One for the ROAD

One for the ROAD

or what’s left of it.........

by anmole prasad

When Subhash Ghising and his motley motorcade of diesel jongas drove into Mela Ground in 1986 to address a general meeting, very few people knew that Ghising was suffering from a severe cold: his weary eyes were watering and both his nostrils were firmly clogged from the long dusty drive across the district. After delivering a lengthy speech that painted a rosy vision of the future of these hills, he issued a call to the people to launch a mass movement called ‘mato-ko-andolan’. Or so it sounded, at that time. Nobody suspected for a moment that actually Ghising was calling for a “bato-ko-andolan” – a struggle for the roads. And thus, thanks to the adenoidal vagaries of one man, the history of Kalimpong was changed forever.

It sounds incredible but it’s true. Just pinch both your nostrils together firmly and try to say “bato” and if it doesn’t sound like ‘mato’ then tell me. And if that’s not enough, go for a walk, or better still, a drive around the rotten roads anywhere within the limits of our autonomous hill council and see for yourself.

But to resume my story: the well-meaning people of Kalimpong, quick to rise to the occasion, launched into an enthusiastic agitation for a separate homeland that began towards the middle of 1986 and lasted for three years; an agitation that was to provoke a sharp and brutal response from the Government of West Bengal: innocent civilians, many of them poor women, were mowed down in the streets by police gunfire in the infamous incident of the 27th of July 1986. Others found themselves dragged from their beds and locked up for months in various jails all over North Bengal. In one fearsome reprisal, the security forces massacred dozens of ‘militants’ (some of them ailing, elderly citizens) in the Gumba Hatta/Upper Dungra area. The Town Hall was commandeered by the Government and its basement rooms were turned into an interrogation cell with attached torture chambers where manacled and bleeding suspects were held.

With the signing of the ‘Accord’ in 1988, his purpose served, Ghising forgot all about Kalimpong. He was hardly seen this side of the Tista and if at all, it was peering out from the smoked glass window of a white Ambassador that rushed out of town before lunchtime, hot on the heels of a howling pilot jeep.

Ghising’s face faded from public memory, people got on with their lives. The maimed dragged themselves around in improvised prosthetics, the arrested persons, who are to this day plagued with criminal cases from the andolan, hired their own lawyers to rescue them, the PWD rebuilt its razed bungalows, business drifted back in from Kathmandu and Siliguri and slowly Kalimpong limped back to a semblance of normalcy.

But it was back then in 1988, after the ‘Accord’, that the bato-ko-andolan took off in real earnest. It was a slow and insidious movement that took several monsoons to manifest itself. In the beginning, one could barely feel the bumps in the comfortable upholstery of the newly launched Maruti Omni vans but slowly and surely, Kalimpong’s roads began to disintegrate.

Never mind, we said, our Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council is equal to the task. Ghising is going to fetch us pots of money from Calcutta and our streets will soon be paved with gold, just as he promised. But as the years rolled by, nothing of the sort happened. The roads just got worse and worse. The ruts became holes, the holes became potholes and the potholes themselves became trenches that filled with water during the rains.

Never mind, we consoled ourselves, our Municipality is equal to the task. Somehow they’re going to scrounge the funds from somewhere to repair the roads. But by then it was too late: the GNLF had turned its eyes on the Municipalities of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong and before you could say ‘Alkatra!’ each of these towns found itself saddled with Municipal councillors of the diesel jonga variety. Side by side, delimitation redefined the boundaries of the Municipal areas, enlarging the maps to include large areas of agricultural land so that urban and rural concerns were hopelessly muddled up in the same civic body. The number of wards increased and so did the number of councillors. Everywhere not just the roads but civic infrastructure itself began to deteriorate rapidly. Main thoroughfares were no exception. Kalimpong’s Main Road, Darjeeling’s Judge Bazar and Ladenla Road, all turned into mule tracks that reminded one of the good old days of the Tibet trade.

