Indian Idol reignites Gorkhaland fire in Darjeeling

By Simon Denyer

DARJEELING (Reuters) - India's Darjeeling hills have come alive with fresh demands for a separate state within India for the Gorkha people, with protests threatening the area's renowned tea and tourism industries.

Bizarrely, it was a television talent show, India's version of "American Idol", that lit the fire of Gorkhaland last September, two decades after the end of a insurgency among ethnic Nepalis in eastern India that left more than 1,200 people dead.

Frenzied canvassing for a local boy, ethnic Nepali or Gorkha policeman Prashant Tawang, metamorphosised into a political upsurge that has ushered in a new king of the hills.

Politician Bimal Gurung surfed the wave of ethnic pride unleashed by the TV contest and now is hoping it will carry his people towards Gorkhaland, the separate state carved out of West Bengal they have been demanding for many decades.

"This is the last fight," the 44-year-old Gurung told Reuters in an interview in his party office in Darjeeling. "Till the last drop of my blood, I will fight this battle until we have a Gorkhaland state for the Gorkhas."

The green, white and yellow flags of Gurung's Gorkha Janmukti Morcha (Gorkha People's Liberation Front) fly from homes, shops and cars all around Darjeeling and nearby towns, bunting criss-crosses above the main streets.

The party's symbols are the sun, the Himalayan mountains and two crossed kukris, the heavy, curved knife used by the famously fierce Gorkha soldiers from Nepal and India who have long fought with both British and Indian armies.

On a windy hilltop by the town of Kurseong, an obelisk crowned by a huge kukri commemorates the "martyrs" of the 1980's insurgency, which formed the backdrop for Kiran Desai's Booker Prize-winning novel "The Inheritance of Loss".