India’s romantic hill station Darjeeling has evoked images of beautiful tea-growing gardens but also, for those who follow its politics, of industrial strikes and violent insurgencies.
No more, says the leader of a new political party that swept to power in recent municipal polls, vowing to end years of agitation that have blighted the region’s main sources of income: tea and tourism.
Ajoy Edwards, whose four-month-old Hamro party won 18 out of 32 seats in the local elections, is the charismatic former leader of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) who went into exile from the region for long periods due to his times as an armed activist, and now says he wants to make progress on historical issues but ultimately get back to business.
“We cannot keep doing what we have done for the past 35 years,” Edwards said. “Especially with strikes, as when we have long ones nothing really happens in the rest of Bengal yet our own people are driven into poverty.”
The scenic town at the foot of the eastern Himalayas is famous not just for the “champagne of teas” but as a hotbed of tension between ethnic Bengalis and Gorkhas – Indians of Nepali origin. Gorkha separatist groups want a wholly autonomous region, free from the West Bengal state government in Kolkata, and this is often manifested in strikes by agricultural workers. Naturally this affects tea production, which in turn ravages the local economy.
“Every time there is a revolution, things don’t go forward. We’re stuck. I mean the infrastructure is essentially still what the Britishers left us with,” Edwards said. “We are still drinking water from 100-year-old reservoirs and living in crumbling houses from that age. There’s a systemwide failure. We’ve just been putting screens on old windows for too long, without ever repairing the glass.”
Edwards formed the Hamro party (Our party, in Nepali) last November after becoming estranged from his GNLF colleagues, preferring an onus on social work and a more centrist approach to the relative tub-thumping nationalism of the past.
He narrowly missed out on winning the seat he stood for but he remains party chairman and is an adviser to the new municipal chair, and carries great influence.
His former comrades have been somewhat scathing of his new persona but he appears unruffled. “A separate state for our people is something we can never lose sight of,” he said. “That’s part of my vision and part of my party’s vision. Having a homeland for the Gorkha people is an emotional demand that will always stay with me – just nothing violent.”
In recent years tea production in Darjeeling has been plagued by industrial action. Strikes and protests that lasted almost a year in 2017 cost the Indian tea industry an estimated 2.5bn rupees (£25m).
While Darjeeling accounts for about 7% of India’s total tea output, its luxury price tag at five to six times that of ordinary strands means it accounts for a disproportionately large share of income. The largest importer is Russia, followed by Iran.
Edwards, whose family owns the picturesque Glenary’s bakery, which offers tea and cakes with breathtaking views from Darjeeling’s main drag, sees a chance to improve the wider economy by ending the region’s political turbulence and strikes.
“Tea production has become so overtly politicised, workers’ wages are dismal. They have remained frozen in time. To earn decent living wages has become a thing of the past,” he said.
“My own restaurant charges around 200 rupees for a pot of Darjeeling tea and it’s absurd that a daily tea worker can earn only around 180 rupees a day, picking the leaves for that pot. And all this means it is our women who end up doing the bulk of the tea garden work, as they can’t do alternative – and better-paying – laborer jobs so easily.”
He is also acutely aware of the negative effects on tourism. He said there was a regular intake of visitors, “but it’s never been done at a proper, professional level. We need to market not just the town but the hamlets around it.”
It remains to be seen whether he can deliver. Of his former comrades of him, he acknowledged rivalry remained. “We’ve been in a cycle of enmity both internally and with outsiders. We’re looking at ending that with proper diplomacy,” he said.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism