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Kent & Sussex Courier

SPRIGG Richard (Keith) Passed away peacefully on 8th September aged 89 years. Funeral Service on 21st September 2011 at The Crematorium, Tunbridge Wells at 12.30, Memorial Service to be arranged later. Family flowers only please but donations to RAFA Benevolent Fund maybe sent to Paul Bysouth Funeral Services, 9 Croft Road, Crowborough TN6 1DL.

Published in the Kent & Sussex Courier from 16th September 2011 to 22nd September 2011 (Distributed in Gillingham (Kent), Tunbridge Wells)

Dr. Sprigg was a distinguished linguist and a long time resident of Kalimpong. Below are two essays on the late Professor.

http://www.kalimpong.info/2009/02/25/an-unusual-doctorate-dr-sonam-wangyal/

http://www.kalimpong.info/2008/07/08/a-thorough-man-dr-sonam-wangyal/

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Hindustan Times
Mahendra P Lama
September 21, 2011

The death toll in the northern district of Sikkim, worst hit by Sunday’s earthquake, is steadily rising. Against the backdrop of an incipient disaster management plan, the relief operation teams are again grappling with the situation. The question of connectivity, both physical and virtual, in the North-east have emerged as the core issue once again in the Centre-periphery disconnects and deprivations. The Indian Himalayan region stretches over 2,500 km, covering 12 states. Among these, the Sikkim and Darjeeling belts are ecologically in the most fragile zone and seismologically most vulnerable Zone 5. They are border states and subject to serious cross-border environmental damage.

Many reports have highlighted the criticality of connectivity for the development, sustenance and integration of the region. However, the blatant lack of political sagacity, absence of bureaucratic resurgence, and a feeble civil society have eaten the vitals of this region. These border states require state-of-the-art infrastructure in view of the development projects being undertaken to strengthen national security and match the changing dynamics on the other side of the border.

An accident or a small landslide can dislocate the entire national highway for hours, sometimes even days. Road dislocation happens routinely in national highways in the entire North-east. The quality of repairs is so poor that most repaired roads wear out within a fortnight. In August 2007, NH 31A remained closed for over 25 days. There was a hue and cry, but the situation didn’t improve. The Border Road Organisation (BRO) is responsible for the building and maintenance of most of these roads. But it has blatantly ignored two vital rules of building roads in mountain areas: one, the road must have a drain on the side of the hill slope so that the water trickling down can be channelised; two, the sinking area requires careful maintenance, and rocks and mud that fill up the sinks must be removed.

There is no drain at all and, hence, rainwater comes down and flows downhill through the road. In the district of Ilam in neighbouring Nepal, there are examples of roads with huge drains.

Massive concrete-based development projects underway in the mountain areas pose a threat to the carrying capacity of these roads. For instance, more than 20 big and small hydel energy projects are underway in Sikkim alone. It’s painful to see that sinking areas are ‘managed’ by filling them with truckloads of rocks and mud, which sink and disappear very soon. The concerned agencies must give a guarantee of at least five years, use techniques like covering toe-cutting edges of streams and rivers and put in place measures to punish defaulters. Since the projects are time-consuming and require high degrees of engineering wisdom and precision, BRO should rework its techniques and use new technology.

We also need to inquire into the role of private players in the aftermath of the earthquake. The 40-plus seconds of quake have exposed the weakening resilience and tenacity of the private players. To improve infrastructure in this region, the authorities must shun their policy of ‘incrementalism’ and switch to ‘transformation’.

‘Save the Hills’, an NGO, recently released a report that states that Darjeeling hills get, on an average, about 388 mm of rains in September. In just six days, between September 14 and 19 (just before the quake) the region received 237 mm rain, or 61% of the total rainfall. There’s a need to study such correlations to develop an early warning system like the one in Bangladesh for cyclones. It’s essential as the nature, frequency, depth and dimensions of natural disasters are expected to undergo changes against the impending backdrop of climate change-triggered vulnerabilities.

The disaster management programme is too government-centric and there are few trained people. The basics of disaster management must be taught at village and community levels, and in educational institutions. It’s because of this lack of institutional commitment in such critical areas of interventions that the North-east, where disasters occur everyday, depends on other states for relief operations.

Mahendra P Lama is the founding vice-chancellor, Sikkim University, Gangtok
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www.telegraphindia.com

“We have never experienced anything like this in Darjeeling before…” the voice at the end of the line said to me. “The ground just shook and shook and would not stop shaking and we were simply terrified.”

