-Left meeting has been called on May 28 to discuss the nuclear deal, he said.Food crisis
Earlier inaugurating the annual conference of the National Institute of Personnel Management, he said that in view of the world food crisis, India would need to produce not only for herself but for her neighbours too.
He mentioned that India’s wheat production was 20 million tonnes against a target of 14 million tonnes.
This was revealed at a recent meeting of the group of ministers.
On the conference theme on human capital, he said that while the economy’s rate of growth had to be ensured to absorb more people gainfully, there was also a need to increase investment in education through public-private partnership models.
“Beginnings have already been made through a 11th plan programme to upgrade 309 industrial training institutes in 29 States. This project is likely to be completed by the terminal year of the plan,” he said. (The Hindu)
Double Jeopardy: (Perspectives on West bengal)
M.J. Akbar, letters@covert.co.in
There is a television game called "Double Jeopardy" built around the rather depressing thought that the answer to a problem might be a problem in itself. India's Marxists have just discovered that this game could spill over into reality.
Moralists have long condemned those politicians who enjoy power without responsibility. The CPI(M) is now discovering the pain of having responsibility without power. That is probably closer to a triple jeopardy.
If ever there was a double jeopardy in politics, then the hammering they have just received across West Bengal in the "panchayat" elections is a gloomy, or glowering, example. From control of 2,303 village "panchayats" in 2003, the CPI(M)-led Left Front has stumbled to 1,633; the Mamata Banerjee-led disunited opposition ascended from 917 to 1,463. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress won more than three-fourths of the village councils.
Two facts stand out in the Bengal results: Mamata won villages that she had not even bothered to campaign in; and the most decisive shift away from the Left was the Muslim vote which it has wooed so consistently with its absolutist opposition to the BJP. The upsurge against the Left in Bengal is therefore greater than these results indicate. If this pattern holds then the Left could lose more than 15 seats in the next general elections.
And it is no longer sufficient to go red each time you see saffron in order to pocket Muslim votes. Muslims want more, including bread and education. As the Sachar Committee's report proved, during more than three decades in power the Left has given neither to Bengal's Muslims. It has certainly provided security to the community, but that is not enough.
You cannot take land with impunity from the Bengali Muslim peasant and yet frighten him into voting for you. That era is over. The tectonic shift in the Muslim vote has cut the ground from under the CPI(M)'s Fortress Bengal.
There are many reasons why the Muslims did not revolt against the Left Front before. The leadership of Jyoti Basu was both charismatic and reassuring. Basu knew the language that would communicate with the people, even if in practical terms (that is, bread and education) he did not do very much. He shepherded the community through its most vulnerable phase, 1970s and 1980s, with the kind of concern that the sentimental might even confuse with affection. It was psychologically impossible for Muslims to leave the CPI(M) as long as Jyoti Basu was at the helm. His successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, was another matter. Buddhadev had been insensitive to Muslim sentiment even when a minister in Basu's Cabinet. Muslims might have accepted his lectures on the "azaan" and "madrasas" if he had begun to address their bread-and-education concerns. Instead, the lectures came with the most appalling usurpation of land in Singur and Nandigram. Muslims were among the worst affected.
There is a phenomenon that is being shrouded by the shift of the Muslim vote toward Mamata Banerjee. In the 1960s, as Bengal's Muslims abandoned the Congress, many of them first went to marginal parties, including outfits led by the clergy. In the elections of the late 1960s, parties that were variations of the Muslim League set up candidates and got a reasonable chunk of the vote. The CPI(M), under the leadership of Jyoti Basu, weaned the Muslims toward the Left and eliminated such parties. They have returned to Bengal politics.
A little before the "panchayat" elections, Jyoti Basu made a casual remark that was not so casual: It was time for another Front, he suggested. The CPI(M)'s partners are displaying signs of fatigue. But an alliance with CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc may be a smaller problem than the Left's dalliance with the Congress in Delhi. The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendor to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day.
Blaming the rest of world doesn't really help: Oil prices shot up to unprecedented levels in 1973 as well, but it did not help Indira Gandhi when she blamed the international situation for domestic inflation. The government can take comfort from clever opinion polls. A recent one showed that the UPA government had 34 percent support, as against 26 percent for BJP and its partners. Then buried somewhere deep in the copy lay an interesting fact: The survey was done among 1,600 respondents in the big cities, and restricted to the very rich, the topmost socio-economic categories. The rich find inflation less demanding than the poor. And if Dr. Manmohan Singh cannot get the vote of this segment, which constitutes less than 10 percent of the population, then he has no vote at all. I am sure if you take a poll within my family, you will find my support at 34 percent. If you check with the whole "mohalla," it could be a different outcome.
