By Dr Barun Roy, PhD
The approaching West Bengal Assembly elections in March-April 2026 present yet another moment of reckoning for the hill districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong—regions trapped in a vicious cycle of identity politics, endemic underdevelopment, and broken political promises. As political parties sharpen their electoral strategies and mobilise familiar rhetorical arsenals, the fundamental questions remain unanswered: Can the demand for Gorkhaland ever be reconciled with West Bengal’s territorial integrity? And more critically, can the region escape the economic stagnation that has rendered its development discourse inseparable from its identity politics?
The Structural Violence of Perpetual Marginalisation
The statistical portrait of Darjeeling and Kalimpong reveals not merely underdevelopment, but systemic neglect masquerading as administrative complexity. Consider the grimness of these realities: unemployment has reached epidemic proportions, forcing educated youth into either utter dejection or migration; the iconic Darjeeling tea industry has collapsed from 14.49 million kilograms in 1990 to barely 5.19 million kilograms in 2025 (Dutta, 2026)—a decline of 64 percent that threatens “a slow decline towards extinction”; and infrastructure allocation remains grossly inadequate, with the West Bengal government allocating merely ₹80.34 crores to both districts combined, an amount risible for regions requiring comprehensive reconstruction (Dutta, 2026; Baraily, 2023).
Water scarcity has become acute, the tourism backbone has been “badly fractured since 2017 without any funds released for its recovery”, and forest villages remain deprived of fundamental rights despite national legislation (Baraily, 2023; Ghosh, 2013). These are not incidental failures; they represent the accumulated cost of treating the hills as political bargaining chips rather than as regions that require genuine developmental intervention. The proliferation of slums in Kalimpong town, with 8,047 persons living in identified slum pockets across 22 of 23 municipal wards, speaks to urbanisation without planning, growth without equity (Chhetri, 2020).
What emerges is a pattern of what can only be termed structural violence—the slow, grinding erosion of economic opportunity and social infrastructure that forces communities into perpetual states of precarity and grievance.
Identity Politics as Symptom and Trap
The demand for Gorkhaland, which has persisted since 1909, when the Hillmen’s Association first requested separate administrative arrangements, must be understood not as a primordial ethnic assertion but as a political response to material deprivation and cultural marginalisation (Roy, 2012). The 2017 agitation—triggered by the state government’s decision to impose Bengali language instruction in schools, perceived as cultural imperialism against the Nepali-speaking majority (Sharma, 2018) —killed over a dozen people, paralysed the region for 104 days, and inflicted devastating economic damage (Sharma, 2018).
Yet framing this purely as a linguistic conflict obscures deeper dynamics. The Nepali language was included in the Indian Constitution’s Eighth Schedule in 1992, granting it official recognition—a victory that should have resolved linguistic anxieties. Instead, the 2017 imposition attempt revealed the profound trust deficit between the Bengali-dominated state apparatus and the hill communities, exposing how even constitutionally protected rights feel perpetually vulnerable to majoritarian political expedience.
The ethnic complexity of the proposed Gorkhaland further complicates separatist aspirations. Gorkhas constitute approximately 35 per cent of the population in the proposed state territory, with Rajbongshis at 25 per cent, Adivasis at 20 per cent, Bengalis at 15 per cent, and others at 5 per cent (Census, 2011). This demographic reality—rarely acknowledged by pro-statehood advocates—means that “Gorkhaland” would not resolve identity anxieties but rather transfer them to new minority communities within a Gorkha-dominated political structure. The Pandora’s box argument holds weight: creating states based on sub-regional ethnic identities would trigger cascading demands across India’s diverse landscape.
The GTA Experiment: Autonomy Betrayed
The Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, established in 2012 to replace the failed Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, was positioned as a middle path—granting administrative, executive, and financial powers while preserving West Bengal’s territorial integrity. A decade later, the verdict is unambiguous: the GTA has failed catastrophically.