The jolt at Richter 6.8 that shook much of the Indo-Gangetic plain and the eastern Himalaya on the evening of September 18 was grim. But it could well have been stronger, lasted longer, caused great tormenting miseries. For seismicity is awake in the region and ‘the mother of all earthquakes’ is gestating an offspring for which we are unprepared.

To alarm and to get alarmed is wrong. And it does not help.

To alert and to be alert can never be. And it always pays.

We, as a people, a society and a techno-political system are not half as alert as we should be to the seismic challenge caused by India’s unsleeping push into Asia. That is one of the most real, tactile, devastating challenges ahead of us. We can do nothing to prevent it. But we can do something to minimize its impact.

To return to Darjeeling.

The famous ‘Bihar earthquake’ of 1934 had its epicentre not in Bihar itself but near where the September 18 epicentre in Sikkim lay. It was of magnitude 8.4. As many as 30,000 people perished in it. Darjeeling was badly hit. The Governor’s House in Darjeeling was among those structures that were irretrievably damaged. It had to be pulled down and a new structure, the present Raj Bhavan, was constructed on the site, the then governor, John Anderson, personally supervising the work. Like every hill town in India, Darjeeling has over the years had high-rise buildings coming up. Today, these overlook some of its most congested localities. It also has a giant water-tank in the middle of the town. An assessment needs to be made of the danger these giantisms pose to themselves and to others around them in an earthquake situation.

Today, if we are to be hit by anything around, not to say above, Richter 7, the results would be too terrible to contemplate. With buildings having come up as they have, the thickening of arterial roads being what it is, and congestion being the name of the urban game, post-quake rescue and relief operations in our towns and cities, especially those in the hills, would take superhuman effort.

But anticipating the contingency and planning for cushioning its impact do not require superhuman effort. They require cool and commonsensical thinking ahead of the crisis. De-populating and even demolishing vulnerable structures, having in readiness plans for landing helicopters and light-wing aircraft even at night-time and in adverse conditions like winter rains and fog, requisitioning public spaces for shelter, equipping hospitals and dispensaries in risk-zones for trauma care, and above all, raising public awareness of earthquake risk, are things that cannot be avoided.

Of these tasks, the last and most important, namely, raising public awareness, has been done for us, albeit unwittingly, by the earthquake of September 18.

The ground having shaken and shaken as never before, the people of the region now know exactly what to expect, what to face with calm preparedness. It is up to the administrations of the areas concerned now to utilize the prevailing sensitization and, taking time by the forelock, act betimes.

The National Disaster Management Authority has been functioning in the area of seismic disasters with speed and alacrity. But administrations across the country, confronted with many scorchingly ‘real’ problems at hand, find it difficult to concentrate on what seems like a hypothetical problem. And yet, a Richter 7 or 8 is not theory ; it lies just underfoot.

Earthquakes have a great ally — public forgetfulness. Few remember the facts of even recent earthquakes in our country. The 1993 Latur earthquake at magnitude 7.4 killed 20,000, the 2001 in Kutch at magnitude 7.7 also killed 20,000, the Indian Ocean tsunami (8+, December 26, 2004) that shook the whole planet from Indonesia to Africa, and Indonesia to Alaska, killed numbers and annihilated settlements beyond belief. Geopolitics being more compelling a subject than geography, few in India remember that the brutal one of Moment Magnitude 7.5 on October 8, 2005 left 79,000 officially dead in Pakistan occupied Kashmir and 1,500 in Jammu and Kashmir. These are statistics from a yesterday that does not seem to belong to us. They are also indicators of a tomorrow that we are going to have to deal with.

After being concurrently accredited to our diplomatic mission in Iceland (2003-4), duty required me to convey my first impressions to the then president, Abdul Kalam. I told him of Iceland’s geothermal reserves and volcanic landscape. He came straight to the point. “Please ask if Iceland has done any new work on earthquake-prediction.” This was of course, for me, a mandate and an order. “The earth is like the human brain,” an Icelandic scientist explained to me. “Prior to a stroke, mini-strokes are known to occur. They generally go unnoticed for they are very, very minor. We try to find out through sensors how many mini-quakes have occurred and within what frequency and where and then, from the data pattern of mini-quake densities and intensities, we are able to conclude if a quake is on its way, like a major stroke …”

India and Iceland have, since, collaborated in the matter of earthquake anticipation. Sensors have been put into the ground at some sites, including our Northeast. We owe it to ourselves to know if these installations forewarned us about any increased activity prior to the September 18 experience.

We have lost time. We can lose no more. We must attempt the following:

1. An urgent and officially issued seismic zonation of India, either confirming or updating the existing four zones,which is as much in the public domain and in the people’s consciousness as the boundaries of our states and Union territories. This zonation should remind us of the areas of very high risk, high risk, low risk and little risk. This should appear in geography text books in schools and be part of the documentation used by all local bodies within their jurisdictions. Land records are public property and public knowledge. The proven risk of earthquakes to the very physical integrity of land should likewise be made part of land use management, protection and policy. The public knows the market values of land, it knows the high-end from the low-end rates, depending on the land’s pluses and minuses. Why should it not know what the seismic values of those lands are, what the MSK (Medvedev-Sponheuer-Karnik) seismic intensities are and how they apply to the sites they live in?

2. The setting up of a seismological agency, independent of the meteorological department which keeps us informed of seismicities as regularly as the met office does about the weather. And, even more pertinently, keeps the various administrative stakeholders informed, alerted, advised.

3. The drawing up of a plan for the East and the Northeast, in which rescue and relief operations can be conducted by air, land and on water, in the foulest of weather conditions and the most elusive of terrain conditions. And the training and equipping of personnel specially earmarked for earthquake duty like, for instance, the fire services.

4. The calibration of structures as being at very high risk, high risk and low risk so that their residents can be forewarned and also made responsible to protect themselves and those in the vicinity by securing the concerned buildings against seismic risk. Likewise, the inauguration of a new architecture regime to assist the phased replacement of the vulnerable buildings. Public buildings have to come under priority scrutiny for their seismic-safety. No collaboration with Japan can be as germane to our needs as an Indo-Japanese plan for earthquake-efficient architecture.

5. The minimizing of the impact of a ‘seismic- stroke’ which cannot be prevented but, by conjoint planning and action in good time, have its blow softened.

Terror and seismic action come without warning and disappear without trace, leaving innocents dead and dying in the debris they create. We cannot allow them to demolish our collective equipoise, but we cannot afford to remain unvigilant, unprepared and uneducated about their propensities.
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www.telegraphindia.com
Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

Our dear friend Karuna — Maharajkumari Karuna Devi Mahtab of Burdwan — never forgave me for calling her, only half in jest, a Punjabi. “Five hundred years in Bengal and we’re still Punjabis!” she exploded. “And not even a word of Punjabi!” her brother added. The protest seemed logical save that, barring exceptional love matches, all Mahtab spouses came from Punjab in those 500 years. A similar conversation with Ralph Ellison, the Black American author of Invisible Man, was more definitive. Ellison nursed no memory, individual or folk, of his African forebears. His consciousness had been shaped in the crucible of the American Dream.

Both conditions were reflected in the forgotten Subash Ghising’s perspicacious reference to “the ‘identity problem’ of the nine million Gorkhas in the country”. His admission also suggested less dogmatism than the angry and emotional response of some Nepalese readers to my Gorkhaland article (“Genie out of the bottle”, July 23). How long does one have to live in a terrain to be regarded as indigenous, one asked. The answer can’t be measured in years or even generations. As the Rastafarian movement and the Black girl flirting with Nigerian names and attire in that magnificent film, A Raisin in the Sun, demonstrated, belonging is a state of mind even more than physical fact. I have seen German-origin Soviet families squatting for days on airport floors with their boxes and bedding like refugees at Sealdah station waiting for flights to “return” to a Germany some had never seen. I also know ethnic Germans who despite Germanic names and appearance, regard themselves and are regarded by others as entirely Russian.

With passports of convenience readily available, legal citizenship is only a small part of identity. Nor is identity constricted by politics which is why many Nagas seek union with their fellow tribesmen in Myanmar. People who knew Dorjee Khandu, the late chief minister of Arunachal Pradesh, say he was loyally Indian to the core but completely Tibetan in lifestyle. A Malaysian bumiputera (son of the soil) is usually born Malay and Muslim, but Malayali settlers in dhoti and angavastram have also been accorded bumiputera status. Karuna Mahtab proved that choice takes precedence over history and ethnicity.

