Gorkha Janamukti Morcha’s latest demand: Bifurcate Darjeeling

Kolkata/Thu Aug 04: There is a new addition to the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha’s charter of demands before West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee. A Morcha delegation has urged Mamata Banerjee to bifurcate Darjeeling district into two on grounds that she has been contemplating a similar move for several other districts.
They said this should be done for the convenience of the hill people who live in many far-flung areas, often detached from the district headquarters.
The GJM delegation argued that the reorganisation should not to be limited to five or six districts and that there should be a comprehensive policy on the subject.
“It should be done simultaneously and not as a stop-gap measure, bifurcating some and withholding others,” said a GJM leader.
The Morcha delegation also urged the Chief Minister not to initiate any move to bifurcate Jalpaiguri district, as proposed by her government recently. The Morcha demanded that the process for inclusion of new areas from Dooars and Terai should be completed before the bifurcation process is undertaken.
The delegation earlier attended an all-party meeting at Writers’ Buildings on the change of name of West Bengal.
Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri said they had no issues with the name change but said the bifurcation of Jalpaiguri
district as proposed by the state government should not be undertaken at this stage when an area verification commission has been constituted to look into the status of areas demanded by the GJM for inclusion into the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration.
The GJM is demanding as many as 400 mouzas, of which about 200 are in Jalpaiguri district. The government had last week announced that it was planning to bifurcate Jalpaiguri district into two with Alipurduar as a new district.
The GJM delegation pointed out that in Alipurduar too, it has demanded a large number of mouzas as there is a huge concentration of Gorkha-speaking people there.
While GJM president Bimal Gurung was not present at the all-party meeting, he turned up later in the evening for a separate meeting with Mamata Banerjee. After the meeting, he said there were no contentious issues with the West Bengal government. The GJM and the state government would work in tandem to develop the hills which had suffered immensely in the past 34 years, he said.
Gurung said he had invited Mamata Banerjee to visit Darjeeling in her capacity as Chief Minister. She had been to Darjeeling once earlier as the railway minister but now she should come as a chief minister, Gurung said.
Asked if the GJM had reservations about the district bifurcation move and when the GTA will start functioning, Gurung avoided a direct answer. “Let the area verification team complete its survey first within a time-frame of six months. Then only GTA will take shape and elections will be held.”
A GJM delegation member later said that in the evening meeting with Gurung, Mamata Banerjee was requested that she should bifurcate Darjeeling district too for administrative convenience.
The population of Darjeeling had increased and there were far-flung areas, particularly on the Kalimpong side, from where people found it difficult to interact with the district headquarters because of lack of communication, roads and other infrastructure, they said. Darjeeling needed to be bifurcated the most, they said. 
~ Express News Service