Ajoy Edwards’ December 2025 letter to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee provides a withering assessment from within: “The 2012 GTA Agreement has never been implemented in letter or spirit. Essential laws, rules, and procedures required for transparency and accountability have not been framed in the past 13 years. This was not a mere bureaucratic delay. It was a deliberate political design to keep the GTA weak, confused and easily controlled” (Sikkim Express, 2025). He further alleges that “properties are being distributed for thirty-year periods without [GTA] Sabha meetings, proper records and any consultation with elected representatives. These are not governance decisions. These are political transactions” (Sikkim Express, 2025). The corruption allegations surrounding GTA operations, including scandals in the Jal Jivan Mission and arbitrary land distribution under the Five Decimal Land Scheme, have eroded whatever legitimacy the institution initially possessed (Sikkim Express, 2025). When the very structure designed to address grievances becomes itself a source of grievance—an extractive mechanism rather than an empowering framework—the argument for more meaningful autonomy gains force.
This institutional failure explains why even critics of the statehood demand welcomed the Centre’s October 2025 appointment of interlocutor Pankaj Kumar Singh. When people describe the appointment as providing “a sliver of hope” despite suspicion of electoral timing, it reflects desperation born from years of administrative betrayal (Nag, 2025; Bhattacharya, 2025).
The 2026 Electoral Calculus: Fragmentation as Strategy
The political landscape entering the 2026 elections reveals how identity politics and development deficits have produced radical fragmentation. The BJP holds all five assembly seats in the Darjeeling district—Darjeeling, Kurseong, Matigara-Naxalbari, Siliguri, and Phansidewa. This dominance stems from the party’s ambiguous positioning on Gorkhaland, promising a “permanent political solution” without committing to statehood, thereby mobilising separatist sentiments without alienating Bengali-majority constituencies elsewhere.
Yet the BJP’s hill alliance is fragile. Anit Thapa’s Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha (BGPM), which swept the 2022 GTA elections with 27 of 36 contested seats, has declared it will contest the 2026 elections independently from Darjeeling, Kurseong, and Kalimpong constituencies. BGPM’s alliance with TMC at the GTA level—which helped it overthrow Hamro Party’s (now renamed Indian Gorkha Janshakti Front) municipal control through defections and TMC support—signals pragmatic accommodation with the state government, prioritising development over statehood rhetoric.
Hamro Party, led by Ajoy Edwards, won only 8 GTA seats out of 45 contested seats but has risen as the most vocal current advocate for separation from Bengal, maintaining that “experiments like DGHC and GTA could not deliver justice, autonomy or respect and that their permanent political aspiration has always been separation from Bengal” (Sikkim Express, 2025). Edwards appears poised to contest from the Darjeeling constituency, positioning himself as the authentic voice of Gorkha aspirations against what he characterises as the BGPM’s collaborationism.
Meanwhile, the GJM factions—Bimal Gurung’s camp, which spectacularly defected from the BJP to the TMC before the 2021 elections and supported the BJP during the Parliamentary elections in 2024, leading to the victory of BJP candidate Raju Bista—add further complexity. Opinion polls suggest the BJP could secure 4-5 seats in the Darjeeling district and potentially dominate the broader North Bengal region, though the reliability of such polls remains questionable (Bhattacharya, 2025).
This fragmentation serves the interests of larger parties. For the BJP, it allows mobilisation of Gorkha identity politics without resolution, maintaining electoral advantage through perpetual grievance. For TMC, BGPM’s pragmatism offers a hill proxy that accepts state supremacy in exchange for development resources and political patronage. For hill communities, fragmentation ensures that no single party can credibly claim to represent unified aspirations or negotiate effectively with state and central governments.
