Darjeeling shut as 27-day bandh starts

Life in the hills of Darjeeling came to a grinding halt as a phase-wise 27-day bandh, sponsored by the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (GJM), began on Wednesday to press for the demand of a Gorkhaland.

As the GJM had vowed to enforce a total shutdown, party activists braved the freezing cold to hit the street.

The roads wore almost a deserted look with only GJM workers being present, putting up barricades and burning tyres to keep themselves warm.

All vehicles went off the road and a curfew-like situation prevailed with everything being shut, whether a tea garden, a cinchona plantation or a medicine shop.

However, the road link between Siliguri and Gangtok in Sikkim via Kalimpong has been kept out of bandh, SDPO Nima Bhutia said.

The Supreme Court had passed a standing order that NH 31A, connecting West Bengal with landlocked Sikkim, should be kept open.

A report from Dooars in the foothills of Jalpaiguri district said the highway linking the North-East with West Bengal remained open and life in the region was normal despite huge concentration of the Gorkha community there.

Opposing the bandh, Akhil Bharatiya Adibashi Parishad has urged the Jalpaiguri administration to ensure normal operation of public transport or else, its workers would take to the street.

About 5000 people, some of them tourists, left the hills for the plains on Tuesday to evade the strike.

The first phase of the four-day shut down will continue till Jan 15 followed by a two-day break.

The strike, as it proposed, will again commence on Jan 18 and continue till the 25th of this month before resuming on the 29th.

It will then continue till Feb 12 and finally the GJM leaders would start a hunger strike.

Both the Communist Party of Revolutionary Marxists (CPRM) and the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), political adversaries of the GJM, have opposed the shutdown.