The Nepalese fanned out along the Himalayan foothills, all over India and into Sikkim and Bhutan, long before the world’s only Hindu kingdom surrendered to revolutionary turmoil. Readers who deny that the British introduced Nepalese labour are right only to the extent that migration existed before Sikkim ceded Darjeeling to the East India Company in 1835. But it’s fanciful to claim (as one reader did) that the Nepalese came as long ago as the 1600s. Darjeeling had only 1,900 people in 1850 (2,200 in 1869) and many of them must still have been Lepchas and Bhutiyas. British rule gave migration an impetus. Leo Rose, Lopita Nath and other scholars regard the treaty of Sugauli and establishment of recruitment centres at Ghoom and Gorakhpur as the start. The 1950 India-Nepal treaty was another major landmark. Did the Nepalese share of Darjeeling’s population rise from 54 per cent in 1901 to 58.4 per cent in 1971 only because of natural growth or did already settled families invite their kin to join them, as migrants do worldwide? Rajiv Gandhi’s refusal in 1986 to countenance citizenship for post-1950 immigrants seems explicable in view of the reported growth of over 700 per cent between 1951 and 2001 in Darjeeling’s Nepalese population.

This eastward push by a vigorous and hardworking community was bound to have consequences on the ground. Indigenous Lepchas and Bhutiyas were reduced to minorities in their own homeland. Ethnic strife erupted periodically in Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and — most of all — Meghalaya. Darjeeling suffered grievously. The diaspora’s most dramatic impact was in Sikkim which had only 2,500 Lepchas, 1,500 Bhutiyas and 1,000 Tsongs in 1873. When the troubles began a century later, the Nepalese were about three-quarters of the population and played a decisive part in changing the status of a Tibetan-Buddhist kingdom with which they could not relate. Typically, the Janata Congress president, Krishna Chandra Pradhan, demanded a Nepalese Hindu king to balance the Bhutiya Buddhist Chogyal! It’s no secret that Bhutan began to be wary of its non-Drukpa population after the Sikkim agitation in which many Darjeeling Nepalese participated. Allegations of Darjeeling Nepalese agitators in Bhutan, too, revived the “greater Nepal” spectre.

Bhutan’s actual Nepalese population may exceed the official 20 per cent. The government began recruiting Nepalese contractual labour (tangyas) in 1900 to work in the tropical forests, allowing them to stay on as tenant farmers with Bhutanese nationality after the 1958 Nationality Law was enacted. Setting a precedent for Ghising, indigenous Drukpa officials avoided calling them Nepalese. They felt absorption would be easier if the Nepalese were called Southern Bhutanese or Lhotshampas. Benign accommodation changed when waves of illegal migrants started taking advantage of Bhutan’s planned growth, empty land and porous borders. The evictions from Bhutan, refugee camps in eastern Nepal, militant organizations, terrorist activity and assisted migration to North America and Europe are another story.

Believing that Gorkhaland would “solve” the “identity problem” he discerned, Ghising made another contribution to the solution by calling his people Gorkha (replacing the “u” of the Indian army’s seven regiments and Britain’s Brigade of Gurkhas with “o”) because Nepalese recalled Nepal and invited comments such as Morarji Desai’s. Prem Poddar claims in Gorkhas Imagined that “the word ‘Gorkha’ (or the neologism ‘Gorkhaness’) as a self-descriptive term… has gained currency as a marker of difference for Nepalis living in India… While this counters the irredentism of a Greater Nepal thesis, it cannot completely exorcize the spectres or temptations of an ethnic absolutism for diasporic subjects.” Despite his acumen, Ghising may have aggravated those fears by sending the Gorkha National Liberation Front’s memorandum to King Birendra of Nepal, Prince Gyanendra and Queen Elizabeth, and by making periodic unpublicized trips to Nepal. The Karuna Mahtab and Ralph Ellison assimilation analogies seemed even less applicable when it was recalled that the All India Gurkha (no “o” then) League referred to Nepal as the “motherland” in its founding constitution.

Several readers have retorted that Bengalis are equally foreign because they are really Bangladeshis. True, many of those who live in Calcutta and West Bengal have ancestral roots in East Bengal (there was no Bangladesh then) just as many Tamils in Chennai may come from villages in Tanjore and other districts. The metropole always attracts aspiring manpower, and internal migration in undivided Bengal followed this universal pattern. The movement since 1947 falls into two categories. The first is a staggered and long-delayed (because of a number of political reasons, not least the 1950 Nehru-Liaquat Ali pact) counterpart of the exchange of population that happened all at once in Punjab. The second is the influx of Muslims from East Pakistan and later Bangladesh which is often abetted by elements in West Bengal. There can be no question that these illegal migrants should be tracked down and deported. But neither category can be compared to the millions of Nepalese who have over the decades crossed the open 500-mile border into a foreign country and made it their home. I doubt if there is a global parallel.

