Sukna is where the plains give out. The road from Siliguri runs flat and hot through tea gardens and then, quite suddenly, begins to climb. The little railway that the British laid in the 1880s starts its long absurd corkscrew here, and the forest closes in. For anyone travelling up to Darjeeling, Sukna is the place where the country changes character. It is also, and this is not incidental, a garrison.The army’s 33 Corps has its headquarters there, watching over Sikkim and over the twenty-odd kilometres of Indian territory, popularly known as the Chicken’s Neck (Siliguri Corridor), that connects the northeast to the rest of the republic.On August 22, the anniversary of the 1988 Gorkha Accord, Union home minister Amit Shah sat down at a resort in Sukna with chief minister Suvendu Adhikari and a group of leaders from the Darjeeling hills. Bimal Gurung was there. So were Roshan Giri, Mann Ghisingh, Darjeeling MP Raju Bista and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) legislators from the region.Later, it constituted a committee to draft an agreement and finalise modalities for a “permanent political solution” to the Gorkha identity issue in the Darjeeling hills and its adjacent areas.The Home Ministry called the meeting a step towards a permanent political solution. The committee will be headed by Pankaj Kumar Singh, a retired police officer who commanded the Border Security Force (BSF) and then served as deputy national security adviser, and who had already been appointed the government’s interlocutor for the hills the previous October.Singh was given a year to speak to organisations across the Darjeeling hills, the Terai and the Dooars and recommend a roadmap. In a reply to parliament in March, the Home Ministry listed his responsibilities. They included dialogue with stakeholders, recommendations for socio-economic development and cultural recognition, and measures to address Gorkha aspirations within the Constitution.Singh has now been asked to head another committee that will reportedly prepare the details of a “final agreement”. But the government has not published a constitutional proposal, a complete list of members, precise terms of reference or a deadline. It has moved from consultation to “finalisation” without disclosing what political arrangement is being finalised.The record is right there, and it isn’t goodSet against the record of the present government, the committee looks less like an opening than like a form.The nearer parallel with Darjeeling is Ladakh. Ladakh wanted the Sixth Schedule. Ladakh received a high-powered committee under a minister of state in the Home Ministry. There were rounds of talks and there were collapses, and there was a hunger strike, and a march to Delhi that ended in detentions, and more talks. In September of last year there were four deaths in Leh and Sonam Wangchuk in custody under the National Security Act (NSA).Then there is Manipur, which should have retired the phrase “double engine” permanently. From May 2023 a state governed by the same party as the Union burned for the better part of two years, and president’s rule had to be imposed.And in Jammu and Kashmir, where statehood was to be restored at an appropriate time, and where the Supreme Court asked for it, and where an assembly has since been elected, the appropriate time has not arrived. This is a government that is very good at holding a position for years while sounding as though it is on the verge of moving.The most decorated of Delhi’s peace initiatives is the Naga Framework Agreement, signed in August 2015 in the prime minister’s presence and described at the time as the closing of India’s oldest insurgency. It is eleven years old. Its contents were kept secret for years, and when they emerged it turned out the two signatories disagreed about what the central term meant, which is a thing you would ordinarily settle before the ceremony.The interlocutor who negotiated it became a governor, quarrelled publicly with the men he had negotiated with, and moved to Tamil Nadu. Incidentally, he is currently the governor of Bengal. The talks continue. Nothing has been enacted.Two councils, no power to make lawDarjeeling knows this kind of progress. It often arrives as a new body with a new name.The Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council followed the 1988 accord. The Gorkhaland Territorial Administration (GTA) followed the 2011 agreement. Both were described as answers to the political unrest in the hills. Both transferred administrative work while leaving the real power elsewhere.The GTA was given control over 59 subjects. But it exists under a West Bengal law. It cannot independently make laws on land, taxation or local government. It remains dependent on Nabanna for money, staff and the actual transfer of departments.Which is exactly where it broke. Arguments began over departments that had supposedly been transferred but remained under the state government’s control. The larger demand survived. In 2017, the hills shut down for 104 days.There is a