The difference between the Left and the UPA might seem distinct over dialectical debates in Delhi; it seems a blur from the villages of Bengal. Jyoti Basu always had a wonderful alibi when faced with difficult questions. He would blame lack of cooperation from Delhi and send subliminal signals that this was also discrimination against Bengalis. Buddhadev Bhattacharya tried to blame the prime minister during the "panchayat" elections. No one bought his story. The voter had seen him cozying up to Delhi too often.
The Marxists will lose very little if they lose Delhi. The Left can afford to lose Delhi; it cannot afford to slip in Bengal, or it will disappear for a decade.
- M.J. Akbar is chairman and director of publications, Covert. (Arab News)
There is a television game called "Double Jeopardy" built around the rather depressing thought that the answer to a problem might be a problem in itself. India's Marxists have just discovered that this game could spill over into reality.
Moralists have long condemned those politicians who enjoy power without responsibility. The CPI(M) is now discovering the pain of having responsibility without power. That is probably closer to a triple jeopardy.
If ever there was a double jeopardy in politics, then the hammering they have just received across West Bengal in the "panchayat" elections is a gloomy, or glowering, example. From control of 2,303 village "panchayats" in 2003, the CPI(M)-led Left Front has stumbled to 1,633; the Mamata Banerjee-led disunited opposition ascended from 917 to 1,463. Mamata Banerjee's Trinamool Congress won more than three-fourths of the village councils.
Two facts stand out in the Bengal results: Mamata won villages that she had not even bothered to campaign in; and the most decisive shift away from the Left was the Muslim vote which it has wooed so consistently with its absolutist opposition to the BJP. The upsurge against the Left in Bengal is therefore greater than these results indicate. If this pattern holds then the Left could lose more than 15 seats in the next general elections.
And it is no longer sufficient to go red each time you see saffron in order to pocket Muslim votes. Muslims want more, including bread and education. As the Sachar Committee's report proved, during more than three decades in power the Left has given neither to Bengal's Muslims. It has certainly provided security to the community, but that is not enough.
You cannot take land with impunity from the Bengali Muslim peasant and yet frighten him into voting for you. That era is over. The tectonic shift in the Muslim vote has cut the ground from under the CPI(M)'s Fortress Bengal.
There are many reasons why the Muslims did not revolt against the Left Front before. The leadership of Jyoti Basu was both charismatic and reassuring. Basu knew the language that would communicate with the people, even if in practical terms (that is, bread and education) he did not do very much. He shepherded the community through its most vulnerable phase, 1970s and 1980s, with the kind of concern that the sentimental might even confuse with affection. It was psychologically impossible for Muslims to leave the CPI(M) as long as Jyoti Basu was at the helm. His successor, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, was another matter. Buddhadev had been insensitive to Muslim sentiment even when a minister in Basu's Cabinet. Muslims might have accepted his lectures on the "azaan" and "madrasas" if he had begun to address their bread-and-education concerns. Instead, the lectures came with the most appalling usurpation of land in Singur and Nandigram. Muslims were among the worst affected.
There is a phenomenon that is being shrouded by the shift of the Muslim vote toward Mamata Banerjee. In the 1960s, as Bengal's Muslims abandoned the Congress, many of them first went to marginal parties, including outfits led by the clergy. In the elections of the late 1960s, parties that were variations of the Muslim League set up candidates and got a reasonable chunk of the vote. The CPI(M), under the leadership of Jyoti Basu, weaned the Muslims toward the Left and eliminated such parties. They have returned to Bengal politics.
A little before the "panchayat" elections, Jyoti Basu made a casual remark that was not so casual: It was time for another Front, he suggested. The CPI(M)'s partners are displaying signs of fatigue. But an alliance with CPI, RSP and Forward Bloc may be a smaller problem than the Left's dalliance with the Congress in Delhi. The Marxists may believe that they can finesse public opinion with their periodic sulks against the Manmohan Singh government even while they dine in splendor to celebrate four years of joint rule. But the people are not that easily fooled. They know the difference between talk and action. They know that artificial froth costs nothing, while the price of food they buy in the market is rising each day.