Gorkhaland will be India’s second Nepalese-majority state. It will be bounded by Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and China. The Nepalese are delighted, witness pictures of a triumphantly dancing Bimal Gurung. But Darjeeling’s sitting member of parliament, Jaswant Singh, tempers pleasure with circumspection. “I am, of course, glad that this ‘Genie’ is finally free and roaming, it was long overdue,” he wrote. “The challenge is to understand: ‘what hereafter’ and to address that.” Since Mamata Banerjee denies that the tripartite agreement, whose signing Jaswant Singh attended, will lead to statehood, she may not even realize there is a challenge to understand and address.
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by Wangchuk Basi
Friday, April 8, 2011

It is time. India’s long awaited second independence movement has begun. The Kalimpong Citizen’s Rights Forum and civil society has joined the movement. I am including a resolution we passed on the 7th April, which was followed by a procession in town to voice our support. Copies of the resolution were faxed to the PM, President, Home Minister, Governor, and campaign headquarters of Anna Hazare. Raise your heads, stand tall, you have nothing to lose but your shackles and say…”it is enough”

A meeting of the Kalimpong Citizen’s Rights Forum was convened at The Ramkrishna Rangamanch on Thursday the 7th of April , 2011. The meeting was conducted in the presence of the President, Executive members of the forum, office bearers and members of NGOs and civil society.

The house deliberated on the ongoing campaign by Mr Ana Hazare to bring to the fore the issue of corruption in our country. The meeting began by accepting that today we are ranked among the most corrupt countries on the face of the planet. The gravity of the situation can no longer be understated as it threatens our very existence as a civilized and developed country. Every facet of our lives has been undermined, our laws subverted and our constitution has become a mockery.

The house was unanimous in supporting Mr Ana Hazare’s campaign and the people’s demand that the Lokpal bill as suggested by Mr Ana Hazare and civil society is passed without delay, and that the nation is restored to it’s people. We demand also that those in position of power , be they in the political realm or administration be made accountable to the people. The privatization of public office must stop immediately, and legislative and administrative mechanisms put into place so that the culture of corruption with impunity is brought to an end. These are diseases that today puts our country into far graver danger than any other foreign or domestic threat, either real or imagined.

While supporting Mr Ana Hazare’s campaign , the house also supported the motion unanimously that our support does not in any way endorse any political party which may express similar views. This is a citizen’s movement and our contention is that political parties are all complicit in bringing our nation to this perilous state.

Jai Hind

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www.himalmag.com
On being an ‘outsider’ in Kathmandu and remembering the past.

At the very outset, I must be a village explainer: Firstly, my full name is Peter John Karthak, and this name has been a frequent irritant in my life. Secondly, I am a Lepcha, a far-eastern aboriginal nationality of Ilam, in Nepal, a group duly enshrined in the country’s official ethnic list. But Nepali bureaucracy and even the country’s intelligentsia are not fully aware of my tribe’s existence, thus leading to doubts about my own Nepaliness and aggravating my identity as an irredentist. Contrary to this identity, however, I am not one to advocate for reclaiming my people’s native lands, parcelled out to other newly created Southasian countries during the 20th century; I am only labelling myself as somebody who is chronically uprooted by the region’s recent history.

Adding to my irredentism is the fact that, thirdly, I am a fifth-generation Christian, a rare bird for the majority Hindu and Buddhist populace of Nepal. Fourthly, I am taken as an immigrant from Darjeeling, and such a creature is called prabasi in Kathmandu. Fifthly, though my ancestral roots are in Ilam of Nepal, the then-His Majesty’s Government of Nepal granted me a naturalised citizenship certificate, and this does not help address my irredentism – as further exacerbated by, sixthly, the additional fact of having been born in Shillong.

Seventhly, being tossed in and around my family farm and the tea gardens of Darjeeling before settling in the district headquarters of Darjeeling – where the native Lepcha are being reduced to a miniscule minority in the much-vaunted Gorkhaland – further added to my internal irredentism. Eighthly, as a Lepcha, I could claim Sikkim as my new home, too, if not the other sanctuaries in the Lepcha world, but Sikkim’s own various turmoil were more discouraging than welcoming. So I ended up in Kathmandu, whose ownership of me is yet to materialise, even after 44 years of dwelling here.

