It is in the context of identity that the clamour for a separate state for the Gorkhas of India has arisen. The demand for Gorkhaland by no stretch of imagination signifies a Gorkha versus Bengali confrontation. The quest for statehood of Gorkhas is also founded on their demand for a rightful identity in the political firmament of the country. Therefore Gorkhaland is the dream of over a crore of Indian Gorkhas living all over India, not merely that of the 25 odd lakh Gorkhas in Darjeeling and Dooars in West Bengal. This means that the political battle for a separate state, while based on identity, is not against other cultural or linguistic or racial identities. It is not a movement directed against Bengal, because this demand is also the demand of Gorkhas in Assam and other states of the Northeast, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and all other states of India. The battleground for this demand has perforce been located in present day West Bengal for historical and geographical reasons. But it does not mean that the Gorkha identity is being pitted against Bengali identity.

It is important to understand the meaning of identity that the Gorkhas presume will come from the creation of a state. The demand for the irrevocable establishment of an Indian political identity for the Gorkhas may seem incomprehensible to the rest of India. After all Gorkhas do carry passports that identify them as Indians, have voters’ cards that say they are eligible to vote in elections in India, and have other identity documents that say they are Indians.

Executive or judicial action will not resolve the question of identity for the Gorkhas since the intrinsic association of Gorkhas with the country of Nepal lies in the minds of the Indian people, and not in the country’s statute books.

The demand for identity means the Gorkhas want to be treated by the polity with the same level of political trust as it does other Indian communities. When the Gorkhas ask for a separate state, there is immediate talk of conspiracies and security threats and danger to the integrity of the nation. The bogey of Greater Nepal promptly raises its head. Every time the Gorkhas does something, the rest of India sits up and starts seeing bogeys where there are none. No questions of such a nature are raised when other regions ask for autonomy or for their language to be recognized. What is it about the Gorkhas that makes them suspicious in the eyes of the nation? The Indian identity of the Gorkha stands warped by the mainstream.

History itself proves how illogical this sort of thinking is. The Gorkhas in Darjeeling and Dooars have been demanding separation from Bengal since 1907, when the Hillmen’s Association was formed. This demand for an administrative divorce from Bengal was also enunciated by the Hill People’s Social Union formed in 1934 and by the All India Gorkha League. A look at the memoranda presented by these bodies clearly disproves any theory that the Indian Gorkhas want to consolidate themselves into a Greater Nepal or break away from the motherland; patriotic Indian Gorkhas have always wanted to have a home within India. Theirs is an angst of belonging, not of separating. The Hillmen’s Association and the Gorkha League variously suggested that Darjeeling should be constituted into a separate province with Jalpaiguri and parts of Assam or be merged into Assam. All this scarcely reveals the mind of a community that wants to secede from India.

When the Gorkhas reiterate their Indian identity, they are asking the rest of the country to accept them as political beings with a stake in the country’s future. They want the country to trust them and assimilate them in the task of nation building. They are only asserting their right to self-esteem in a country that they helped to build. They are saying that by creating a separate state of Gorkhaland, the polity will be seen as unambiguously accepting the Gorkhas’ Indianness.

How do borders create identities? A seminal work on the purpose of mapmaking came with historian Thongchai Winichakul’s book, Siam Mapped, in 1994. In it, taking the case of Thailand, he argued that modern nations become established through the imposition of borders, boundaries, and categories of configuration upon previously borderless, unbounded, or un-categorized regions, peoples, and spaces. The University of Wisconsin-Madison professor said that for a people who shared links of culture, language, political unity, it was still necessary for them to be ensconced within definite boundaries for them to achieve a political identity—that it was the demarcation of boundaries which decided who and what they were from who or what they were not. Winichakul also concluded that this was effected through the state-sponsored definition of boundaries and peoples.

In simpler words, it is the delineation of geographical boundaries that gives a community—or a nation—an identity as a political entity. A nation is a self-defined cultural and social community. Members of a "nation" share a common identity, and usually a common origin, in the sense of history, ancestry, parentage or descent. By this definition, the Gorkhas are a nation. A state, on the other hand, is a political association with effective sovereignty over a geographic area.

Professor Ian Barrow, in his book, Making History, Drawing Territory, has similarly drawn an equation between history and territory and writes that the colonial Britishers took such pains to survey and make maps and to enumerate the demographics of all places they colonised because having properly bounded territory reinforced the construction of their own sense of national identity.

Both these scholars viewed a community of people as a fluid, amorphous group lacking a concrete identity until they were categorised within politically defined spaces with boundaries that could be reflected on the map. Indeed, sociologists will tell us that territoriality—or the taking over of a well-defined territory for itself—remains a basic instinct of humans, who after all are evolved from tribes whose identities were defined by their territorial spaces. Without these landmarks that kept them within a certain space, the tribes lost their self identities.

But it does not need treatises and scholars to emphasise that creating boundaries can create identities, as it did in 1947 when the Radcliffe lines created three separate identities for West Pakistanis, Indians and East Pakistani, each so sure of his identity that the other, on the morrow, became an enemy. Good neighbours on one day, enemies suspicious of each other the next—this was what the demarcation of West Pakistan, India and East Pakistan achieved most facilely. Borders, then and now, are the lines between identities.

Since it is geographical space that will ease the way out of this half-consummated national life for the Gorkhas, it is quite clear that a state of their own is now imperative for them to assert a full Indian identity--a state that roots them to India, a state that they can give as an address should someone in Connaught Place in Delhi ask them where they come from, a state that tells everyone that an Indian Gorkha is not a migrant from a neighbouring country but a landholder in India.

The state for the Gorkhas will be an emblematic home for all the Gorkhas of India—for those in Assam, in other parts of the Northeast, in Uttarakhand, in Himachal Pradesh, in every other state of India. The earlier agitations for a statehood in the current territory of the Darjeeling hills were prompted by the need of that underdeveloped area to be properly nurtured. In that sense, the demand for a separate state—of Uttarakhand and Gorkhasthan earlier and then of Gorkhaland under the GNLF—represented a local solution for a local problem. The current demand, in this aspect, is patently different in its objective. The new state will not be premised on economic solutions to the problems of a particular region. The new state, instead, is a political entity that will create, with no ambiguity whatsoever, a political identity for a people who were landholders in a territory that later became current day India.

A home state for the Gorkhas will serve various purposes. It is, foremost, an anti-mindset construct that will finally tell India that the Gorkhas are a vibrant part of the country’s diversity. It will create an Indian identity for the Gorkhas. It will concretise for the Gorkhas their centuries-long commitment to Indianness. It will remove all ambiguities about their origin and status. And it would, fortuitously, obviate the negative aspect of Article 7 of the India-Nepal Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1950. The treaty, which allows citizens of Nepal to freely come to India and settle down here, will no longer contribute to the impression that Indians Gorkhas are people who have taken advantage of Article 7 to settle down in India.

Giving the Gorkhas themselves their true sense of identity is vital if they are to assume their true destiny. An example can be cited of the Gujaratis. Till 1960, there was no Gujarat, just Bombay. Then that state was bifurcated and Gujarat was carved out, leaving the rest of the parent state to be called Maharashtra. Today that Gujarat stands as an icon of identity, fights and achieves economic prosperity on the strength of its Gujarati identity. It is a matter of conjecture that Gujarat could have achieved all it has had its people remained as Mumbaikars. The new state gave them a sense of self-fulfilment that fuelled their innate strengths and they are now able to flaunt their identity as bona fide Indian Gujaratis. In a similar way, a separate state for the Indian Gorkhas will help the community finds its own feet and march in tune with the forward movement of the great country of India.