United hill protest blow

Food items being loaded onto a vehicle in Darjeeling on Saturday. (Suman Tamang)

Vivek Chhetri, TT, Darjeeling, Aug. 17: Cracks have appeared in the Gorkhaland Joint Action Committee a day after it was formed by nine hill parties to present a united face and direct the statehood movement.

One of the constituents, the Akhil Bharatiya Gorkha League (ABGL), today threatened to quit the committee if the elected members of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration — all of them Gorkha Janmukti Morcha members — do not resign.

“There is no word on elected GTA members resigning despite our advice. We have decided we will not be part of the committee unless they do,” ABGL general secretary Pratap Khati said. “The GTA is a body under the Bengal government; a Gorkhaland state is not possible unless the GTA is scrapped.”

The autonomous hill body has 45 elected members and five nominees, of whom two are from the Morcha and three from Trinamul.

Yesterday, the joint action committee had unanimously decided to “reject” the GTA but “at an appropriate time”, committee chairman Enos Das Pradhan said. The ABGL’s statements suggest it wants the resignations to come immediately.

Raju Pradhan, committee co-ordinator and Morcha leader, refused to comment on the development. “Let them (the ABGL) do whatever they want; I don’t feel like commenting,” he said.

When the committee meets tomorrow to discuss the course of the agitation from August 26 onwards, the ABGL threat too is likely to come up.

The Morcha today wrote to Assembly Speaker Biman Banerjee saying its three MLAs would not sit on the Treasury benches and demanding space on the Opposition benches, Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri said.

Banerjee said in Calcutta that he would make “a separate sitting arrangement” for the Morcha members after he receives the letter.