Ninthly, had I not been a child who never saw his father, my irredentism would not have arisen in the first place; rather, my parental firm address would have solidly anchored me somewhere. Tenthly and lastly, were I living somewhere within a fold of the ancient Lepcha realms, I would not be an irredentist. Technically, I belong to Kathmandu, yes, but ethnically I belong to a territory that once embraced Ilam (in Nepal), Darjeeling and Sikkim (now in India) and west Bhutan. But since none claims me, I belong spiritually nowhere. As an irredentist, I am thus practically invisible. My parts are scattered; so the sum, the total, is far from being whole. (more…)

Condemn this act of Desperation and Violence

We write this note to vehemently condemn the killing of two innocent persons from Dooars and Kalimpong by the state security agencies at Shibshu and also those who instructed to carry out such brutal act. In a democratic country like ours , protests, strikes and resentments for any reasons are both common and very normal. It must be more so in a state like West Bengal where the ruling party and the govt themselves have called for several bandhs and strikes in the past. Has anyone calculated the losses and damages triggered by these govt sponsored bandhs?

The duty of a responsible state is to look for and provide a durable solution to such kind of protests which have hit the hills of Darjeeling for almost three decades now. A civilised society like that of Bengal would never celebrate the use of guns against hapless, unarmed and innocent human beings. Given the history of inquiries and their revelations in the aftermath of such killings in West Bengal no one would even have faith on such inquiries let alone asking for the same.

Solutions cannot be brought by brutality and repressions and parochialism and highhandedness. The people of Darjeeling district have not seen the government and the state for last three decades now. Utter chaos and lawlessness, political alienation, economic deprivation and cultural degeneration have been deliberately and systematically injected by the state of West Bengal. People have suffered incessant damages, large number of people have been killed, institutions have been uprooted and more importantly the very beautiful psyche and harmony of the people have been dislocated and demolished. Darjeeling district brought so much of fame and name, huge quantum of wealth and assets and more seriously global prestige to West Bengal as the “Queen of the Hills” and what it in turn got is only filth-dirt, destructions, deprivations, negligence and violence. It has institutionalised internal colonialism in Darjeeling district and Dooars region.

The Shibshu incident only proves that the West Bengal Government only believes in repressions and brutality. Political will to give a durable solution is starkly feeble and remarkably fragile. It also shows the crying need to democratise the Bengal brand of democracy.

What the people in Darjeeling district and Dooars require and want today is a solution to their century old problems that range from identity to development; demographic encroachment to erosion in national security; political participation to constitutional recognition and newer geographical configuration to their own governance system. West Bengal Govt today has two clear options either it should sincerely and effectively rule or quit to let the people Darjeeling district and Dooars to manage their own affairs. The options are narrowing and signs of desperation and nervousness have already started appearing in the politico-governance firmament of West Bengal.

This is a desperate situation today that requires a desperate solution. We the civil society members of the Darjeeling and Dooars want the solution that is durable, permanent and more critically that fulfils the century old aspirations of the people who live and sustain in these two distinct geographical regions.

Issued by

Prof Mahendra P Lama, a concerned citizen.
On behalf of the Civil Society Members of Darjeeling district and Dooars

Measure the difference between ‘an attack on democratic forces’ and ‘simply a case of murder’. It is obvious that the government of West Bengal is once again not going to uphold the law when it comes to Darjeeling. Their ‘bigger concern’ is the tripartite talks. To arrest Morcha leaders including Gurung, who was included in the complaint filed by AIGL to the police, would jeopardize the negotiations.

Even the response from Delhi was far short of what was warranted. Although admitting that normality had to continue in Darjeeling before talks could go forward, senior Congress leader and Union Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee affirmed that the talks with GJMM would continue. ‘Our main priority will be to keep the national highways which pass through Darjeeling district open as they are vital to our security… they connect Sikkim and Bhutan,’ he said.

Himal Southasian
Darjeeling, a travesty of democracy
by Niraj Lama

The shocking daylight slaying of Madan Tamang, the main Opposition leader of Darjeeling, in the heart of Darjeeling town on 21 May, has plunged hill politics to a new low. It has deepened the continuing political crisis in the hills by snuffing out the most recognizable moderate voice in the hills. The current political leadership is suddenly reviled as a murderous lot by the local populace. Worse, this act threatens the legitimacy of the on-going tripartite talks in Delhi regarding the hills’ political future.

