The Binay Tamang camp of the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha has decided not to hold any joint election campaign programme with ally Trinamul Congress in the Darjeeling hills.

“In the hills, we will not hold any joint meeting or organise campaigns with the TMC. Our party workers will, however, support the TMC candidates in the plains,” Tamang said on Wednesday.

The decision, sources said, is an attempt to de-link the Tamang camp from Trinamul.

“There is now a feeling among many in the party that the public has not yet forgotten the 2017 statehood agitation,” said a leader of the Tamang faction.

As the Trinamul government had firmly crushed the agitation, 13 hill people had died and over 100 had been jailed and many displaced for fear of arrest.

An analysis of the Lok Sabha and Darjeeling Assembly by-election defeat in 2019 by the leaders of the faction had also thrown up a similar inference.

“The sentiment has not changed much in the past two years,” said a source in the Tamang camp.

The Tamang camp had of late slowly started trying to stamp its separate identity and creating an impression that the party was not being controlled totally by Trinamul.

“That is why the party had coined the slogan hamro ghar afnai bhar (build you house on your own strength) for the Assembly elections,” another leader in the Tamang camp pointed out. The other reason for coming up with the slogan was also to lay stress on “regionalism”.

The BJP-GNLF camp which is at loggerhead with the Trinamul-Morcha combine has already started raising the 2017 agitation issue.

“L.B. Rai daju (hill TMC president) seems pained at the leg fracture of Miss Mamata Banerjee. But did he feel the pain when 13 people were killed in 2017?” Prabhaskar Blone, the spokesman for the GNLF Darjeeling branch committee, had asked recently.

Images of the 2017 agitation days are also resurfacing in social media.

“Under these circumstances, the Tamang camp has little option but to try and de-link itself from Trinamul. However, whether they will be successful in projecting this image is another issue,” an observer said.

The prevailing sentiment makes the battle tough even for the Bimal Gurung faction of the Morcha, said the observer. Gurung, too, has allied with Trinamul for the Bengal Assembly elections.

“Gurung has not yet made an impact on Trinamul’s strategists,” said the observer.

Gurung, however, claims he will not only win the three hill seats of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Kurseong but also influence the results in “10 to 15” seats in the Dooars and the Terai.

Gurung will announce his candidates for the three hill seats on March 23. Tamang will declare the nominees on Sunday at a public meeting in Mungpoo, about 35km from Darjeeling.

“We have identified 52 issues that will be mentioned in our election manifesto which will be released at the Mungpoo public meeting,” said Tamang.