Wilson Champromari on the Alipurduar College grounds after the results were announced. Picture by Anirban Choudhury

Nov. 10: The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha today met with its first success in electoral politics with the victory of Wilson Champromari, the Independent it had backed in Kalchini. For the hill party, the conquest of the Dooars seat is a significant development ahead of the tripartite talks in Darjeeling on December 21.

The Morcha support to Khageswar Roy of the Trinamul Congress in Rajgunj also resulted in Mamata Banerjee’s party securing its second MLA from north Bengal (the first being Ashok Mondal from Dinhata) in a seat that has been traditionally held by the CPM.

“I remember chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee categorically challenging me to win an election when I had raised the issue of the Dooars (that the region should be part of Gorkhaland) at one of our meetings in Calcutta. He had snubbed us about Dooars and I had staged a walkout. The victory in Kalchini is a slap on Bhattacharjee’s face,” said Morcha president Bimal Gurung in Darjeeling today.

“We will now say that there is a mandate for Gorkhaland even in the Dooars and this stand will figure prominently in the next round of talks,” he added.

Even though the Morcha leadership is upbeat over the development, political observers feel that the Adivasi community, which forms around 40 per cent of the Dooars population, is opposed to the inclusion of the area in Gorkhaland, the new state that the hill party has been demanding.

Observers said the candidate supported by the Morcha won because Adivasis, who had so far largely voted for the RSP, had for the first time put up an Independent to further the cause of their outfit, the Akhil Bharatiya Adivasi Vikas Parishad.

“This resulted in the splitting of the Adivasi votes which earlier had largely gone (only) to the RSP,” an observer said. “The Adivasi votes split and the Nepali votes going en mass to the Morcha candidate, Wilson Champromari won the polls.”

The Nepalis, who constitute about 30 per cent of the population and were RSP supporters once, consolidated their votes for the Morcha backed candidate.

The Adivasi community had turned against the Left Front after the arrest of a number of Parishad leaders in clashes with the Morcha supporters earlier this year.

“We have voted for the Left, but instead of supporting us the government arrested our people when we protested against the Morcha demand to include the Dooars in Gorkhaland,” a Parishad leader said.

Kshiti Goswami, the public works minister from the RSP, admitted the alienation suffered by the Adivasis. “The Left has failed to address the problems of the Adivasis and they got alienated from us,” Goswami said. “That is again why they supported their own candidate and our votes got split in Kalchini.”

The traditional winners of Kalchini, the RSP, has been pushed to the third place and the Congress to a distant fourth, with the Independent candidate supported by the Parishad bagging the runners-up position.

Many believe that Gurung’s selection of Wilson, an Adivasi, proved to be a good choice as he managed to garner tribal votes, which helped him sail through.

“Moreover, the manner in which the Morcha pressured the state government to open closed gardens acted as a positive move in the eyes of the voters. The Chinchula tea garden was reopened before the Pujas,” said an observer.

In Rajgunj, Trinamul’s Khageswar Roy romped home to victory with the backing of the Morcha. In the last Lok Sabha polls, the Morcha backed BJP candidate had polled 33,000 votes but this time, the party polled a paltry 14,000 votes.

Trinamul leader Partha Chatterjee dodged the question on whether the Morcha support had played a role in Rajgunj. “We did not seek any support and I do not want to comment. It was definitely the apathy of the state government that led that community to vote against them,” said Chatterjee.

However, Gurung seemed to be happy with the Rajgunj outcome. “We had supported Trinamul Congress as we might have to talk to them in the future. After all, we cannot be rigid and our move has paid off,” the Morcha president said, hinting about the probable change in guard in 2011.