DT Editorial 12 Issue

In the past few months we all have found ourselves to be in a very precarious and paradoxical situation as we tried to exercise our democratic rights of universal adult sufferage. Yes, we all voted for the lotus (no secret ballot on that of course, as there was no need to even see what the other symbols looked like) and to top it all this lotus was represented not by someone who had lived through the Gorkhaland agitation, who knew what it was to be living for more than a hundred years as a displaced and marginalized identity……..but Jaswant Singh has promised to learn about it all!!! After all it was a landslide victory wasn’t it??? Some record breaking 2.5 lakhs vote…..sole victory, landslide victory. More victory of course when it seemed that the CPM were being wiped off not only from Siliguri but from everywhere as well. However, one must know that we are not actually struggling against the CPM but against forces who still accept the colonizer’s primitive haphazard border lines which shoved hundreds of heterogeneous identities into homogeneous states as a result of which the former had to be marginalized. Such has also been the case with us Gorkhas as well and as such the struggle continues and the responsibility widens for us to make others accept the rationale that we never were a part of Bengal and as such the question of Bengal division never arises.



Therefore, this makes us think about the landslide victory altogether because despite it we still are a minority and this feeling has grasped us even more tightly now as we watched with baited breath how the UPA swept the entire nation giving us their version of landslide victory. No sooner had we tried to analyze this situation in terms of our agitation than we were given a taste of our very own landslide. No, the monsoons had not begun…..it still has not…but one storm… and there we all were sliding downhill as we lost lives, hope and trust. Since we have to blame someone this time we blame it on plastic bags...so we hope to see us all in jute or paper bags for lets say ….another two weeks.


Well with landslides striking us, both good and bad, tourism losing its charm and quality, roads ever so bad, education more expensive but of no use as we can never stay in Darjeeling to realize our career plans, buildings ever rising even after the disaster, tea gardens still maintaining its colonial taste………..Jaswant Singh, with such a landslide victory but with such problems still to empathize, better start delivering than just reminiscence about how wonderful the campaign was with such decent and simple hill folks. As someone had said, “The next greatest misfortune to losing a battle is to gain a victory as this.” Indeed it is not only the leaders who have to understand this and still continue with an entirely new strategy but it is also up to us, who went so eagerly to vote and celebrated the landslide victory, to now actually channelize our victory results into the appropriate avenues.



Shreyashi Chettri
Editor
letterstoed@darjeelingtimes.com