In the meantime, party hoodlums received an open general license to occupy reserved roadside land. Not, as they would like to put it, because they were ‘landless’, but because these lands represented the very best of prime real estate that could be flogged off to unsuspecting buyers for lakhs of rupees. Witness the massive encroachment and transaction of PWD lands along Reshe Road towards the outskirts as an example. As usual, the local SDOs and the Assistant Engineers of the PWD did nothing about it, preferring to look the other way rather than rake up a row before one’s transfer orders arrived. At any rate, the Collectorate itself was too busy apportioning the last of Kalimpong’s public lands amongst its civil servants and petty bureaucrats to worry about such minor things. And so, as the traffic got heavier and heavier, the roads became narrower and narrower. It was a state of affairs that could, to this day, only be described as leng-feng.

But no, I remind myself. There were some desultory repairs actually made to the roads from time to time. But when? When the Dalai Lama came to town? When the elections were just around the corner? When the original paving from 1920 began to show up on Main Road and it just got too damn embarrassing? In one particularly pitiful instance, a contractor was saddled with the job of patching one of the smaller roads. The work was so shoddy that by the time the man reached one end of the road, the patchwork had already been stripped away from the other. The outraged residents were contemplating the filing of a complaint with the Kalimpong Municipality against him. The outcome of which is still unknown. One wonders if their righteous anger would have been mitigated if the contractor had told them what he’d spent to get the contract.

And so the bato-ko-andolan drags on as roads are stripped bare of their surfaces, of the layers beneath and of the very boulders on which they had originally been laid. Every car becomes a rattletrap in a matter of days no matter how carefully one drives. Every conversation inside a vehicle turns to the appalling condition of the roads and ends with abuse for the ruling party. Every visitor to Kalimpong tells you what a nice place it is – except for the roads.

The usual excuse put forward is the lack of funds. For a moment, let’s assume that’ s true. Even so, the Municipalities could easily maintain a standby crew ready with a few barrels of alcatra and the (presently idle) road roller ready to patch the smallest rut on the street thus preventing it from becoming a pothole during the wet season. The biggest enemy of the road is water, for water enters the crevices of the road surface and destroys it, as any layman would tell you. The Municipalities could also easily clear the drains of all obstruction and keep them well maintained at a negligible cost. Strict bye-laws preventing the laying of water pipes over drains would go a long way in preserving our roads. The use of drains as a place for dumping garbage and waste water has also contributed to the destruction of our roads: a fine example of this is to be seen below the Government Housing colony where a perennial stream of black filthy waste is emptied not only onto the drain but often over the street itself. This notwithstanding that some of the most powerful (and supposedly responsible) officers of the Government are residing in the colony. The Sub-Divisional Officer, ensconced in his villa on the other side of the hill is of course hardly bothered by this. The water distribution networks needs to be regulated, redesigned and revamped in so that the digging of roads to lay pipelines is reduced. The major drains and jhoras leading out of town are required to be kept well maintained and free of obstruction. The use and disposal of plastic has to be reduced by proper legislation and by the introduction of a garbage bin system in every shop and home. All this hardly requires funds; all that it really needs is for the Municipalities, the Government and the people to play a more proactive role, for the enforcement of existing regulations and a more efficient use of the present infrastructure.

But where is the will? After all, there is more money to be made out of destroying a road than from maintaining it. All of us have paid the price of the bato-ko-andolan either by a twisted ankle, a damaged car or even a fatal accident. But what are its profits? One will never know for sure, for the accounts of the Municipalities are shrouded in secrecy, even though the law obliges them to transparency and to an annual disclosure to its citizens. Under the indulgent eyes of a State Government that rules through a satrap, the accounts of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council are also kept under wraps and never questioned. What has been received for maintaining the roads, what has been spent, what has not, are questions to which there will be no answers so long as the State and Council are in cahoots with each other. The only purpose our roads serve today therefore, is as a monument to our inability to self-governance, to our weak and collaborating leaders, to our corrupt and self-serving bretheren who prevent us from ever becoming a civic society.

A good road is the first index of civilisation. A road is the first point of physical contact between the citizens and the administration. Every time a man steps out of his house in Kalimpong, he curses his luck. The only things that are new about our roads are the names that politicians give them. A man with patched trousers, no matter how ragged, always stands with dignity. And so it is with roads; we don’t ask for new ones, even patched ones will do. And I’m afraid as things stand today in Kalimpong, the bum is showing.