DARJEELING: A Gorkha organistion, protesting for a separate state, yesterday said it was prepared to hold talks with the West Bengal government in Delhi and not in Kolkata.
“We are not prepared to go to Kolkata for the discussions. We are open to talks with the state government in Delhi, in the presence of a representative from the central government,” Roshan Giri, a leader of the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (Gorkha People’s Liberation Front) spearheading the campaign for a separate state to be carved out of West Bengal, said here.
State Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee on Wednesday sent a letter to GJM chief Bimal Gurung renewing his appeal for talks.
Giri said the GJM was yet to receive the latest missive from the chief minister.
“The Darjeeling district magistrate (Rajesh Pandey) on Wednesday told me that he will be receiving the faxed letter from the chief minister and he will hand it over to us. But we have received no such letter so far,” he said.
Pandey said no such letter has arrived from the state secretariat.
Meanwhile, an indefinite shutdown called by the GJM entered its fourth day yesterday, paralysing life in the Darjeeling Hills.
With rains continuing to lash, Darjeeling experienced intermittent power cuts.
With the Gorkhaland demand triggering violence in the Darjeeling Hills, Siliguri and Dooars in the past few days, tea and tourism, the mainstay of the region, has been severely hit.
The campaign has revived debate within political parties on smaller states.
Each political party has worked out its own logic for supporting or resisting demands for smaller states.
The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) favours splitting up most states for better governance while the Congress prefers not to have a fixed position on the issue.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) is against smaller states. But the Communist Party of India (CPI), favours it though not in the case of every state.
For the parties, it is a matter of political expediency, political analyst G V L Narasimha Rao said. The BJP actively campaigned for the new state of Jharkhand because it led to, as was widely known, curbing the influence of the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) of Lalu Prasad Yadav who held sway in Bihar.
“The BJP supported the Jharkhand movement to expand its political influence. But the BJP would resist any move to split up Gujarat where it is so powerful,” Rao said.
Senior Congress leader M Veerappa Moily added: “There is no point recklessly dividing states for political expediency. The Congress does not have an ideological stand on the issue.”
But for all practical purposes, the Congress is against the creation of smaller states though many within its own ranks are supporting the separation of Telangana from Andhra Pradesh.
“Reckless division of states will have a cascading effect and states may eventually end up being divided along caste lines,” Moily warned. – IANS
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