A car being burnt outside my window

Yesterday, someone in the crowd at one of the GJM's rallies was shot while protesting outside the house of a leader of the recently-deposed GNLF. That man's house and two cars were burned, and other GNLF-connected people also had their houses or stores damaged. I'm not clear on whose car I saw being burned. But, so far as I know, there were no people attacked.

A little visual meditation on the nature of the Indian state: Note the position of the police as the crowd rolls the car to where they are going to burn it.


Compared to what this area has been through in the past, this was really a pretty contained and limited episode of political violence. It was definitely obvious that (1) these guys were very knowledgeable about the safest and most effective way to burn a car. They had crowd control going and everything. And (2) the spectators were all quite calm -- there weren't even shouts of encouragement or solidarity, actually. They definitely seemed more like observers than participants.

And today things were very calm. The stores were open, the car removed from the road, the rallies back on.

Oof... I'll write something more complete about my take on the Gorkhaland movement later.

I actually only have 12 more days in India. I'm already supposing that I'll have to make a return trip, so I don't feel too panicked to finish things up. Nonetheless, it did sneak up on me.

As compelling a reason for a separate state as any

Darjeeling really isn't much like the rest of India. For one thing, its not flat, hot, or particularly crowded. And there is much less rice, lots more noodles. Also, they tend not to use milk in their tea. (There is also supposedly some stuff about separate cultural identities and unique historical civilizations or blah blah whatever that my interviewees are always going on about.) But a REALLY important difference, and one that I am uniquely well-qualified to measure, is the region's surprisingly advanced cuteness technology.

This was first evident in the glorious array of umbrellas on daily display.


Then there is the broad deployment of pint-sized uniforms.

And, for another thing, the better weather and quieter streets mean that people walk their kids about in public quite a bit. There are even pony rides! Another impact of the weather seems to be that the town's indigenous cuteness production is oriented toward knitting children's clothing (note the pink striped sweater on the left in the pony-ride picture and the blue cap in the shot below).

Finally, many people keep pet dogs here, and those are pretty rare in the rest of India. Doma is the puppy who lives at my guest house. (Up close, she kind of has the face of the dog who guards the Labyrinth, from the David Bowie movie).

You may recall that in an earlier post I put forward a rough unified field theory of the commercial-availability of cuteness. In which the critical explanatory variable for high levels of cuteness technology was low birth rates. WELL: as previously hypothesized, Darjeeling is, in fact, near the replacement rate with total fertility of 2.1 children per woman, based on the 2001 census. This is well below the rate for the state (2.6) and far below India's national fertility rate of 3.2 children/woman, which, as we have seen, dooms much of plains India to its shocking lack of appreciation of stuffed penguins.

Albert has voted that we remain in Darjeeling for the balance of the trip.

The Indian Idol ripple effects continue

When last I was in Darjeeling (November 2007), the Gorkha Janmurti Morcha (GJM), led by a firm supporter of Indian Idol winner and ethnic Gorkha Pradan Tamang, was trying to unseat the incumbent Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), led by an old-timey guy who probably secretly misses the days of radio.

Fast-forward to July 2008, and the GNLF and its unhip leader have been forced to step off the political scene. And the GJM is now leading the charge for the creation of a Gorkha state. Technically, Darjeeling is in the midst of an "indefinite" strike, but this week is a "relaxation" of the strike, so things can go along as before. (What, you feel like that's fundamentally a contradiction of the concept of a strike? Well, mister, there is no place for your Western-centric purist notion of political tactics here in India. You probably think that a "relay" fast-unto-"death" doesn't make any sense, either.)

The GJM flag is up everywhere now, and there have been rallies held regularly to keep people focused on the cause.

The GJM presents a certain normative tension, something that strikes me when I read about many different mass movements. It is clear that many, probably most, people here are passionately in favor of the GJM and its cause. But despite and even because of that genunine popularity, there is clearly a lot of pressure to conform. There is a wing of the GJM for almost any identity you can think of: women, youth, students, truck drivers, private school teachers, hotel owners-- even a wing for non-Gorkhas. Other political parties are essentially non-existent, and anti-GJM posters are immediately torn down. The group is starting to enforce social reforms, like cracking down on alcohol use. The GJM is quite tactically focused on strikes and road blockades, so it issues all kinds of directives about when people can and can't work and travel.

It's probably true that if these measures were put to a vote they'd prove overwhelmingly popular. But it's also true these measures are being unilaterally announced by a small group of people who've never even run in an election. From one point of view, this all looks like a cynical strategy by the GJM leadership to remove any potential opposition, and from another point of view it is a spontaneous, grassroots development that is essentially democratic.

Today's illustration: the private school students' march!

Schools are actually on summer break, but about 500 students turned out this morning - running the gamut from age 9ish to 16ish. They were all in their uniforms and organized in pairs, the girls first, then the boys, lined up in the town square by school. Then a GJM leader said a few words and they proceeded on a little march through town.

My first thought was that this was the most adorable political protest I'd ever seen. It was a veritable sea of pigtails and pleated skirts. And, maybe I'm just getting pervy as I get older, but I think I would have had quite a bit more trouble concentrating in middle school if all the boys had been required to wear those cute ties, not to mention properly tailored pants. They looked so dapper!

There was nothing particularly menacing about the gathering, either. For one thing, it looked like a good way to correct one of the problems of summer, which is that you don't necessarily have all your friends together in one place as often as you might like. Second, attrition from the march-through-town was already starting within the first few blocks--I'm not sure they could have kept things going much beyond the first internet cafe they passed. Third, the kids were supremely undisciplined with the call-and-response they were supposed to be doing as they marched. I've seen a number of these GJM marches now, and about every 40 people or so there is supposed to be someone who shouts things like "We want Gorkhaland!" and then the crowd around answers "Gorkhaland! Gorkhaland!". And variations ensue. There are always some people walking fairly far away from any "caller" who aren't really shouting. And if one of the callers is uninspiring or stops shouting, that can result in a gap of about 40-50 people in the line who are just strolling along.

Well, with the kids, a few teachers had selected the right kid for the "call" part of the job -- someone popular but also loud. But most of the students put in the "call" role were blushing and muttering instead of shouting out their lines. And, I'm sorry to say it, but there was not a single girl in a "call" role who was doing an adequate job, and most were very giggly. Perhaps the neckties do have excessive swoon inducing properties.

So, this morning I was thinking the whole thing was pretty amusing and harmless, not too National Socialist Party Youth or anything, despite the uniforms. But then in the paper today there is a story about a teacher getting fired because his students told that parents that he had criticized the idea of Gorkhaland in class.

Young people engaged with the democratic process or totalitarians in knee socks? Can anyone really know?