The Federalism Crisis: When Autonomy Becomes Performance
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s October 2025 letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, objecting to the appointment of an interlocutor as “inconsistent with the spirit of cooperative federalism”, reveals the fundamental constitutional impasse (Bhattacharya, 2025; Nag, 2025). Her argument—that the GTA falls under state jurisdiction, precluding unilateral central intervention—is legally defensible but politically tone-deaf. When a leader claims that “peace and harmony prevailing in the hill districts” result from state government efforts (Bhattachary, 2025; Nag, 2025), while residents describe systematic neglect and institutional failure, the disconnect becomes absolute.
Yet the centre’s timing—appointing an interlocutor months before crucial state elections—equally reeks of electoral manipulation rather than sincere conflict resolution. This instrumentalisation of constitutional mechanisms for partisan advantage corrodes the very federalism both governments claim to uphold. Genuine federalism requires not just a formal division of powers but good-faith engagement with regional aspirations. When both state and centre treat hill demands as electoral resources rather than governance challenges, the federal compact becomes performance art.
Constitutional scholars have proposed Article 244A—currently applicable only to tribal areas in Assam—as a potential template for granting Gorkhaland autonomous state status within West Bengal without bifurcation. It would establish a legislature and a council of ministers with genuine powers while preserving territorial integrity. The proposal merits serious consideration as a third path between the failed GTA model and the politically unviable option of full statehood. Yet neither the state government nor major political parties have engaged substantively with such constitutional innovation, preferring familiar rhetorical positions to creative institutional design.
Development as Political Economy, Not Electoral Promise
The economic crisis in Darjeeling and Kalimpong cannot be addressed through electoral promises or cosmetic schemes. The tea industry’s collapse results from multiple structural factors: 80-90 percent of tea bushes are over 70 years old, requiring capital-intensive replantation; labour absenteeism reaches 40-50 percent due to better opportunities elsewhere, while temporary labour from plains is “prohibitively expensive”; climate change and cheaper Nepali tea from across the border compound competitive pressures; and the shift to organic production, while environmentally sound, reduces yields without commensurate price premiums (Dutta, 2026).
Government intervention is desperately needed—subsidies for replantation, marketing support, infrastructure upgrades, and labour stabilisation policies. However, such intervention has been absent. Similarly, tourism, described as “the backbone of the Hills,” received zero recovery funds after the 2017 agitation devastated the sector. Forest villages remain in legal limbo, unable to access Forest Rights Act provisions because there are no functioning Panchayats under GTA jurisdiction (Ghosh, 2018). Small-scale and cottage industries in Kalimpong face “lack of infrastructure, lack of advertisement, shortage of manpower, lack of support by the government and the effect of globalisation” (Thapa, 2024). The pattern is consistent: development requires sustained, non-electoral investment in productive capacity, institutional strengthening, and human capital formation. Instead, both state and central governments make periodic announcements—such as the State Government’s 2021 comprehensive plan featuring tea tourism and industrial hubs, or the Centre’s Border Area Development Programme funds—which either fail to materialise or become mired in corruption and mismanagement (Baraily, 2023).
The cynical reality is that underdevelopment serves electoral interests by maintaining grievance-based mobilisation. A genuinely developed Darjeeling and Kalimpong, with thriving industries, robust infrastructure, and effective local governance, would reduce the salience of identity politics and challenge the patron-client relationships through which larger parties control hill constituencies.
The Census Threat and Gorkha Unity
Anit Thapa’s September 2025 call for political unity among hill parties in response to the approaching census, warning that “if we cannot bring all the Indian Gorkhas under one platform and unite our community, then we will not be able to think of anything else in the coming days”, identifies a genuine concern (Pradhan, 2025). The census risks fragmenting the umbrella category “Gorkha” into constituent sub-groups—Tamang, Gurung, Rai, Limbu, Newar, etc.—potentially diluting political representation and access to affirmative action benefits. However, this concern also reveals the constructed nature of Gorkha identity itself (Roy, 2012). The various hill communities have distinct linguistic, cultural, and historical trajectories; the “Gorkha” category emerged through colonial military recruitment and subsequent political mobilisation. The janajati movement—indigenous communities asserting distinct identities separate from the Gorkha umbrella—reflects these underlying tensions. Census disaggregation might therefore represent not external imposition but internal assertion of more granular identities.
