Indian Gorkhas–Why we must play and win the game

Mahendra P Lama,EOI, 11 December 2015: Indian Gorkhas are at the crossroads today. India is vying for a global position.  

Diverse sets of nationals and sub-nationals in the country are reasserting their role and striving to get maximum mileage from India’s global entry. Many of them have already taken a significant portion of the political and development pie. In this competitive theatre, every community wants to be a player and a difference maker.  

The game is on. Indian Gorkhas have to decide now and today what we really want and where we go from here. Should we go with the rest of India to compete at the regional, national and global levels and get maximum benefit from India’s foray at the global level? Should we reorient our community thinking, redesign our societal approaches and restructure our collective action? 

All these are aimed at making our children and upcoming generations re-focus on education, making them professionally competitive, and more critically, making them think big. This nurtures and builds confidence in them that they can achieve their goals. At the same time, strongly reconnecting them to their roots is very crucial and essential.

Should we continue to be Khukuri and emotion-centric, or become an example of knowledge generation and knowledge leaders. We could use the same blood, sweat and tears (ragat-pasina-aanshu) to re-identify and re-position ourselves as the “gyan-vir” (knowledge brave) and “rashtraneta” (national leader). We have done it in the past at a very individual level and now we have to do it in a “hul-bathan” (collective and ample numbers) mode-level. This is going to make the real difference to the Indian Gorkhas as a national entity.

We are known for our honesty, integrity, courage and perseverance. We have rich cultural traditions and an unwritten yet affluent intellectual heritage. We have a distinct advantage as we have made immense contributions in almost all fields of the nation building process, both in the pre- and post-independence periods. It is a historic folly on our part that nobody made an effort to de-construct and again re-construct our history. The historical narratives at the national level are, therefore, biased and remain largely untold. In fact, nobody wrote an exclusive history of us. This is where we failed and showed a shocking degree of intellectual-gap, unlike in other communities. This is a major societal failure and reflects self-centric political leadership.

We also have an equally distinct disadvantage as we are scattered geographically; population-wise we are a minuscule lot; we are one of the least educated communities; economically we remain deeply downtrodden; we do not have a national forum to fight for our cause, and more seriously, our political leadership has been of sub-regional character with a myopic vision.

In other words, our political leaderships have failed us in every respect. They have been so lacklustre, underrated at all levels; ignorant to the hilt; marginalised by virtue of their background and acts; harmfully short sighted  and self-centric at the highest societal cost. They are seemingly a bunch of emotions, hollow promises with dangerous instincts of self-prophesy and survival. They do not count at the national level at all. They have become local lords and regional cocoons. As a result, the national image and power of the Indian Gorkhas have eroded steadily and remain widely stigmatised, thereby putting the very future of coming generations in total jeopardy. Some of them have done irreparable damage by playing dangerous cards like dividing the Gorkhas into different caste-religious entities. In a country with 125 crore people, how retrogressive has been this thinking of some political leaders. History will never forgive them.

Therefore, our agenda for the next 30 years will be to first make the Gorkhas in India educated and competitive, then empower them with their basic and constitutional rights, and make them a formidable socio-political force and knowledge driven community at the national level. 

The gradual yet steady induction of the Indian Gorkhas in the policy and decision making process, in institutions such as Parliament and state assemblies; apex national commissions; governance, bureaucracy, financial and political institutions; corporate houses, media, education, culture, science and technology security and justice related institutions and in the implementation agencies, are essential and could bring a new future to the Indian Gorkhas. We have to compete and just compete and nothing else.  Many of our people have done so in the past in the fields of education, national security, sports, media, music, corporate institutions, literature and even politics. This means we can. The only difference we want now is - unlike just a trickle in the past, we want a constant flow of streams which will ultimately join the sea of India’s Who’s Who. (writer: Mahendra P Lama)