Ghisingh on Sunday: Arm-twisting?

Darjeeling, Jan. 16: Round I of the battle over the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council polls between Subash Ghisingh and the state has gone to the hill leader with Delhi agreeing to resume a review of the body.

The talks were thrown off-track after the assassination attempt on Ghisingh in 2001.

Today, the Gorkha leader announced that the Centre has responded to a letter he wrote almost three months ago, agreeing to resume talks with the state and the DGHC on the problems affecting the council.

?Shivraj Patil, the Union home minister, called me up at 1 pm yesterday and said the Centre was ready to resume the second round of the tripartite review meetings. Even the state government has sent its representative here and the developments are positive,? Ghisingh said at the Tourist Lodge in Darjeeling.

The GNLF leader had earlier refused to participate in the elections if an alternative to the present council was not worked out. He had also stressed repeatedly that his letters to the Centre, the state government and United Progressive Alliance chairperson Sonia Gandhi ? would determine ?the future of hill politics?.

Though a date has not been finalised, the DGHC chief said the meeting could be held even in the ?next three days?.

He threatened to return to the sort of agitation that once made the hill resort a dreaded place if the state government finalised the poll dates before the review yielded result. ?We will announce a 108-hour bandh... file for an injunction in court and withdraw from the memorandum of settlement (the DGHC Accord) of August 22 (1988),? said Ghisingh.

Urban development and municipal affairs minister Asok Bhattacharya, however, asserted this afternoon that the government ?wants the polls before the term of the present council expires on March 26?.