GJM hard sells G-word - State has acknowledged Gorkhaland demand: Morcha

Darjeeling, July 9: If the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha is looking for a selling point in the impending agreement with the state government, it can find one in the nomenclature of the proposed council that will govern the region.

The Morcha leadership is viewing the inclusion of the word Gorkhaland in the name of the elected body, the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, as a tacit acknowledgment by the state government that a demand for a separate Gorkhaland state is legitimate.

At the same time, the state government sees it as a sign of its spirit of give and take to accommodate the concerns of all sections as much as possible. Government sources pointed out that the word was part of a proposal drawn up during the tenure of the Left government.

Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri today said the inclusion of the word Gorkhaland in the name of the new set-up for the hills was “a moral victory” for the party.

“For the first time, the word Gorkhaland is in the official records. This is a step forward for us in our movement for a separate state. We still have not achieved our aspiration. But there is little doubt that by adding the word to the name of the new set-up, the state government has tacitly admitted that our demand for a separate state is legitimate. It is also an admission by the government that it recognises all that we have been saying about our separate identity,” Giri said.

After a meeting of the Morcha and senior government officials at Writers’ yesterday, both sides had said an agreement had been reached on all unresolved issues, including the nomenclature of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration. The agreement is scheduled to be signed within a week.

Asked about the inclusion of the word Gorkhaland in the name of the hill authority, Mamata Banerjee had said: “What’s in a name?”

Today, a Morcha leader said: “A lot is in the name. We had made it clear that we will settle for nothing short of statehood and that the new arrangement is only a temporary one. So the word Gorkhaland in the name of the new body will serve as a constant reminder to the people of the Darjeeling hills that our demand is very much alive.”

According to a Morcha leader who attended yesterday’s meeting, the state government had not objected to the inclusion of the word in the name of the hill set-up.

“This is perhaps because even while negotiating with the previous government, no one had any objections to the name (Gorkhaland Regional Authority) we had suggested,” the leader said. “The government perhaps think that we will be happy with only this and once the agreement is signed, we will forget about our statehood demand. But this is unlikely to happen.”

Yesterday, Morcha president Bimal Gurung had said that if a separate state of Telangana was formed, “I will immediate raise our statehood issue”.

Chief secretary Samar Ghosh refused comment on Gurung’s observations, saying: “It’s their interpretation. It’s their perspective. We cannot react on this. The issue of statehood never featured during the talks. The matter was not even raised.”

The Opposition parties in the hills did not, however, sound too enthused about the inclusion of the word Gorkhaland in the new hill set-up’s name. “It is just a ploy by the Morcha to confuse the people,” said R.B. Rai, the president of the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists and former Darjeeling MP.

-TT