“Will you see the players well bestowed? Let them be well used, for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of the time”— Hamlet, II, 2

The clamour for Gorkhaland is, once again, part of our present. Not that the territorial demand of the Gorkhas, which had bloodied the pristine charm of Darjeeling during the ’80s, had ever petered out. But the belligerence of the Gorkha National Liberation Front and its leader Subash Ghising, the original “players”, had largely been tamed over time, the latter’s growing pusillanimity proportionate to his declining popularity. Ghising eventually resigned as administrator of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council in May 2008, in time for new players to enter the stage, revive the enfeebled cause and rally people around issues of deprivation and neglect — both real and perceived.

In Bimal Gurung, once a Ghising strongman but now the inheritor of his mantle as messiah of the Gorkha cause, the aspiration for a separate state regained its voice. As leader of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, he has delineated the territorial limits of his vision of Gorkhaland to include not just the Darjeeling hills, but also the Dooars, the Terai and Siliguri (a Bengali dominated town in north Bengal) — thereby inflaming non-Gorkha passions and garnering greater attention. His most masterful manoeuvring, however, has been his successful lobbying to get the BJP’s Jaswant Singh to contest the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat, with locals regarding it as nothing short of a coup that a national leader can echo their demand for a separate state, convinced that Singh’s presence will deliver their beautiful land from political obscurity.

... contd.