Sikkim is held hostage by Gorkhaland agitation: Chief minister (Interview)


IANS

Gangtok, Jan 10 : Over the past years and especially these last days, Pawan Chamling has been seeing his dreams of a prosperous Sikkim, which he wants to be India’s top state in per capita income, shaken and even fractured by an ongoing agitation for a separate Gorkhaland in neighbouring West Bengal.

“Since 1986, when the demand first surfaced, we have been suffering, but the present time has been very bad, 80 percent of our hotel bookings have been cancelled, our lifeline is closed and we are under tremendous pressure,” said Chamling, who has been chief minister of this Himalayan state for 15 years over three terms. In the 2009 elections, his Sikkim Democratic Front made a clean sweep in the 40-member state legislature.

“We lost about Rs.2,000 crore (Rs.20 billion/$400 million) in these past weeks,” said Chamling in an interview in New Delhi, after a meeting with PrimeMinister Manmohan Singh where he demanded that the central government ensure that the highway from Siliguri and New Jalpaiguri be kept open.

These are the main rail, road and air hubs for north Bengal. The highway, which snakes its way up from the Bengal plains to Gangtok,Sikkim’s capital, and to the India-China border, has been blocked at the entry point for Sikkim by protesters demanding a separate state, including school children.

“We are hostages in Sikkim: if it is a national highway, then it should be treated as such and cleared for traffic, goods and passengers. Why should we have to suffer for no fault of our own,” Chamling snapped. “The centre and the stategovernment in Bengal should ensure safe conduct of convoys through the highway.”

He balanced this against the integration of Sikkim since 1975, when it was absorbed into India. Not less than 10,000 jobs had been hit in the tourism industry alone, he said.

Chamling added that the prime minister had assured him that he would talk to Home Minister P. Chidambaram about the issue. The chief minister now plans to visit Kolkata to press his counterpart in West Bengal, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee. While Chamling said the Gorkha demands were within the ambit of the Constitution, he felt the centre andWest Bengal should not delay a decision on the issue.

Clearing the blockade is a ticklish problem for the centre because law and order is a state subject under the Constitution and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance does not want to do anything that would give the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) inWest Bengal an issue to mobilise anti-Delhi support.

The state is to go to the polls next year and the CPI-M and its allies are facing for the first time a major challenge to three decades of rule from a resurgent Trinamool Congress under RailwayMinister Mamata Banerjee and its ally, the Congress. The state government has been rocked by its failure to control the Maoist challenge in Lalgarh and singed by the agitation over Singur.

Chamling holds to his vision of a Sikkim where ecological conservation would be balanced with economic development through investments in major hydro-electric dams, eco-friendly tourism and pharmaceuticals. He says his government has already brought in Rs.30,000 crore from investments in hydro power and another Rs.10,000 crore in higher education and tourism.

But he also knows that that the constant pressure on his tiny state could disrupt its enviable record of many decades of peace with Tibet to the north, an unstable Nepal to its west and north-eastern insurgencies.

And this is something that New Delhi cannot take for granted any longer.

(Sanjoy Hazarika can be contacted at sanjoyha@gmail.com)
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