Subash Ghising, once upon a time widely called ‘Appa’ by the Gorkha peoples of the Queen of Hills Dajreeling, happened to be such an influential politician who facilitated the long suppressed aspiration of the Gorkha community of India to sprout as a powerful ‘self-determination’ movement of 1980s called Gorkhaland Agitation.
Ghising fronted the Gorkhaland movement in the 1980s. Ghisingh, once the ‘uncrowned king’ of Darjeeling who coined the cause of ‘Gorkhaland’, expired in oblivion in New Delhi, away from his soil – Hills of Darjeeling at the age of 78. The founder leader of the Gorkha National Liberation Front, established in 1980, Ghising became the Chairman of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council in West Bengal, India from 1988 to 2008.
Born in 1936 in Darjeeling, Ghising became a part of the Indian Army at an early age of 18 in 1954, but quit it in 1960 and served as a teacher in a primary school in the hills. The deprived living circumstances of the people of the hills concerned him towards Tarun Sangh, a social organisation, where he was christened in the domain of politics.
Ghisingh, after founding a political ensemble Nilo Jhanda, began organising political platforms highlighting the cause of the people of the hills, which not only gained him fame amid the publics in the hills but also helped him in intensifying his mass base in Darjeeling.
Condemning the successive state governments of West Bengal and Centre of disregarding the grounds of the people of the hills and just treating them as a ‘vote bank’, Ghisingh in April 1979, for the first time elevated the demand for an isolated ‘state’ Gorkhaland based on linguistic and ethnic lines of Gorkha community within the constitutional framework of India.
With a call for a distinct state for the people of Darjeeling, Ghising coined the term ‘Gorkhaland’ and launched a fierce movement in Darjeeling in 1980 under the banner of GNLF, thus turning the queen of the hills into a battlefield of the self-determination of the peoples, leading to bereavements of more than one thousand people till 1988. After the interference of the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and West Bengal Chief Minister Jyoti Basu, a historic tripartite agreement was signed between the Centre, state and Ghising, thus leading to the creation of a semi-autonomous body, Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) in 1988.

References –
1. https://thedarjeelingchronicle.com/su...
- An article on Subash Ghising by Upendra M Pradhan - a political analyst based in Darjeeling.

2. https://scroll.in/article/844660/darj...
- Scroll Story by Shoaib Daniyal

3. Inputs by Raja Puniani – Poet, Author, and Entrepreneur

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