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| A crowded street of Darjeeling town on Tuesday, the day of the ABGL’s janta curfew. (Suman Tamang) |
TT, Darjeeling, Feb. 9: The ABGL’s 24-hour janta curfew failed to evoke any response in the hills, prompting the party to describe it as a “defeat of the hill people”.
The hills were normal since morning and the Janmukti Asthai Karmachari Sangatan (JAKS), a body of DGHC casual workers affiliated to the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, brought out a rally that later ended in a public meeting at Chowk Bazar here.
Madan Tamang, president, ABGL, said: “We were trying to test the people. If we had used force, posted some picketers and damaged a few vehicles, everything would have been shut. We wanted to go about in a decent manner and it has not worked.”
The ABGL leader said he was only trying to tell the people that it was useless to accept the same council. “My only point is that you (Morcha) are fooling the people. If you want a council, why are you crying hoarse over Gorkhaland. Anyway, today’s event is definitely not our party’s defeat but it is the defeat of the hill people.”
The Morcha, which has talked about an “interim” council, said the set-up can be valid only till the Assembly election in 2011. “There will be no compromise on Gorkhaland.”
Addressing the meeting at Chowk Bazar, Machendra Subba, president, JAKS, said his outfit was not “bothered about” other party’s political programmes. “Our stomachs are half empty and we are fighting for our rights. We are not bothered about other party’s political programme. The state government has repeatedly backtracked from its written assurance to regularise our jobs.”
The JAKS president urged B.L. Meena, the DGHC administrator, to function from the hills. “If he does not want to operate from the hills, it is better that he goes on a vacation,” said Subba.
Meena has been functioning from Pintail Village near Siliguri for the past three-four months. Most officers are unable to attend office in the hills because of a “ban” imposed on the movement of government vehicles by the Gorkha Janmukti Vidyarthi Morcha.
Morcha deadline for Dooars permit
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TT, Alipurduar, Feb. 9: The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha today asked the Jalpaiguri district administration to permit the party to hold meetings in the Dooars and threatened to organise gatherings across the region if the nod was not given within seven days .
The party set the deadline after it had been denied permission to hold meetings at Birpara and Kalchini. On Sunday morning, Morcha members were arrested while assembling for a memorial meeting, defying a prohibitory order at Birpara. But they succeeded in organising the meeting in the evening after their release on personal bonds.
The Parishad had called a 12-hour strike across the Dooars the same day to thwart the gathering.
The Morcha’s plea to hold the meeting at Kalchini today had been shot down by the block development officer yesterday. “The state government is denying us democratic and fundamental rights. We had requested permission to conduct meetings, but the administration refused to heed our pleas. Today, the party submitted a memorandum to the district administration through the BDO, seeking consent to hold meetings throughout the Dooars.
“If the permission does not come within seven days, we will organise gatherings across the Dooars and the authorities will be responsible if any violence takes place,” said Shyamal Gurung, the organising secretary of the Morcha’s Dooars committee.
The BDO said permission for a meeting at Kalchini had been denied, considering the law and order problems at Birpara on Sunday.
Workers attacked
Around 500 supporters of the Parishad locked up the office of the CPM at Banarhat in Jalpaiguri district this evening, after two workers of the Adivasi outfit had been attacked allegedly by the members of the Citu in Kalabari Tea Estate.
Sources said the injured workers, Ashish Oraon and Dasain Oraon, had been taken to a health centre at Banarhat for treatment.
The CPM has denied the charge. Nobody was inside the CPM office and the protesters did not disperse even at 7.30pm.
Plains protest hill cop attack
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| Children at the 12-hour relay hunger strike organised by the Gorkha Janmukti Vidyarthi Morcha in Kalimpong’s Damber Chowk on Tuesday. Picture by Chinlop Fudong Lepcha |
Siliguri, Feb. 9: Ten supporters of the Bangla O Bangla Bhasha Banchao Committee were arrested here today shortly before they were to protest the attack on a police constable allegedly by Gorkha Janmukti Morcha supporters in Kalimpong last week.
