Tragedies heaped by three stooges

In my last three series, "Darjeeling's Nepali Bhasha Andolan, circa 1960s", we saw the complete absence of Darjeeling's political leaders in the issues raised by the mass movement for the Nepali language in the northeast of India, fomented in Darjeeling. I mentioned their deliberate disappearance from, if not active antipathy for, the popular agitation, which was nothing short of a language riot or insurgency.

There were reasons for the weasel-like burrowing of such leaders as Theodore Manaen of the All-Indian Congress Party, Ratanlal "Maila Baje" Brahmin of the Indian Communist Party and Deo Prakash of the Gorkha League. They hid themselves away from the Nepali Language Movement and many other civil rights stirrings because they were the three comedians of the hill politics, the Keystone Cops in Indian Nepali national regalia but empty of any missionary zeal needed as their political inputs to the dynamism and success of the campaigns. In fact, their masterly inactivity in their own strategically chosen periods and during Darjeeling's dilemmas at crucial times produced bad chemistry, especially when their crusades for the hills were colorfully couched in dramatics of Quixotic quirks and gimmicks. We shall presently see enough of their individual and uppish antics.

Why were they the way they happened to be? Brief individual sketches on these three political jokers of the District of Darjeeling, as I observed them during the decade of 1956-1966, will help clarify the matter to some extent. I was 12 in 1956 and 22 when I left Darjeeling in 1966. From 1960 to 1966, I was a political volunteer, one among those who worked for Deo Prakash Rai and the Gorkha League in the belief that the combination would best serve Darjeeling's purposes in Calcutta and West Bengal's Legislative Assembly or Bidhan Sabha at the state level while Theodore Manaen, and later Madan Thapa, and the Indian Congress Party would promote the district's interests at the Centre and its Lok Sabha or Parliament in Delhi. This seemingly diametrically opposed combination of concepts and candidates looked like a dichotomy, but there was an improvised wisdom in this strategy. As a result, the two leaders were repeatedly elected to their high offices in Calcutta and New Delhi from the District of Darjeeling. And therein lay the great tragedies to befall us in the Northeast.

As for Maila Baje, he was mostly just a sideshow during the period I cite, the third force who was the reserve ammunition in our political armoury. He was the last resort in times of choicely bankruptcy and emergency. Therefore, he remained just that: our reserve silver bullet that could be loaded in the election clip when needed.

As the linguistic structure of the regional and cosmopolitan Darjeeling hills warranted, all the political and civic leaders were sorts of polyglots. They operated in Nepali, Bangla, English and Hindi - somewhat in that order - and Theodore Manaen was the best student and teacher among the politicos to operate in his expressive and no-nonsense mediums.

But it was Deo Prakash Rai and Maila Baje who displayed their Nepali national auras in non-Nepali climates of Calcutta's Bidhan Sabha while Manaen managed with his khadi and English in New Delhi. Rai once aroused his audience to Himalayan heights with chauvinistic pride at Chowk Bazaar when he described at length in his political rally how he demanded to speak in his most beloved Nepali language in the hall of the Bidhan Sabha and how he struggled for the recognition of Nepali as a medium of expression and lingua franca, facing the adversity in the Bengali-dominated assembly. He received ear-splitting applause when he reported successfully that interpreters had to be arranged for in the august hall to have his proceedings and deliberations made in Nepali to be translated into Bangla and English. Ah, the ovation he received that afternoon at Chowk Bazaar when he made this froth-filled announcement of his victory! He had touched his highest glory that day, and his audience clapped and shouted with joy and verve. He was a winner!

Ratanlal Brahmin was no less a comedian, and he was waiting in the wings to best Rai and Manaen. This he did when he also reported to his proud assemblage at the same Chowk Bazaar quadrangle that he put on his Nepali national bastra of daura-suruwal, jamat topi and kot to appear in the Bidhan Sabha assembly hall. For proper effects, he had also couched in his patuka his sharpened khukuri coupled with chakmak and karda sheathed in the dap, or scabbard.

As if it were not enough, he declared to the cheering Saturday crowd that he presented his deliberations in the Nepali language, leaving the Bengali assembly agog and nervous at the new reckoning. Ah, the applause he received that day! He had notched higher in his antics than Deo Prakash Rai, hadn't he?

That is how the Nepali leaders of Darjeeling played with their constituencies, throwing dust in their eyes time after time with ostentatious Indian Nepali sentiments and feelings. Nepali or no Nepali, they should be pressing their demands for water, electricity, roads, education, basic health, development projects and retroactive funds for tourism, cottage and small-scale industries, tea development and its world markets in the hills. This they could do by hollering in Bangla or shouting in English; Nepali was merely a false front for their political capitalisation.This is how the three stooges of Darjeeling politics played with the petty provincialism of their hilly denizens. They achieved and accomplished virtually nothing for the peoples of Darjeeling.

With this preamble, let us then paint the political portraits of these three leaders who led Darjeeling down the drains from where there emerged the populist penman and political pugilist called Subhash Ghising. But that was to happen decades later, in the 1980s. By that time, alas, the three political punks had already rendered Darjeeling a wasteland.