Harsh Vardhan Shringla, the chief coordinator of India’s G20 presidency, and a retired IFS officer who has served as foreign secretary and India’s ambassador to the US, has come back to his roots in Darjeeling amid buzz that he may be nominated by the BJP for the Darjeeling Lok Sabha seat.
Rumours started after posters came up in Darjeeling district, featuring 61-year-old Shringla in a suit, greeting everyone for the new year in his avatar as president of the Darjeeling Welfare Society.
This is causing immense heartburn to current BJP MP Raju Bista and his followers.
Followers of Raju Bista told The Daily Guardian: “Shringla ji has his roots in Darjeeling, but neither has he grown up here nor does he know the problems of the common man. Raju Bista sir, on the other hand is a home-grown person who has been beside the hills people at all times. If our party nominates Shringla ji, it would be committing the same mistake that it had done when it had nominated Surinder Singh Alhuwalia. Raju Bista had to work really hard to overcome the problems created due to the non-performance and absenteeism of Alhuwalia ji.”
In the past, the BJP had fielded heavyweights like former Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and former Union Minister of State S.S. Ahluwalia from Darjeeling.
The BJP has inducted former bureaucrats such as S Jaishankar, Hardeep Singh Puri, RK Singh, and Ashwani Vaishnav, all of whom have been given prime positions of responsibility in the Narendra Modi Government.
Shringla’s aunt Chokila Iyer was India’s first female foreign secretary between March 2001 and June 2002.
Shringla was India’s Foreign Secretary between 2020 and 2022 and Ambassador to the US between 2019 and 2020. He also served in Bangladesh and Thailand. Apart from G20 and his tenure as Foreign Secretary during the pandemic, Shringla worked closely with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the “Howdy Modi” event in Texas in 2019.
Ratan Pradhan, a long-time friend of the Shringla family, told The Daily Guardian: “Harsh Vardhan is liked because of his humble and down-to-earth nature. He is a grounded diplomat – and has often helped people from Darjeeling. Most recently, during the COVID crisis, he helped those from the region stranded outside India and ensured their safe passage home.”
However, Rajkumar Ghimere, a Raju Bista supporter, said: “However much Shringla ji’s supporters say that he is a Gorkha chora, the fact is he has never really lived in Darjeeling or was even born there. He was born in Mumbai, attended the Mayo School in Rajasthan’s Ajmer, and went on to graduate with an Honours degree in History from St Stephen’s College, University of Delhi. His exposure to Darjeeling was that he used to spend his holidays in Darjeeling. Hundreds of tourists do the same every year.”
The BJP has a track record of fielding outsiders, but the Darjeeling hills have been kind to the party’s choices.
The Darjeeling hills gave the BJP its first MP from West Bengal in 2009 with Jaswant Singh, who was from Rajasthan’s Barmer, winning the seat, thanks to the support of the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM) led by Bimal Gurung.
In the 2014 elections, the saffron party fielded Union Minister S.S. Ahluwalia, from the seat. In this election, too, the GJM supported the BJP on “the promise to consider the demand of Gorkhaland“ and helped Ahluwalia win the crucial seat.
In 2019, the party fielded Raju Singh Bista, an industrialist, though he was a political greenhorn. Though Bista is Nepali-speaking, he was born in Manipur which is why many in the Darjeeling hills still consider him as an “outsider”.