Blaming the rest of world doesn't really help: Oil prices shot up to unprecedented levels in 1973 as well, but it did not help Indira Gandhi when she blamed the international situation for domestic inflation. The government can take comfort from clever opinion polls. A recent one showed that the UPA government had 34 percent support, as against 26 percent for BJP and its partners. Then buried somewhere deep in the copy lay an interesting fact: The survey was done among 1,600 respondents in the big cities, and restricted to the very rich, the topmost socio-economic categories. The rich find inflation less demanding than the poor. And if Dr. Manmohan Singh cannot get the vote of this segment, which constitutes less than 10 percent of the population, then he has no vote at all. I am sure if you take a poll within my family, you will find my support at 34 percent. If you check with the whole "mohalla," it could be a different outcome.
The difference between the Left and the UPA might seem distinct over dialectical debates in Delhi; it seems a blur from the villages of Bengal. Jyoti Basu always had a wonderful alibi when faced with difficult questions. He would blame lack of cooperation from Delhi and send subliminal signals that this was also discrimination against Bengalis. Buddhadev Bhattacharya tried to blame the prime minister during the "panchayat" elections. No one bought his story. The voter had seen him cozying up to Delhi too often.
The Marxists will lose very little if they lose Delhi. The Left can afford to lose Delhi; it cannot afford to slip in Bengal, or it will disappear for a decade.
- M.J. Akbar is chairman and director of publications, Covert. (Arab News)
WEST BENGAL PANCHAYAT ELECTION: GATHERED VIEWS
Reading signs
One swallow does not make a summer and the loss of a few seats does not mark the beginning of the end of a political regime. This is not to suggest that the losses suffered by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the zilla parishad elections are without significance. One thing must be made clear: the results in no way indicate that the overall dominance of the CPI(M) at the village level has in any way been broken, even in east Midnapur. Yet the defeats have drawn the public attention that they have because of the areas in which they have occurred, and the events that preceded the elections in both Singur and Nandigram. Both places have been at the forefront of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s policy of acquiring agricultural land for industrialization in West Bengal, and of opposition to such policy. It is thus easy to draw the conclusion that the election results are a verdict against industrialization. Such a conclusion would be simplistic.
There are other factors that need to be considered to understand the significance of the losses suffered in Nandigram and Singur. The CPI(M) will have to accept that the politics of terror no longer fetches electoral dividends. Perhaps it did at one time, but it no longer does. The perception and the nature of politics even in the rural world have obviously undergone a change that the comrades are not willing to either recognize or accept. The CPI(M) and the government it heads would do well to recall the adverse comments made on West Bengal by the Sachar committee. Muslims in the state featured badly in every sphere — from education to government employment — that the Sachar committee had considered. It would be unrealistic to believe that the poor conditions of the Muslims had nothing to do with the way the rural folk voted in a place like Nandigram or a in a district like Malda. (It goes without saying that the conditions of the Muslims should be improved irrespective of election results at whatever level.) Under the circumstances, the CPI(M) should count its blessings that the results have not been worse.
It could, in fact, have been worse for the Left Front government since it chose, when faced with opposition, to occupy a dubious middle ground. Having begun a process of industrialization it pressed the pause button when its policy of land acquisition encountered resistance. Given the fragmentation of land holdings and the layers of usufructuary rights vested in land, it will be idealistic to expect that land will move from agriculture to industry through the operation of market forces without state intervention. The challenge before Mr Bhattacharjee is to continue with the process of industrialization and to manage the fallout without allowing the cadre of his party to run berserk. His failure to do all this will make the loss of a few rural seats into a setback for the entire economy and society of West Bengal. (The Telegraph) 23.5.08
CPM banks on Dooars mandate- Morcha meets failed, says Asok
The results of the panchayat polls in the Dooars have made it clear that people there do not want their area to be included in the separate state of Gorkhaland demanded by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, Darjeeling district CPM leaders said here today.
“Morcha president Bimal Gurung, at a number of meetings in the Dooars, had urged residents to vote against the CPM and the Left allies. But as the results show, we have done exceptionally well in the Dooars, especially in Malbazar, Birpara, Metelli and Nagrakata blocks where the Morcha meetings were held,” Bengal urban development minister Asok Bhattacharya said.
“We take this mandate as an outright refusal by the residents to express solidarity with the Morcha and its demands,” the CPM leader added. “People even voted us back in power at the Kalchini panchayat samiti, ousting the Congress.”