Thapa’s proposed solution—requiring all communities to register their caste as “Gorkha” and their language as “Nepali”—privileges political expedience over cultural authenticity (Pradhan, 2025). It asks communities to subordinate their specific identities to a collective strategic category. Whether such subordination serves their interests or merely consolidates the power of dominant Gorkha political formations remains contested.
The demand for Scheduled Tribe status for 11 Gorkha sub-groups, which the interlocutor is mandated to address, further complicates matters. ST status would provide constitutional protections and benefits, potentially addressing material marginalisation without the political complications of statehood. However, it would also create new inequalities between recognised and unrecognised communities, as well as between Gorkhas and other hill and terai populations, such as Rajbongshis and Adivasis, who have their own autonomy movements.
Breaking the Cycle: Toward Genuine Solutions
The Gorkhaland question will not be resolved through the 2026 elections, nor through any single electoral cycle. It requires a fundamental reorientation of political economy and institutional design instead, moving from identity-based grievance mobilisation to capability-based development and genuine power-sharing. First, the GTA must either be radically reformed or replaced. Ajoy Edwards is correct that the current structure has utterly failed. Constitutional innovation—whether through extending Article 244A, creating a special category of autonomous regions within states, or designing a strengthened GTA with legislative powers and protected funding streams—must be seriously explored. It requires tripartite negotiations involving the centre, state government, and a unified hill political leadership that transcends factional interests. Such unity currently does not exist, and fostering it may require external mediation.
Second, development must be delinked from electoral cycles and identity negotiations. The tea industry requires an emergency rescue package comprising replantation subsidies, labour stabilisation programmes, and marketing support comparable to that received by coffee in South India. Tourism needs infrastructure investment, skill development, and integrated planning. Small-scale industries require access to credit, technology, and markets. Forest communities need land rights implementation. These are technical, financial, and administrative challenges amenable to policy solutions if there is political will.
Third, the politics of language and cultural recognition must move beyond the binary of imposition versus separatism. Nepali language’s constitutional status should translate into a robust institutional presence in education, administration, and cultural domains in West Bengal. It need not threaten Bengali identity or state unity; successful multilingual federalism elsewhere in India demonstrates the possibility. Similarly, recognition and support for sub-ethnic cultural revival—through development boards, educational institutions, and cultural preservation programmes—can coexist with collective Gorkha political identity.
Fourth, the region’s demographic complexity must inform political solutions. Any autonomy arrangement must protect the rights and identities of Lepchas, Bhutias, Rajbongshis, Adivasis, Bengalis, and others who would become minorities in a Gorkha-dominated structure. Power-sharing mechanisms, reserved representation, and cultural protections must be built into institutional design from the outset, not as afterthoughts.
Finally, political parties must be held accountable for the gap between electoral promises and governance delivery. The BJP’s “permanent political solution” remains undefined after years of control over hill constituencies. TMC’s development rhetoric has not translated into institutional transformation or economic revival. The hill parties themselves have failed to present coherent, unified visions beyond statehood slogans. Voters in Darjeeling and Kalimpong deserve better than this permanent state of suspended resolution.
Conclusion: The Weight of History, the Urgency of Now
Standing at the edge of the 2026 elections, the hills face a familiar crossroads. Political parties will deploy the usual rhetoric—promises of development from TMC, permanent solutions from BJP, and genuine autonomy from hill parties. Voters will be asked once again to choose between identity and development, between separatism and pragmatism, between different versions of the same unfulfilled promises.
But the region cannot afford another cycle of mobilisation without transformation. The tea industry is genuinely on the verge of extinction. Youth unemployment is creating a lost generation. Infrastructure deficits worsen annually. The GTA has become a symbol of governance failure rather than autonomy achievement. Moreover, the perpetual state of political uncertainty deters the very investment—economic and institutional—that the region desperately needs.
