“In a Time of Universal Deceit, Telling the Truth Becomes a Revolutionary Act” George Orwell
The Darjeeling Chronicle (TheDC) brings to you news, views, and stories from the Eastern Himalayan region of India that encompasses the Darjeeling Hills, Terai, and Duars, including the surrounding region of Sikkim. The main objective of TheDC is to bring to focus, highlight and share news, issues, stories, and views from the perspective of its local inhabitants i.e. the Gorkhas. In doing so, TheDC attempts to “be” as well as “project” the voices of the people of this region, particularly those who believe in the demand for Gorkhaland and continue to struggle for the same within the Union of India.
TheDC initially started as a Facebook page four years ago in November 2013: then with the objective of sharing “news as it happened on the ground”. It was conceived out of necessity and great urgency at a time when the struggle for a separate state of Gorkhaland (which keeps resurfacing time and again) in the Darjeeling Hills was at its peak, and the Bengal Government, in their bid to crush the struggle and aspirations of the local’s inhabitants had banned all local media, local cable TV news, including online news portal for months. This takedown of local media and cable TV was a dictatorial move by the Bengal government to control and suppress information, facts, and our ground realities. Following this, the State-funded media houses and channels presented news from the Bengal perspective, where most of the news was either fabricated, full of hyperbole, or simply based on random assumptions aimed at misleading the mainland audiences/readers into thinking that the demand for Gorkhaland was somehow separatist in nature and thus anti-national.
So a few of us got together and started TheDC to report the truth – our ground realities, our stories, our views, and our issues.
What started out of urgency – TheDC, a Facebook page went on to become an integral community platform which helped to not only inform the people but also provided them with a space to raise “their” voices and be heard. In a very short span of time, TheDC has emerged as one of the most important news sources for our region.
We feel honored that some of our Breaking News stories, first reported in TheDC have been used and widely quoted by national, as well as international media. Our Facebook page has today transformed into a growing platform for news dissemination, and community involvement, activism, and numerous initiatives connecting our people more strongly with our region, without ever having to boost a single post. Today we are happy and extremely proud to state that we have to some extent succeeded in becoming the platform and the “voice” that we had hoped to become.
During the course of running the Facebook page, we had always strived towards further strengthening and developing this platform. It dawned on us that in addition to sharing the most important, relevant, and up to date news, views, and issues of our region, we also wanted to include, share and connect with news and issues relating to the greater North East community of India and the Gorkhalis across the world. Not to forget the numerous suggestions and requests from our readers for an official news website that kept encouraging us to work towards it.
This site is thus dedicated to our readers and followers, who had faith and trust in us all these years. This site seeks to take our endeavor a little further, as the more people we can reach, the greater will be the reach of the information we disseminate – information about us, our people, our region, our issues, and our struggles.
In these past five years, TheDC has remained proudly independent and fully run by volunteers. It is because of the committed volunteers that TheDC never had to compromise on the quality, authenticity, and reliability of any news and the critical analysis of the same. We have remained and continue to remain committed towards the formation of Gorkhaland within the constitutional and geographical contours of India.
Information is power, let us make sure we share this power with everyone!!
Jai Hind. Jai Gorkhaland.
Write us at admin@thedarjeelingchronicle.com or editor@thedarjeelingchronicle.com