Explained : How Prashant Tamang’s Indian Idol Win Changed Darjeeling’s Politics and Stirred a Movement and Its Impact

It was a hero’s welcome. 

In December 2005, Subhash Ghisingh, the late leader from the Darjeeling hills, arrived at Bagdogra airport carrying a political “gift” for the region: Sixth Schedule status for the Darjeeling hills. He had just signed a memorandum of understanding with the state and the Union government.

Ghisingh was garlanded and offered khadas (traditional white ceremonial scarves) as he was welcomed by a sea of supporters, many dressed in traditional attire. A cavalcade of cars wound its way up the hills. Flags fluttered. Slogans filled the air. I remember a visibly joyous Ghisingh distributing laddoos among journalists and supporters at the Pintail Village resort, where he and his party functionaries had halted. It felt celebratory, almost festive, a leader returning to his people, still firmly in command of the political imagination of the hills.

A year later, the tone had changed dramatically.

“If he cannot do it, then we will,” Ghisingh’s lieutenant Bimal Gurung declared, summarily rejecting the Sixth Schedule arrangement and raising the demand for a full-fledged separate state. “The youths are ready to ask for statehood. We do not want anyone to come in between us and our goal.”

In less than two years, the dynamics of hill politics had changed forever. The fervour once reserved for Ghisingh now belonged to Gurung. Sixth Schedule faded from public memory; statehood became the sole rallying cry. 

What caused such a drastic U-turn? 

The answer is layered and complex but, reduced to a single line, it is this: Prashant Tamang became Indian Idol.

An unlikely catalyst

Prashant Tamang won the Indian Idol title in 2007. 

A boy from Darjeeling, he was a constable with Kolkata Police – a job he had got on compassionate grounds after his father died in harness – when he auditioned for the third season of the singing reality show on Sony Entertainment Television. He went on to have a successful singing career, touring widely with concerts. Over the last 15 years, he also acted in Nepali films such as Gorkha Paltan and Pardesi, apart from doing playback singing for films. Most recently he appeared in the hit web series Paatal Lok 2. 

Tamang died in Delhi on January 11 this year, following cardiac arrest. He was 43.

However, Tamang’s achievement as an artist, important as it was, was not his most enduring legacy. His real significance lay elsewhere, in what he came to represent. 

Even as he undertook the Indian Idol journey, he sparked a phenomenon. People voted in extraordinary numbers. With every episode, the frenzy grew, spilling beyond the Darjeeling hills into the plains of Siliguri and the Dooars. Streets emptied, shops shut early, and people gathered around television sets to watch, and vote. 

He became a sensation not only in India but also in Nepal. I remember Nepalese supporters from the bordering districts crossing over to vote for him. Members of the Nepali diaspora across the world sent money and organised campaigns. Tamang polled an unprecedented number of SMS votes – by some estimates, running into several crores – far outstripping his closest rival, in the grand finale.

As it turned out, Indian Idol was no longer just a reality television contest; it had become a collective moment of assertion.

Tamang’s ascent on the Indian Idol came to symbolise a collective desire for acceptance, to be recognised as Indians rather than viewed as outsiders, and to be seen beyond tired stereotypes that reduced an entire community to security guards, porters or menial labour. 

For decades, Nepali-speaking Indians, or “Gorkhas”, have lived with a persistent sense of marginalisation, caught in a paradox of belonging. That condition that shaped both the political demand for Gorkhaland and the extraordinary emotional investment in Tamang’s rise. The demand for Gorkhaland must be read against this long search for identity and recognition. It has never been only about administrative boundaries or political power; it is also about dignity, about the right to belong without qualification. In that sense, the Gorkhaland movement drew strength from the same impulses that propelled Tamang’s rise, a collective assertion that Gorkhas – Indian Nepalis – are not outsiders, but an integral part of the Indian nation.

Tamang represented something the community had been denied for long: recognition without apology.

That mattered.

The joke

The “joke” came soon after Tamang’s crowing on the Indian Idol platform. 

“If every Nepali takes up singing, who will guard the shops?”, an FM radio jockey in Delhi quipped on air. He apologised later. But the damage was done. 

