Students for Gorkhaland- parents divided over students’ participation

Dipen Pradhan, SNS, Darjeeling, 27 August 2013: The GJMM has succeeded in proving its point beyond any shadow of doubt that the party can paralyse education in the Hills if it wants to, taking the students and their parents on board. 

Thousands of students, studying from Class I to XII and many of them hailing from the rural areas of the Hills, gathered to sloganeer for Gorkhaland at Motor stand in Darjeeling ~ the venue the GJMM selected for the rally to raise the pitch for the demand for Gorkhaland. 

Significantly, nullifying the theory doing the rounds in the Hills that the parents are reluctantly giving in to the GJMM diktats roping in the students for the statehood stir, many of them were found lined up on both sides of the roads, encouraging their wards to march ahead in response to the clarion call for Gorkhaland. 

They chimed in occasionally, as the thoroughfare was reverberating with slogans ‘Mamata Banerjee, hai hai’. But all the parents did not fall in line. One of them said the children should not be forced to shout such slogans that show contempt for the elders. 

“We teach them to respect the elders and such slogans fly in the face of the moral qualities we seek to inculcate in the impressionable,” one of them said. 

Countering the argument that they are being forced to participate in the movement in spite of themselves, a student said they had come here of their volition. “No one has forced us to join the rally,” said a student of Darjeeling Government College. 

“My parents are in the thick of the movement. They are fighting so that we can get a better future in a state of our own. How can we allow ourselves to be left behind?” the student asked. 

Enthused by the large turnout of the students in the party’s rally, the GJMM chief Mr Bimal Gurung said on his Facebook page that the students of Darjeeling are ready to sacrifice their education for the cause of Gorkhaland.