The Darjeeling Congress leadership believes that the BJP is managing to win the Darjeeling seat since 2009 without doing anything concrete by simply “harvesting the dissatisfaction” against Bengal's ruling Trinamool.

Trinamool lacks acceptance in the hills as it is opposed to carving out Gorkhaland from Bengal.

The hill Congress leaders want the party's central and state leaders to chart events to ensure Congress visibility in the hills.

Munish Tamang, the Darjeeling Congress candidate during the recent Lok Sabha election, did a post-mortem of the election results during the executive meeting of the West Bengal Pradesh Congress in Calcutta on Friday.

“The BJP is just harvesting the discontentment against the TMC in Darjeeling and is managing to win the Darjeeling seat without doing anything,” said Tamang, who is also a college professor at a Delhi college.

There is a general “trust deficit” against the TMC in the hills, said a political observer in the region.

"In fact, this holds true for any party that comes to power in Calcutta (Bengal Assembly), as they are opposed to the demand for a Gorkhaland state around which Darjeeling politics hinges," said the observer.

Raju Bista of the BJP won the Darjeeling seat for the second consecutive term. Despite earlier changes in candidacy, the BJP has been winning the Darjeeling Lok Sabha constituency since 2009, while the TMC has never won the seat.

In the 2019 Lok Sabha election manifesto, the BJP had promised a permanent political solution (PPS) without defining it and tribal status of 11 Gorkha communities.

These promises were neither fulfilled in the next five years, nor did they find mention in the BJP’s 2024 election manifesto, Congress hill leaders have often pointed out.

Tamang, in his assessment of the BJP in the Darjeeling hills, minced no words.

“The BJP has done nothing but (its leaders) just come here once in five years to win the (Lok Sabha) seat," Tamang said.

“In the political journey of Darjeeling, the Congress has done a lot. People have sympathy towards the party,” Tamang pointed out.

It was during the Congress government at the Centre that the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) was set up in 1988. The inclusion of Nepali language in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution in 1992, the agreement for including the hills under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution and the formation of the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) in 2012 were all done during the Congress-led coalition governments at the Centre.

“The hill people have sympathy towards the Congress but we as a party need to be more visible. Visits by central and state leadership to Darjeeling need to be more frequent,” Tamang said.

The Congress had last won the Darjeeling seat in 2004.

This was possible because of the support of Subash Ghisingh’s Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), which was the dominant political force in the hills then.

During the last Lok Sabha election, Bista polled 6.79 lakh votes whileTMC’s Gopal Lama received 5.08 lakh votes. Tamang had been a distant third with 83,000-odd votes.

Bista’s victory margin, however, saw a sharp drop from 4.2 lakh votes in 2019 to 1.78 lakh votes in 2024.

Sources said that Tamang’s “visibility” suggestion was taken note of by Ghulam Ahmad Mir, the Bengal minder of the Congress.