62-year-old Tamang was overseeing preparations for a public meeting to mark the foundation day of All India Gorkha League (AIGL), a party which he headed, when a mob, believed to be supporters of the Gorkha Jan Mukti Morcha (GJMM), attacked the venue with khukris and swords. He was hacked to death in full view of office-goers, local residents and tourists, and, worse, a whole contingent of police expressly deployed to the spot to maintain peace and order during the public meeting. (more…)

The Telegraph – Opinion
FREE SPIRIT

Victor Banerjee mourns the loss of his close friend, Madan Tamang

His email address was simply rhododel@: his magnificently wild and creatively cultivated hillside garden was less treacherous than Eden, and yet on the edge of every leaf was a timeless drop of suspense that one never expected would one day fall upon blood-sodden earth. No one knew more about Himalayan blossoms than he. No one loved them more than he did: and no one’s garden was a louder chorus of triumph than the quiet acres that surrounded his quaintly constructed log houses amidst the pines.

To travel into the interiors of Bhutan and Sikkim and sweat for years to acclimatize rhododendron bushes to the altitude and climate of Darjeeling was one man’s dream, one man’s achievement. The gentle Gardener had green thumbs and eyes that, while talking to you, would wander to the tree lines on the horizon to contemplate his people’s destiny.

He gave me two dozen cuttings and plants packed immaculately in moss, to transport across the Himalaya. I travelled two nights and a day across the sizzling plains and finally climbed into the comfort of the foothills above the Shivaliks. All the rhododendrons had survived the journey. As I dug holes in the mountainside, he spoke to me over the crackle of a very bad telephone connection and told me, step by meticulous step, how I should go about putting the plants into the ground. It took me five minutes to plant each sapling, and at the end of it I collapsed on the heather. “Finished”, I cried into the mouthpiece. “No, you haven’t”, came the flat and sharp response. “It is the beginning of a new life and a new lifetime!”

That was 10 years ago, almost to the day. He died a few days back. For centuries, we have slaughtered one another for more bad reasons than good. To lustily hang on to a few tracts of land, we have subjugated fellow humans to suffering and neglect and exploitation. Some have fought against that, for all they ever wanted was for flowers to bloom upon a free land.

The Gorkhas have had no representation in Parliament to talk of and no clout with which to demand their rights. Today, one of the Gorkha people’s dreamers is dead: killed violently by one of his own, on the street in broad daylight, with tourist cameras clicking and capturing his death throes.

My friend, Madan Tamang, is dead. And India shines. Real estate is booming. Vegetables are affordable to farmers who have sold out to developers. The nouveau riche once reeked of money. Today, the tables have turned and yesterday’s elite are the impoverished, unwanted and pooh-poohed dregs of society. But the hands of the clock shall still keep turning, without remorse.

In our blossoming flower garden, everything, as the people’s poet Rilke once said, “is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colours, there would be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night”. Madan’s joyous plants shall droop and weep through the night for their leader who was felled for his love of Darjeeling and its people.

Years ago, at the gates of Pashupatinath in Kathmandu, I was told about the most famous lines ever written in Nepali poetry. Today, I find little comfort in the fact that only our silenced conscience makes cowards of us. “Kun mandir ma janchau yatri, Kun samagri puja garne (which temple are you going to dear pilgrim, and what is your offering to the Lord?)” It is time we thought twice about what the Little Prince said to the wily fox: “One sees clearly, only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes”.

And as Darjeeling’s rhododendrons bloom on alien mountain slopes this week, I shall gaze through prayer flags at the full moon that rises on Buddha Purnima night and mourn the loss of a dear friend, a great gardener. Out of gardens grow fleeting flowers but lasting friendships.

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Thank you Mr. Bannerjee for the moving elegy…. a shared sorrow.
-admin

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www.kalimpong.info

The discovery of the photograph of the Tibetan Mirror Press and its editor Mr. Tharchin (or Rev. G. Tharchin, or Tharchin Babu) necessitates the stitching together of some past stories…

Dr. Sonam Wangyal’s essay about Tharchin Babu titled “Kalimpong’s Lonely Warrior” had a wonderful description of the editor of the Tibet Mirror Press and Kalimpong personality.

However, Tharchin, a Ladakh-born Tibetan who made Kalimpong his home is remembered not for the way he dressed or looked but for a journal he wrote. … Tharchin Babu is and will forever be reminisced for Tibet Mirror which was the only Tibetan language journal ‘in the whole world’. It was read from the grand monasteries of Lhasa to the Oriental departments of esteemed European universities, and it was eagerly awaited upon by the foreign offices of Washington, Peking (Beijing), London, Moscow and New Delhi. When the Chinese presence in Lhasa intensified Tibet Mirror responded with salvos of anti Chinese, anti communist and anti Mao Tse Tung articles.