The district CPM leadership also thanked chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for clarifying his government’s stance on the Morcha’s statehood demand. A four-member delegation of the hill party met the chief minister in Calcutta yesterday. At the meeting, Bhattacharjee reportedly asked the Morcha to focus on greater autonomy for the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council.
“We now expect the Morcha to play a responsible role in ending the stalemate in the hills through discussions with the state and maybe, the Centre,” Jibitesh Sarkar, a state secretariat member of the CPM, said.
Morcha leaders, however, denied the urban development minister’s claims. “We had never passed any directive to the voters in the Dooars and always said they were free to vote for any candidate. The inference drawn by the CPM is wrong, as voting in the panchayat polls and expressing support for Gorkhaland are different issues. We still say that the residents of the Dooars support our demand,” Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri said.
One swallow does not make a summer and the loss of a few seats does not mark the beginning of the end of a political regime. This is not to suggest that the losses suffered by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in the zilla parishad elections are without significance. One thing must be made clear: the results in no way indicate that the overall dominance of the CPI(M) at the village level has in any way been broken, even in east Midnapur. Yet the defeats have drawn the public attention that they have because of the areas in which they have occurred, and the events that preceded the elections in both Singur and Nandigram. Both places have been at the forefront of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s policy of acquiring agricultural land for industrialization in West Bengal, and of opposition to such policy. It is thus easy to draw the conclusion that the election results are a verdict against industrialization. Such a conclusion would be simplistic.
There are other factors that need to be considered to understand the significance of the losses suffered in Nandigram and Singur. The CPI(M) will have to accept that the politics of terror no longer fetches electoral dividends. Perhaps it did at one time, but it no longer does. The perception and the nature of politics even in the rural world have obviously undergone a change that the comrades are not willing to either recognize or accept. The CPI(M) and the government it heads would do well to recall the adverse comments made on West Bengal by the Sachar committee. Muslims in the state featured badly in every sphere — from education to government employment — that the Sachar committee had considered. It would be unrealistic to believe that the poor conditions of the Muslims had nothing to do with the way the rural folk voted in a place like Nandigram or a in a district like Malda. (It goes without saying that the conditions of the Muslims should be improved irrespective of election results at whatever level.) Under the circumstances, the CPI(M) should count its blessings that the results have not been worse.
It could, in fact, have been worse for the Left Front government since it chose, when faced with opposition, to occupy a dubious middle ground. Having begun a process of industrialization it pressed the pause button when its policy of land acquisition encountered resistance. Given the fragmentation of land holdings and the layers of usufructuary rights vested in land, it will be idealistic to expect that land will move from agriculture to industry through the operation of market forces without state intervention. The challenge before Mr Bhattacharjee is to continue with the process of industrialization and to manage the fallout without allowing the cadre of his party to run berserk. His failure to do all this will make the loss of a few rural seats into a setback for the entire economy and society of West Bengal. (The Telegraph) 23.5.08
CPM banks on Dooars mandate- Morcha meets failed, says Asok
The results of the panchayat polls in the Dooars have made it clear that people there do not want their area to be included in the separate state of Gorkhaland demanded by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, Darjeeling district CPM leaders said here today.
“Morcha president Bimal Gurung, at a number of meetings in the Dooars, had urged residents to vote against the CPM and the Left allies. But as the results show, we have done exceptionally well in the Dooars, especially in Malbazar, Birpara, Metelli and Nagrakata blocks where the Morcha meetings were held,” Bengal urban development minister Asok Bhattacharya said.
“We take this mandate as an outright refusal by the residents to express solidarity with the Morcha and its demands,” the CPM leader added. “People even voted us back in power at the Kalchini panchayat samiti, ousting the Congress.”
The district CPM leadership also thanked chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee for clarifying his government’s stance on the Morcha’s statehood demand. A four-member delegation of the hill party met the chief minister in Calcutta yesterday. At the meeting, Bhattacharjee reportedly asked the Morcha to focus on greater autonomy for the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council.
“We now expect the Morcha to play a responsible role in ending the stalemate in the hills through discussions with the state and maybe, the Centre,” Jibitesh Sarkar, a state secretariat member of the CPM, said.
Morcha leaders, however, denied the urban development minister’s claims. “We had never passed any directive to the voters in the Dooars and always said they were free to vote for any candidate. The inference drawn by the CPM is wrong, as voting in the panchayat polls and expressing support for Gorkhaland are different issues. We still say that the residents of the Dooars support our demand,” Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri said.
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