The Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) will confer the Bhasha Sewa Samman Puraskar on communist leader and former Darjeeling MP R.B. Rai for his role in the constitutional recognition of the Nepali language.
This is the second time in a year that the GTA is conferring its prestigious awards on a political leader.
Earlier this year, the GTA had bestowed the first Subash Ghisingh Memorial Civilian Award on Renuleena Subba, former Kalimpong MLA who had once taken a toy gun to the Bengal Assembly on the sly and fired shots to draw the House’s attention to an issue concerning the hills.
“The GTA has decided to confer the Bhasha Sewa Samman Puraskar on R.B. Rai, former Darjeeling MP who played a pivotal role, along with former Sikkim MP Dil Kumari Bhandari, to get the Nepali language recognised in 1992,” said Anos Thapa, GTA Sabha member in charge of the information and culture department.
The award will be presented to Rai on August 31. While the bill to include Nepali in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution was passed in the Lok Sabha on August 20, 1992, the President’s assent to the same came on August 31 that year.
The GTA has lined up a series of events from August 20 to 31 to mark the historic movement that had continued for four decades.
The demand to include Nepali in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution gathered steam in 1956, but parties failed to deliver much then.
On January 31, 1972, eminent people in the hills, fed up with the lack of progress on the issue, formed the Bhasha Samiti, which was later rechristened as the Akhil Bharatiya Bhasha Samiti.
The Samiti took up the task of uniting all political parties, holding mass meetings and spreading the demand for the inclusion of Nepali in the Eighth Schedule to other states where Nepali-speaking people resided. Samiti leaders also met then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi repeatedly to press for the demand.
“During our first meeting, she categorically told us it would not be possible to recognise the language and raised security concerns on agreeing to the demand,” Prem Kumar Allay, the late founder secretary of the Bhasha Samiti, had earlier said.
When Indira visited Darjeeling in the mid-1970s for a public meeting and did not say anything about giving the official tag to the Nepali language, the crowd overran
the podium.