The West Bengal government’s response to the Gorkhaland movement follows the same predictable pattern we have seen in Jharkhand, Nagaland, Kashmir and elsewhere. Attempts to resolve ethno-regional conflicts in India have a long history, and have coalesced into a single approach that presupposes the conflicts as being purely political phenomena. It is ironic, then, that the substance of this ‘political approach’ generally involves the use of punitive measures by state governments to compel contending groups to engage in negotiations. Within this framework, the recurring need is to discipline and punish unruly subjects. Those struggling for Gorkhaland know this well. The state’s response was predictable and involved the deployment of paramilitary forces, the reviving of all pending cases against GJM party workers and leaders, and mass imprisonment. The desire for self-governance in the Darjeeling hills is centred on two major claims. The first is the recognition of the collective social and cultural rights that earmark their distinctiveness from the Bengali ‘other’. The second is the aspiration to achieve self governance without jeopardising the sovereignty of the nation state. The contours of the Gorkhaland movement, which is over 100 years old, have been defined by the conflation of these positions – the politics of identity on the one hand, and the realisation of this identity through the politics of self-rule on the other. The movement has mobilised issues of ‘primordiality’ (language, culture, race, shared history, dress) and civility (nationality and citizenship) as important bases of articulation. A long time coming

A separate administrative system for the Gorkhas of the Darjeeling Hills was first proposed in the early years of the last century, although it was not until the 1980s that the Subhas Ghising-led movement for a separate state reached its violent and vocal apex. In August 1988 the agitators accepted the provision of a Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC), which although falling short of complete autonomy, went some way to devolving power to the hills. Ghising took charge of the new Hill Council and became the figurehead of peace and governance, along with his party men. Outside the Sixth Schedule areas of the Northeast, the DGHC was the first sub-state, local administrative arrangement of its kind in India, and was later used as a post-conflict mechanism to restore normalcy in Ladakh, Jharkhand, and Bodoland. The enthusiasm and hope at the initiation of the Hill Council soon dissipated, however, and the DGHC has since shown itself to be a storehouse of corruption, political high-handedness and nepotism. As Ghising’s popularity waned, his authority was challenged by one of his close associates, Bimal Gurung, who founded a new platform, the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM), in October 2007. Gurung usurped his former political boss in 2008. With a new leader and political platform, the Gorkhaland movement received a new lease of life. Noticeable in the GJM’s approach was a decrease in conflict, and the presence of a peculiar blend of Gandhigiri and non-violence. The possibility of recourse to force was nonetheless implicit. On the whole, the movement remained largely peaceful in its new avatar compared to the struggle of the late 1980s. Still, the daylight killing in May 2010 of All India Gorkha League chief Madan Tamang sent shockwaves through the hills. Gurung and his GJM have opted to follow ‘procedural’ democracy at the cost of ‘substantive’ democracy, and instead of boycotting parliamentary and Assembly elections (which Ghising and his GNLF repeatedly did), the GJM has used them as an opportunity to flex their electoral muscle. In parliamentary elections in 2009, and again in 2014, the GJM supported the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) instead of promoting its own candidate. It is not Hindutva ideology that enabled the BJP to repeatedly secure the single parliamentary seat earmarked for the district; rather, the GJM backed the BJP candidate Jaswant Singh (in 2009) and S S Ahluwalia (in 2014) – decidedly outsiders – and campaigned for them in the hope that if the BJP came to power at the Centre, they would fulfil the promise of considering the Gorkhaland issue made in their Lok Sabha manifestos. Electoral politics in the Darjeeling hills is dominated by the Gorkhaland issue, and this focus is only likely to continue. There will be no break from this trend in the future unless the culture of ethnic bloc-voting changes. The incentives to do so are slim. The ascendancy of the GJM was founded on the strategy of bloc-voting, achieving significant results: as soon as the 2011 Assembly elections were over and the Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee sworn in as Chief Minister, the process of reconciling with the aggrieved hill leadership was initiated. The GJM initially welcomed the new state government, and a Gorkhaland Territorial Agreement (GTA) was signed between Trinamool and the GJM in July 2011. Antim larai

When the central government gave the go-ahead for Telengana, and the Trinamool in Calcutta showed no signs of doing the same for Gorkhaland, Bimal Gurung resigned from his post as chief executive of the GTA on July 30 and began the ‘final struggle’ (antim larai). Besides mass rallies, the series of no-compromise protests involved road-rolling by naked youths, hair tonsuring by women and the etching of Gorkhaland slogans on naked bodies, among other symbolic gestures. The precipitating factor for the antim larai was the act of self-immolation that killed one protester (Mangal Singh Rajput – projected as the ‘war hero’ and the ‘only martyr’ in the recent Gorkha agitation – was born out of a ‘Gorkha mother’) in Kalimpong in July. The state’s response was predictable and involved the deployment of paramilitary forces, the reviving of all pending cases against GJM party workers and leaders, and mass imprisonment. Though the state government had earlier agreed to make efforts to release persons in custody (except those charged with murder) as per the provisions of the GTA tripartite agreement of July 2011, mass imprisonment emerged as a tool to exert pressure upon the movement’s leadership and rank and file. Over 1000 men and women who had joined the GJM’s programme were imprisoned. Facilitated by the High Court’s verdict in Rama Prasad Sarkar vs The State of West Bengal, the state government adopted a ‘rough and tough’ approach, declaring all strikes ‘illegal’, and issuing an ultimatum to the GJM to withdraw within 72 hours or face dire consequences. The strikes continued in different forms, including a janta curfew – a novel form of protest in which people registered their dissent by remaining indoors and away from the danger of arrest. In response, the state government began withholding the salaries of government employees who remained absent from their duties on strike days, and ordered ration dealers to open their shops or have their registration cancelled. As part of the mass imprisonment, the state government also jailed a number of business scions for their alleged role in supplying the money and foodstuffs necessary to run the movement during August and September.