The demand for Gorkhaland emerges from legitimate grievances of cultural marginalisation and economic neglect. It deserves serious engagement rather than dismissal as parochialism or instrumentalisation as an electoral strategy. Nevertheless, statehood alone, even if politically achievable, would not automatically generate development, address intra-regional inequalities, or create the institutional capacity for effective governance. What the hills require is not another round of electoral bargaining but a fundamental reconstruction of state-society relations—characterised by genuine autonomy with accountability, sustained development investment without corruption, cultural recognition without fragmentation, and federalism as lived practice rather than constitutional formalism.
Whether the 2026 elections can catalyse such a transformation remains doubtful. Electoral logic favours the perpetuation of grievance over its resolution, the mobilisation of identity over the mundanity of governance, the spectacle of confrontation over the tedium of institution-building. Yet the alternative—continued cycles of agitation, broken promises, and deepening marginalisation—is unconscionable.
The hills have waited over a century for justice. They cannot, and should not, wait longer. The question is whether India’s federal democracy possesses the imagination, courage, and commitment to deliver it finally.
References
Baraily, M. (2023, April 6). Neglected Hill Area (Darjeeling & Kalimpong): Urgent Need for Adequate Budget Allocation & Policy Focus [LinkedIn]. Hill Area Economic Rights Movement. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/neglected-hill-area-darjeeling-kalimpong-urgent-need-adequate/
Bhattacharya, R. (2025, October 26). Decode Politics: Why Centre’s Gorkhaland interlocutor has marked a new flashpoint between Mamata, BJP. The Indian Express. https://indianexpress.com/article/political-pulse/why-centres-gorkhaland-interlocutor-has-marked-a-new-flashpoint-between-mamata-bjp-10325369/
Chhetri, B. (2020). Proliferation of slums in Kalimpong town of Darjeeling Himalaya: A study of socio-economic and housing conditions. Ensemble, 2(1), 52–68. https://doi.org/10.37948/ensemble-2020-0201-a006
Dutta, I. A. D. (2026, September 1). Darjeeling tea output may hit a new low in 2025 amid weather and labour woes. Business Standard. https://www.business-standard.com/industry/news/darjeeling-tea-output-may-hit-new-low-in-2025-amid-weather-labour-woes-126010900537_1.html
Ghosh, S. (2018, April 24). Forest Communities in Kalimpong fight for their rights. Ground Zero. https://www.groundxero.in/2018/04/24/forest-communities-in-kalimpong-fight-for-their-rights/
Nag, J. (2025, October 18). Mamata Banerjee urges Modi to revoke the appointment of the Gorkhaland interlocutor amid concerns over federalism. The Economic Times. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/politics-and-nation/mamata-banerjee-urges-modi-to-revoke-gorkhaland-interlocutor-appointment-amid-federalism-concerns/articleshow/124675672.cms
Pradhan. (2025, October 9). Census threatens Gorkha identity, says BGPM chief Thapa; Calls for political unity. Sikkim Express. https://sikkimexpress.com/news-details/census-threatens-gorkha-identity-says-bgpm-chief-thapa-calls-for-political-unity
Roy, B. (2012). Gorkhas and Gorkhaland. Parbati Roy Research Foundation.
Sharma, D. (2018). Gorkhaland agitation 2017: The politics and social media impact. Indian J. Soc. & Pol., 5(1). https://ijsp.in/admin/mvc/upload/5I08_GORKHALAND%20AGITATION%202017%20THE%20POLITICS%20AND%20SOCIAL%20MEDIA.pdf
Sikkim Express. (2025, November 19). GTA a failure: Edwards writes to CM. Sikkim Express.
Thapa, D. (2024). Navigating the Challenges and Unlocking the Potential: An Exploration of Small-Scale and Cottage Industries in Kalimpong. International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology, 2134–2171.
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