(sorry about all the broken pictures lately; my internet sucks)

MIRIK, INDIA
From Wikipedia:

Mirik (Nepali: मिरिक) is a picturesque tourist spot nestled in the serene hills of the district of Darjeeling in West Bengal, India. Mirik has become a tourist destination for its climate, natural beauty and accessibility [...] A 3.5-km-long road encircles the lake and is used for walks with the view of Kanchenjunga on the far horizon. Boating on the quaint shikaras and pony riding are available.

Mirik is that place that your parents would drag you ever summer even though you were sick of it five years ago and just want to stay home and play video games. Except there isn’t a beach. Tourism is almost entirely Bengalis from the lowlands, but I’m at a complete loss to explain what they actually do here – the lake isn’t swimmable and there are only so many times you can ride a pony or paddle around in a boat. Everything closes at 7pm, so we just sat in a gazebo and drank beer the whole time.

But I got to ride an Enfield there.

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
The word bandh is usually translated as “general strike,” but that obscures the word’s whole crappy spectrum of meaning. To be more specific, a bandh is a type of protest where political party or other organization orders an entire town or region to completely shut down under the threat of violent reprisal (usually breaking all your stuff, but on Saturday some Maoists killed two people for working during a bandh).

Bandhs are incredibly common in India, Nepal and Bangladesh – West Bengal alone has as many as fifty a year. While many are called for legitimate grievances, they’re such a spectacularly effective way of getting noticed that some people will invoke a bandh every time they’re mildly pissed off (I’ve heard that it’s the norm in Nepal for farmers to shut down the only highway when there’s a wreck or somebody runs out of gas). There are so many that Nepalbandh.com actually keeps up with bandh calls and posts them on a calendar (there were about two or three every day last month).

Every time a bandh is on it inevitably destroys revenue for businesspeople and makes life a pain in the ass, so pretty much everybody hates them. The Indian government ‘banned’ bandhs in 1998, but you can imagine how that went, and there’s at least one anti-bandh group on Facebook.

The GJM loves stupid, flamboyant protest tactics, so of course they call a bandh in Darjeeling at least once a month. This time around it had something to do with Gorkhas killed in a Maoist attack and they announced it with orange posters stuck on buildings throughout the main thoroughfare. All transportation was to be shut down for two days, so everyone who needed to leave the city descended on Darjeeling’s jeep stand the evening before.

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
Last time we talked about the history of the Gorkhaland movement. The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha is campaigning for an independent Nepali state within India, a demand that is historically, logistically and politically respectable.

But that doesn’t excuse the fact that the GJM’s tactics seem like they came out of a focus group of nine year olds. Highlights include:
- Forcing everyone to write “Gorkhaland” on their shop, restaurant or home (otherwise you go on “the list”)
- Banning alcohol and cracking down on live music so it looks like everyone is oppressed and not having any fun
- Giving teenagers big sticks and Gorkhaland-themed tracksuits and letting them walk around town intimidating everybody
- Making elementary school kids march through town chanting “Gorkhaland”

Best of all are the second-rate theatrics the GJM puts on – A few weeks ago, party leader Bimal Gurung announced that he would commit suicide if Gorkhaland wasn’t independent by March 10th, 2010. That didn’t happen, and when the media started to taunt him the GJM staged a press conference to address the issue. In front of a crowd of GJM supporters, Gurung reached for his briefcase to “fulfill [his] promise,” and a swarm of Gorkha women threw themselves on him shouting “Oh please don’t do it!”

Seriously. You can read about it here.

Idiotic as their tactics may be, the GJM isn’t messing around. They have power, influence and legions of angry, goose-stepping kids, so next time we’ll see what happens when they decide to shut down the entire city.

DARJEELING, GORKHALAND
Indian politics are complicated, confusing and often absurd. Darjeeling has been embroiled in a ‘political situation’ since independence, and while it’s gotten a lot less violent lately tensions remain high. The next few posts will be about the Gorkhaland independence movement, so here’s a brief rundown.

West Bengal is a state in India populated mostly by Bengali people, who share their language and heritage (though not religion) with the people of Bangladesh. Darjeeling and its surrounds are politically part of West Bengal, but the overwhelming majority of people are ethnically Nepali (or ‘Gorkha’) and have little to nothing in common with the Bengalis that actually run the state. The lack of Gorkha representation in West Bengal’s government has spawned numerous independence movements demanding a separate state for Nepali-dominated areas. Many states in India were drawn around ethnic boundaries (Assam, Nagaland, Tamil Nadu, etc), so it’s not at all an unreasonable request.

Back in the mid-80s, the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) started getting violent about the whole thing and a few hundred people died in the streets of Darjeeling. The Indian Army was called in, order was restored and the GNLF settled for a semi-autonomous “hill council” instead of a fully independent state. Nothing much happened until late 2007, when a former member of the GNLF decided that the Gorkhaland issue wasn’t over and founded the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM). The GJM whipped up dormant nationalist sentiments, recruited disaffected youth and quickly became a visible symbol of the revitalized Gorkhaland movement. Unlike the GNLF, the GJM espouses a devotion to satyagraha, Gandhi’s idea of non-violent resistance.

Sounds pretty okay, right? The problem is that the people running the GJM have no idea what they’re doing. They may have a commitment to nonviolence, but the tactics they’ve adopted are just as stupid and ineffective as indiscriminate killing.

We’ll talk about that on Monday!