danger that Shah’s committee will lead to another version of the same arrangement. A GTA with more departments. A GTA with a larger grant. Perhaps a new name and a more impressive office. All of that might improve everyday administration. None of it would explain who finally controls the hills.The alternative on the table, pressed for years by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI(M)) and by sections of the hills, is the Sixth Schedule – a constitutionally protected council with real law-making power. That has been tried before too.In 2005, the Union government, the Left Front government and the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) agreed to create a Sixth Schedule Gorkha Hill Council. Bills introduced in parliament two years later proposed giving it law making powers over 45 additional subjects, including agriculture, transport and education. They were referred to a standing committee chaired by Sushma Swaraj.It was a more serious transfer of power than either the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) or the GTA. It was also deeply unpopular with a large section of the hills by the time it reached parliament.Bimal Gurung had broken away from Subash Ghisingh and formed the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha. His party opposed the Sixth Schedule proposal, arguing that it betrayed the demand for Gorkhaland. There were also fears among non-tribal residents about political representation and land rights. The Bills stalled and eventually lapsed.The Gorkhaland claim has never been just the three hill subdivisions. It reaches into the Terai and the Dooars. But in those areas Nepali speakers are a minority. Rajbanshis, Adivasi tea workers and Bengalis are not going to accept absorption into a hill-dominated council.The 2005 agreement understood this. It went mouza by mouza, which proves how granular and how explosive the territory question is. Any settlement that includes the Dooars costs the BJP the plains. Any settlement that excludes them lets hill hardliners say the identity question was left half-done. There is no version of the line that both sides sign.The choice of Singh as the head of the committee is revealing here. He is a former BSF chief and former deputy national security adviser. Shah announced the committee during a visit in which he repeatedly spoke about the security of the Chicken’s Neck. For Delhi, picking Singh signals that government is treating this more as a stability problem sitting on top of the Chicken’s Neck, twenty-two kilometres wide at its thinnest, with a corps headquarter at Sukna and eleven hundred acres just handed over to the BSF.The part nobody says out loudStatehood is out of possibility. The home minister ruled out dividing Bengal during the campaign, and the plains electorate that put this government into Nabanna would not forgive it, and behind Darjeeling stand Kamtapur and Greater Cooch Behar waiting for a precedent. The Sixth Schedule is closed for the reasons above. What remains is the Territorial Administration with more subjects bolted onto it, which is to say the same instrument that has now failed twice, thicker.The BJP has already extracted everything the Gorkhaland issue can give it electorally.Darjeeling has elected BJP MPs since 2009. The promise of a permanent political solution appeared in the party’s 2019 Lok Sabha manifesto. The words were repeated in 2026. During the assembly campaign, Shah said the issue would be resolved within six months if the BJP came to power in West Bengal.That government was sworn in on May 9. The six months run out in early November.The strongest thing that can be said on the other side is that the arithmetic has genuinely changed. Delhi and Kolkata are run by the same party, which retires the standing excuse that the state government would not come to the table.The difficulty is that in late August, with ten weeks left on a promise the home minister made himself, the deliverable was a committee without a reporting date, chaired by the man who was already doing the job.The committee could still produce something meaningful. But it would have to do what earlier arrangements avoided. It would need to define the territory involved, include groups outside the BJP’s circle of allies, protect the rights of the Terai and Dooars communities and say plainly what law making and financial powers will leave Kolkata.Most importantly, the Union government would have to decide what it is prepared to give up.That decision cannot be delegated to an interlocutor. It belongs to home minister Shah, chief minister Adhikari and the governments they lead.Until they make it, the permanent political solution will remain what it has been for years. A useful phrase, repeated at election time, followed by a committee once the votes have been counted.The men who came down from the hills that morning drove back up in the evening, on a road their great-grandfathers were brought across a border to build. A committee will follow them shortly, and take down what they say.