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Sukna is where the plains give out. The road from Siliguri runs flat and hot through tea gardens and then, quite suddenly, begins to climb. The little railway that the British laid in the 1880s starts its long absurd corkscrew here, and the forest closes in. For anyone travelling up to Darjeeling, Sukna is the place where the country changes character. It is also, and this is not incidental, a garrison.

The army’s 33 Corps has its headquarters there, watching over Sikkim and over the twenty-odd kilometres of Indian territory, popularly known as the Chicken’s Neck (Siliguri Corridor), that connects the northeast to the rest of the republic.

On August 22, the anniversary of the 1988 Gorkha Accord, Union home minister Amit Shah sat down at a resort in Sukna with chief minister Suvendu Adhikari and a group of leaders from the Darjeeling hills. Bimal Gurung was there. So were Roshan Giri, Mann Ghisingh, Darjeeling MP Raju Bista and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislators from the region.

Later, it constituted a committee to draft an agreement and finalise modalities for a “permanent political solution” to the Gorkha identity issue in the Darjeeling hills and its adjacent areas.

The Home Ministry called the meeting a step towards a permanent political solution. The committee will be headed by Pankaj Kumar Singh, a retired police officer who commanded the Border Security Force (BSF) and then served as deputy national security adviser, and who had already been appointed the government’s interlocutor for the hills the previous October.

Singh was given a year to speak to organisations across the Darjeeling hills, the Terai and the Dooars and recommend a roadmap. In a reply to parliament in March, the Home Ministry listed his responsibilities. They included dialogue with stakeholders, recommendations for socio-economic development and cultural recognition, and measures to address Gorkha aspirations within the Constitution.

Singh has now been asked to head another committee that will reportedly prepare the details of a “final agreement”. But the government has not published a constitutional proposal, a complete list of members, precise terms of reference or a deadline. It has moved from consultation to “finalisation” without disclosing what political arrangement is being finalised.

The record is right there, and it isn’t good

Set against the record of the present government, the committee looks less like an opening than like a form.

The nearer parallel........

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