Sachep Pradhan, now in his late 40s, has witnessed Darjeeling’s turbulent political struggle for identity and autonomy from the front row and bears the scars of a personal loss, but the “homeland” of his dream has never seemed more distant.
Sachep’s father, Rudra Kumar Pradhan, a powerful Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) leader, was murdered on March 28, 1999, when Subash Ghisingh’s party held sway over the hills.
Rudra, the then president of the GNLF’s Darjeeling branch committee, was hacked to death at the Darjeeling Motor Stand, days after winning the Tukvar constituency for the third consecutive time as a Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) councillor.
Sachep was a student in Delhi when he got the news. The killing marked the beginning of a long personal and political reckoning for him.
In the bypoll that followed, Bimal Gurung, who would later unseat Ghisingh from Darjeeling’s power corridors, won from Tukvar, stepping into a larger political arena in the hills.
Politics was never far from the Pradhan household.
Sachep’s mother, the late Indra Kala Pradhan, was the general secretary of the Gorkha National Women’s Organisation and was active during the violent Gorkhaland agitation of the 1980s.
“My parents were booked under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities (Prevention) Act (TADA). Our family was branded terrorists just for demanding a separate Gorkhaland,” Sachep recalls.
Sachep’s house on Gandhi Road was razed to the ground, and six family-owned shops in the town were destroyed.
“My brother and I worked for years to rebuild what we had lost,” he said.
Sachep is a lawyer now. His house has been reconstructed, and life, in many ways, has moved on. “But the idea of a homeland for better governance and to safeguard our ethnicity has grown more distant,” he said.
“We believed in the BJP for 15 years. I had offered them my office then. Now we find no reason to keep believing in them,” Sachep added.
The BJP has held the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat since 2009 and won Assembly seats in Darjeeling and Kurseong in the last elections, riding on the promises of a permanent political solution (PPS) and tribal status for 11 Gorkha communities.
The contours of the PPS have not been clearly defined, while talks on granting the ST tag are going in circles.
In the hills, the PPS is widely interpreted as a pathway to Gorkhaland. Yet, for many like Sachep, it remains an unmet promise.
“What is the issue in the hills for this election today?” Sachep asked. The question has no easy answer.
The Anit Thapa-led Bharatiya Gorkha Prajatantrik Morcha (BGPM) has foregrounded development, while maintaining that it would not oppose any party that delivers Gorkhaland. The BJP, in power at the Centre, walks a tightrope, unable to push a demand that risks dividing Bengal, where Darjeeling accounts for just three Assembly seats.
For Sachep, the deeper concern is not just political delivery, but political intention.
The GTA Sabha did pass a “bill on Gorkhaland”, but neither the state nor the Centre has taken it seriously.
“During the Gorkhaland agitation of the 1980s, people were united. Dignity mattered. Now politics is only about posts and power,” he said.
Yet, he desists from romanticising the past.
His father’s killing, many believe, came at a time when dissatisfaction with the DGHC — formed in 1988 after a 28-month-long agitation — had begun to surface. Issues regarding power devolution and administrative control had started complicating matters by the late 1990s.
“The first seeds of the Sixth Schedule demand had started to germinate then,” Sachep said.
The Sixth Schedule, which provides special provisions for the administration of tribal-majority areas in the Northeast, has always been contentious in Darjeeling, where tribal communities are not in the majority. Many hill leaders were uneasy with the demand when it was first made.
Sachep, who speaks sparingly about the circumstances of his father’s death, said: “I don’t want to say much, but I believe he was murdered by state actors.”
No one has been convicted in the case.
Even after Rudra’s death, the family remained under pressure amid speculation that Indra Kala Pradhan might contest the bypoll.
“We have endured a lot,” Sachep said.
He is not unsettled by the past any more. The current uncertainty rattles him more.
“The politicians may have drifted. The people have not,” he said.