The photograph from the previous post then put a face to the description. We also see the elegant and proud sign of Tibet Mirror Press back then in 1957.

Then we have yet another photograph that I had taken in Dec 2008 of the present state of the poor press:

It is a pity that Kalimpong’s rich and colorful history has been reduced to this.

Here’s an important and informative discourse on the demographic politics played in the Dooars since partition. The essay is a little heavy with the numbers, but the numbers are important so please do not be intimidated by the figures and the statistics. This is a very relevant article, and has important information for the inclusion of the Dooars in the state of Gorkhaland.

The article is a little long, but I decided to put the whole thing up without breaking it up into parts. Do take the time to read it all. Book mark the page if necessary.
-Admin

PRE-INDEPENDENCE The ethnic people, the autochthones, were the Rajbansis,[1] or the Koches,[2] the Totos and the Mechis[3] Dukpas and the Garos. I will not claim that the Gorkhas are indigenous to the Dooars, a claim the Bengalis too cannot assert, but one can claim that the Gorkhas are one of the oldest non-autochthones. This report will also attempt to show that over the passage of time the natives and the ancient settlers got swamped by the continuous flood of Bengali immigration to the extent of making the area a Bengali subdivision.

The Gorkhas in the Dooars is not a recent phenomenon and the Gazetteer of West Bengal Government itself admits: “They began to immigrate and settle down in the district (i.e. Jalpaiguri) especially in the western parts of the district, as agriculturalists, from the beginning of the eighteenth century.”[4] This would mean that the history of the Gorkhas in the Dooras stretches to a minimum of 300 years. The recorded accounts of the Gorkhas inhabiting the area in the days of yore are also to be found outside the official gazetteers. The official history of Cooch Behar mentions of a gang of Sanyasis that used to raid Cooch Behar in the 1770s. The group seems to be so large and strong that the State police and the armed forces of the Maharajah could not stop the raids and the Government of Cooch Behar had to seek assistance from the East India Company. Even the Company’s representative seems to have been frustrated and he eventually appealed to the Nepal king to intercede[5] since the Sanyasis were almost entirely Gorkhas. This book Cooch Beharer Itihas (in Bengali) documents that Nepalis (Gorkhas), Bhutanese and Bengal Moslems would often combine and attack Cooch Behar with deadly effect.[6] The same source enlightens us that prior to Sino-Gorkha War, Nepal used to send tribute to the Chinese Emperor through the Raja of Baikunthapur.[7] This would have been impossible if the Gorkha king did not have substantial influence over the ruler of the place. The Sanyais were active even as late as the 1770s and many of them were employed by the Bhutanese “as means of enforcing collection of tribute from recalcitrant payers.”[8] The second phase of Gorkhas settling in the Dooars, according to the Gazetteer, was “in the mid-nineteenth century” with the opening of the tea gardens[9] and even in this case the Gorkha history in the Dooars is 150 years old. (more…)

From: HImalayan Times, Kalimpong
Thursday, January 7, 2010

GORKHALAND & TELANGANA – States of Confusion

By Sandip C Jain
Editor, Himalayan Times, Kalimpong

Whether the dramatic green signal shown by the otherwise honourable Union Minister for Home Affairs Mr.P.Chidarambaram to the people of the Telangana region for their demand of re-de-merger, will actually translate into the creation of the twenty-ninth state of the Indian Union or whether it will turn out to be one of the biggest con act pulled out in the Political history of Independent India, still remain a part of the next Act. Only time will tell whether a new state of Telngana will become a reality or whether the midnight assurance given by the Government of India to the Telangana Rastriya Samity was just a ploy to make its supremo K.Chandrashekhara Rao, withdraw his 11 days hunger strikes. Telangana’s fate appears as hazy and shrouded in mystery as the polices of the Central government in matters relating to creation of new states in India.

For the time being of course, all it has managed to do is to set ablaze all the three regions of Andhra Pradesh, (Telangana, Rayalaseema and Coastal Andhra Pradesh) which now the Central Government and the Congress Party in particular will find extremely different to extinguish and even if it somehow manages to bring this raging inferno into control, it will only do so at the expense of being severely scalded itself. (more…)