The protesters, who were on way to Pintail Village to demonstrate, were picked up on Hill Cart Road near Mallaguri.
“We protest the attack by the Morcha supporters on a policeman on February 4 evening and want the administration to arrest the culprits,” said Mukunda Majumdar, the committee president.
In a letter to chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee yesterday, the committee iterated that no autonomy should be granted to the hills. “However, keeping in mind that the Gorkhas are a majority in the three hill subdivisions, we propose the bifurcation of the existing Darjeeling district into Darjeeling and Siliguri districts. While the former will comprise the three hill subdivisions, the Siliguri district can be formed with the plains area,” Majumdar said.
The letter also suggested that 18 mouzas in the foothills, which were part of the Siliguri subdivision earlier but included in the DGHC area in 2006 and 2007, should be brought back under the Siliguri administration.
Meanwhile, the GNLF has alleged that Morcha leaders are using the 2011 Assembly election as a shield to “hide their failure” to achieve Gorkhaland.
“When they (Morcha leaders) had announced that they would achieve Gorkhaland by March 2010, we kept quiet and allowed them to go ahead,” said Rajen Mukhia, the GNLF convener of the Terai, today. “Nowadays, the Morcha leaders are talking of some interim arrangement till the next Assembly election in Bengal and seem to have forgotten their previous commitment.”
The Morcha leaders have realised that they will not be able to achieve Gorkhaland and are simply hoodwinking the hill people by raking up the issue of Assembly polls. “This is nothing but an attempt to hide their failure. People have understood their capacity and are silently walking out of the Morcha and joining our party,” the GNLF leader said.
Mukhia said the Bengal government has succeeded in shifting the Morcha’s focus from statehood to a powerful council.
GNLF’s Kalimpong branch committee president Dawa Pakhrin said from Delhi that he was busy organising a national conference by the Bharatiya Federation for New States, an apex body of organisations raising statehood demands, in Nagpur at the month-end.
Rebel caught in Gangtok
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Gangtok, Feb. 9: The chief of the United Gorkha Revolutionary Front, Ajay Dahal, was arrested in Sikkim today with a firearm and ammunition.
A former jawan of the Central Industrial Security Force, Dahal has been underground ever since the murder of GNLF panchayat member Yonsingh Lepcha at Lower Santuk, 20km from Kalimpong, on October 24, 2006.
The UGRF, a militant outfit, was formed in 2006 when Dahal had announced that he was raising an “army” to fight for Gorkhaland.
Dahal’s arrest comes more than three years after Kalimpong police caught the rebel outfit’s second-most important member Suk Bahadur Subba on November 29, 2006 in an ambush in the forests of the Lava-Algarah belt. Subba was considered to be an even more important catch than netting Dahal at that time as the former used to recruit for the United Gorkha Revolutionary Army, the UGRF’s armed wing, and collect firearms and funds for the outfit, police said.
While senior Sikkim police officers did not want to comment on the arrest saying that a news conference would be held tomorrow, reliable sources in the police said Dahal was picked up around 1.30pm from the taxi stand in Gangtok. Following intelligence inputs that the rebel was in the Sikkim capital, plainclothes men had been on the lookout.
A country-made gun and three live .38 cartridges were seized from the handbag he was carrying, the sources said. Dahal has been interrogated at the Sadar police station. A team of policemen from Kalimpong has also arrived here.
A senior police officer in Darjeeling also confirmed Dahal’s arrest. Warrants had been out against him for Lepcha’s murder and for holding armed training camps in the Pedong area of Kalimpong, he said.
Intelligence sources said Dahal had left the GNLF soon after the murder of former DGHC councillor G.K. Pradhan in Kalimpong on October 3, 2003. He joined the GNLF(C) but left it in 2006 to form the UGRF. Dahal was also the Kalimpong president of the All Gorkha Students’ Union.
Of late, the UGRF chief has been threatening Gorkha Janmukti Morcha president Bimal Gurung and his frontal leaders through pamphlets. Former GNLF councillors also received threats from him.
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