Demand for GTA quota

VIVEK CHHETRI

Darjeeling, June 4: The Gorkha Janmukti Morcha today demanded that the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration notification be changed to reserve seats for the Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes in the GTA Sabha.

Morcha general secretary Roshan Giri today said: “Our party president has sent a letter to the chief minister requesting her to provide reservations to SC and ST communities in the GTA Sabha.”

The decision was taken after members of the All India Schedule Caste Association met Morcha chief Bimal Gurung and other senior leaders on Saturday.

The GTA memorandum of agreement signed by the Morcha, Centre and the state government on July 8, 2011, had stated that SC, ST, women and other “unrepresented communities” would be represented through five nominations to the 50-member GTA Sabha. The 45 constituencies would have elected councillors.

But on March 24 this year, the Morcha and the state government agreed that the five nominated members would be from the new mouzas from the Dooars and the Terai if they were incorporated later in the GTA.

The Morcha’s reservation demand had been made probably keeping in mind that the Schedule Castes were among the first to object to the Sixth Schedule status proposed by Subash Ghisingh. There was no provision for their representation in the Gorkha Hill Council Darjeeling to have been formed under the Sixth Schedule status.

The SC community makes up about 9.7 per cent of the hill population while the ST stands at 34 per cent.

Asked about the reason for this “sudden” demand, Giri said: “We were under the impression that provisions for seat reservations would be made while the notification for the GTA and elections to the body would be issued. We realised there were no such provisions when the GTA Act notification was announced on March 12 and when the GTA election rules notification was issued on March 15.”

Under current election rules, seats for SC and ST are reserved according to the proportion of their presence among the population in a given area. “We want this system to be adopted,” said Giri. Under this system, seats for the SC and STs are to be reserved in constituencies in which the percentage of their population to the total population is the largest. The CPM too had demanded that the GTA Sabha must have quotas for these two communities. “We demand that reservations be made for SC and ST in the GTA,” former Rajya Sabha member Saman Pathak said.

The CPM also demanded that all political parties be consulted before the delimitation of the 45 GTA constituencies is finalised. “The government gave us only a week’s time to file objections. We should have given at least 10-15 days,” said Pathak. The Darjeeling administration issued the list of 45 constituencies on May 26.