Reflections on parliamentary elections and Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling hills

In conventional wisdom electoral system has been considered for long as a particularly important element in the attempt to accommodate ethnic conflicts since it acts as the most specific manipulable instrument of politics that opens up scope for negotiating conflicting claims through accommodation and cooption of the rebel leaders. Mediation of such institutional engineering is possible since election and electoral politics helps introduce meaningful competition for power, it also encourages inclusive participation and contributes towards the guarantee of civil and political liberties necessary for the fair play of political competition and participation. Arguments of this genre are plenty in Western academia. Consociationalists like Lijphart or the centripetalists like Horowitz, for example, did endorse electoral engineering as the most powerful instrument that enables ethnic conflict ridden political systems move in the direction of conflict containment, peace and tranquility. Differences of opinion, whatsoever is there, are based on the nature and form of the electoral process but not on the argumentative content that elections do accommodate ethnic conflicts. The present paper intends to weigh up the strengths and weaknesses of such arguments with the help of the empirical realities of Darjeeling Hills – a region that has been marred by ethnic conflict and movement and also marked by the episodic continuance of elections of various sorts. It is interesting to note that elections did take place in Darjeeling hills almost without interruption, which have apparently fostered democracy in the hills by enabling both participation and contestation in Dahlian sense but they hardly accommodated the leaders to the extent of resolving the aspiration of having a separate state called Gorkhaland for the Indian Nepalis/Gorkhas. The case study of Darjeeling Hills largely suggests that the electoral engineering took place in the region has sharpened rather than ameliorated the ethnic cause. Mainstream national political parties did participate in the electoral processes but that have hardly dismantled the ethnic exclusivity of hill politics and the ethnic bloc voting pattern of the Gorkhas. For reasons of space the paper will restrict itself with the analysis of the pros and cons of parliamentary elections and electioneering vis-à-vis the Gorkhaland movement in the Darjeeling hills.