The Joint Action Committee (JAC), a new pressure group comprising all political groups active in the hills, was formed in mid-August to determine the future course of the renewed agitation. The JAC ruled out negotiating with the state government, instead insisting on the Centre’s intervention to which the state government was opposed. The central government’s attitude regarding Gorkhaland was ambivalent, despite its positive stance on the Telengana demand. This added fuel to the burning cauldron of the hills. All other political parties in West Bengal refrained from directly criticising the steps taken by the state government to dissipate the most recent Darjeeling crisis, although organisations such as the Bengal-based Association for Protection of Democratic Rights (APDR), All India Students’ Association (AISA), Bharatiya Gorkha Parisangh (BGP) and Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists (CPRM) did raise their voices against human-rights violations committed by the state. In deploying the ‘state of exception’ model in the recent past, the state has tried to ‘set apart’ the citizens of the Darjeeling hills and deny them a politicised form of life. State of exception

The response by the Indian state to the agitations in the Darjeeling hills during the past thirty years reflects the implementation of what the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has referred to as a ‘state of exception’. In order to maintain the normative aspect of law in Darjeeling, the state in all sincerity has obliterated, contradicted and suspended the law itself. During the agitation in the summer of 2013, Darjeeling temporarily became, as Agamben puts it, a space “devoid of law, a zone of anomie in which all legal determinations were deactivated”. Life remained paralysed throughout the months of August and September. Offices, educational institutions, markets and shops were shut down; roads were deserted. Myriad security forces including the Rapid Action Force (RAF), Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF), as well as the police patrolled the streets day and night while many of Darjeeling’s Muslim inhabitants stayed away from Eid-Ul-Fitr celebrations in support of the antim larai for Gorkhaland. The indiscriminate arrest of GLP volunteers, including women and top brass GJM leaders such as Binay Tamang and Anit Thapa, continued. Television stations covering the protests were closed down at short notice, and bandhs were declared illegal. The ‘state of exception’ perspective provides us with an opportunity to make sense of the Darjeeling situation, and the central and state government’s responses to what are perceived as challenges to its hegemony and the body of the union. Post-independence, the deployment of the ‘state of exception’ has been common in India during times of both war (in 1962, 1971 and 1999) and peace (during Indira Gandhi’s 1975 State of Emergency). In the absence of an actual war, ethnic movements demanding new homelands or states appear to the disciplinary gaze of the government as something of a ‘miniature war’, which justifies deploying the ‘state of exception’ model before the situation gets out of control. Declarations of loyalty to the Indian Union that are made at the same time as demands for reconfigurations within it are generally ignored by the state and media, especially when any proposed realignment will take place in sensitive border regions. In deploying the ‘state of exception’ model in the recent past, the state has tried to ‘set apart’ the citizens of the Darjeeling hills and deny them a politicised form of life. The hill people – the citizens – are reduced to a ‘bare life’ common to all living beings; one which lies beyond the reach of political interference. Attempts to normalise the hills by employing abnormal measures stand justified within this reasoning, simply because the state has intended to invest in the body of the Gorkha law-abiding qualities, albeit by outlawing them. During the months of August and September 2013, the ‘rough and tough’ approach of the state government culminated in the successful deployment of the ‘state of exception’ and prescribed the agitating Gorkhas this ‘bare’ life common to all living creatures, and demanded that they remain busy within the privacy of their home. They should eat, propagate, educate, entertain and fulfil all other mundane needs, but should refrain from raising the cry for Gorkhaland, assembling for political meetings or processions, or participating in any political programme of action. Similar scenarios have unfolded practically every time demands for statehood have been raised by ethno-regional outfits in India since Independence. Across the spectrum, the political parties in power at the central or state level have, generally, been at the very least suspicious of aspirations to carve out new states. Consequently, the reliance upon the ‘state of exception’ framework has become the rule rather than the exception. In other words, the suspension of the rule of civilian law and the framework it provides for citizens to engage in democratic discussions and processes is seen as the best tool in the state’s armoury to meet challenges posed by ethnic or linguistic demands. Such an approach, as Agamben reminds us, renders citizens as outlaws, who have no recourse to law other than that of the sovereign’s power over life and death. Ethnos vs polity

From a legal perspective, one cannot invalidate ‘separate state’ movements in India by simply terming them ‘anti-constitutional’. Article 3 of the Indian Constitution, for example, maintains in unambiguous terms that Parliament may lawfully create a state. The meaning of this for state governments that do not wish to see their borders redrawn is that if the demand for a separate state is not from the outset anti-constitutional, then there is a need for an alternative code of politics that will complicate and derail the whole process to ensure that the integrity of the Union (and the ambit of any particular state government) is left intact. That the Darjeeling situation has been temporarily normalised only by the preventative mass-arrests and police violence that go along with a ‘state of exception’, makes clear that the protesters’ demands have been put on the back burner at best. When people consider the merits of ethnic group loyalty, there is a tendency to view this loyalty as autonomous of the state and polis, and inherently dangerous, irrational and unpredictable – particularly so in sensitive border areas. The noted Darjeeling-based writer Indra Bahadur Rai counters this perception in a 1994 essay titled ‘Indian Nepali Nationalism and Nepali Poetry’, where he writes: “One can finally emerge as a pan-Indian nationalist by inductively working one’s way up from premises of patriotically loving your own national people and serving one’s own national community.”