The remark may have been tossed off lightly, but it landed heavily. It reduced a rare moment of national recognition to a familiar slur. At a time when the community was asserting dignity and belonging, the comment did exactly the opposite.

Anger spilled onto the streets. In Siliguri, a protest rally taken out by the Indian Nepalis against the remark was met with stone-pelting and attacks by local residents, largely Bengali speakers, following rumours that an ambulance was obstructed. I was there as a young journalist and watched the violence escalate to my utter disbelief – more so to see communal strife erupt in my hometown, a place that had always been known for peaceful coexistence. 

Vehicles were torched, shops vandalised and neighbourhoods turned hostile. Curfew was imposed, and the situation deteriorated to the point where the army had to be deployed to restore order. What began as a protest against a racist insult exposed deeper fault lines, leaving Nepali-speaking residents feeling targeted and unsafe in the plains. 

The episode marked a turning point. The outrage did not subside; it hardened into political resolve, fuelled in no small measure by the shoddy handling of the situation by the Left Front government then in power in West Bengal. The anger and humiliation of that moment fed into a broader political mobilisation.

Soon after, the agitation moved decisively beyond symbolic protest to take the shape of a full-fledged fight for a separate state of Gorkhaland. At its forefront now was a new leader: Bimal Gurung.

The shift

Ghisingh did not see it coming. 

Gurung did. He had his ear to the ground. As the chief patron of the Prashant Tamang Fan Club, he was present throughout Indian Idol voting frenzy – mobilising, organising, and standing visibly with the people. He understood the mood of the moment and positioned himself alongside it. The people noticed. The crowds followed.

When the moment arrived, the emotional energy that had been building around Prashant Tamang flowed seamlessly into political mobilisation. People backed Gurung, just as he had backed Tamang. With that support behind him, Gurung could do what had once been unthinkable: challenge Ghisingh openly and assert a new vision for the hills. 

The increasingly alienated Ghisingh never paid much heed to the Indian Idol phenomenon. Perhaps he did not grasp the power of a televised reality show, much like many today struggle to understand Gen Z politics shaped by social media.

Two weeks after the grand finale of Indian Idol, Gurung floated his own political party, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, and emerged as the new mass leader of the hills. With that, the long dominance of Ghisingh’s Gorkha National Liberation Front came to an end. A new phase of Gorkhaland agitation followed, marked by dharnas, protests and strikes. Ghisingh was forced to resign, effectively bringing the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, established in the aftermath of the violent agitation of the late eighties, to a close. He was pushed into political exile, where he would later die. In 2012, the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration was established. 

The political landscape of the hills was altered for good. 

What endured

No, Gorkhaland did not happen. Nor was the Sixth Schedule implemented. 

The Darjeeling hills have since witnessed repeated political churns. Alliances have shifted, leaders have risen and fallen, and the landscape today feels murkier than ever. Public trust in political leadership is low; cynicism runs deep. Charges of corruption persist, the state government is widely seen as apathetic, and a sense of drift is unmistakable.

But does that mean the “Prashant Tamang phenomenon” failed?

Decidedly not.

What it achieved was profound. In the aftermath of Indian Idol, Ghisingh’s era of unquestioned authority came to a decisive end. The kind of dictatorial control he once exercised over the hills has not returned. No leader since has been able to rule with the same fear, finality or monopoly over the public imagination. That rupture alone was significant.

Equally important was what ensued. The hills today reflect a diversity of political opinion that would have been unthinkable two decades ago. Flags of different colours fly openly. Dissent exists. Allegiance is no longer singular or enforced. That plurality may be messy and often frustrating, but it is also a form of freedom. And that freedom is a gain.

Tamang was not a political actor. He never set out to be one. Yet, without intending to, he triggered one of the most consequential political realignments the Darjeeling hills have seen. More than that, he showed a community what it looked like to be visible, to be recognised without apology. In that brief moment, he altered how people saw themselves, and that shift endured long after the voting lines closed and the stage lights dimmed.

Tamang won’t be forgotten in a hurry. His legacy lies not in what he set out to do, but in what his moment made possible. In finding his voice, a community found its own – and that will endure.

Anuradha Sharma is an independent journalist.

This article went live on January nineteenth, two thousand twenty six, at fifty minutes past twelve at noon.

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