A poster at the Morcha blockade on the railway tracks at Sevoke, 15km from Siliguri. (Kundan Yolmo)

Dec. 28: Nearly 400 members of the Gorkha Janmukti Vidyarthi Morcha were arrested today with police swinging into action, not in Darjeeling or on the national highways under siege but in Jalpaiguri, where the hill outfit is not known to have much of a hold.

Among those arrested from the road linking Bhutan with India were schoolchildren who had been brought in by the Morcha.

At Dagapur and Sevoke, in the foothills, and at Rangpo, on the way to Gangtok, traffic continued to be blocked between noon and 4pm.

At the level crossing at Sevoke Bazar, Morcha supporters squatted on the tracks.

At least three trains — the Delhi-Alipurduar Mahananda Express, the Danapur-Kamakshya Capital Express and the Ranchi-Alipurduar Express — were stuck for three to four hours.

The protest will be longer tomorrow, beginning at 10am, the Morcha announced. “We will block the highways and train lines for five hours from 10am tomorrow to protest the arrests,” said the general secretary of the Morcha’s student wing, Keshav Raj Pokhrel.

Anti-Morcha outfits in Siliguri gave the state government 48 hours to intervene. If it doesn’t, they threatened to take on the squatters.

“We have waited and watched for two days. If the government remains inert for two more days, we will clear the roads and rail routes ourselves,” said Mukunda Majumdar of the Bangla O Bangla Bhasha Banchao Committee.

The arrests at Dalsinghpara, 50km from Alipurduar, sparked protests in Darjeeling town, where Morcha members surrounded the police station.

General secretary Roshan Giri accused the government of trying to derail “a peaceful movement”. “We will not budge an inch from our statehood demand,” he thundered.

Among those arrested was the Morcha-backed Independent MLA from Kalchini, Wilson Champromary.

At 1pm, a police team requested the picketers to remove the blockade as traffic between Bhutan and India had come to a standstill. “When they refused, we arrested all the picketers and took them to the Alipurduar police station. The road is important,” said Alipurduar additional superintendent of police Anoop Jaiswal.

He said the police had “not counted” the number of people taken into custody and that he did not know if the MLA was among them.

From the lock-up, Wilson said he had gone to see how the blockade was going. “Things were peaceful and the students were shouting slogans when suddenly the police arrived and asked them to move. I asked them why a peaceful movement was being targeted, but they did not listen…. I will write protest letters to the Prime Minister, chief minister and the Union home minister.”