As West Bengal's Left Front Government and the Darjeeling district administration look the other way, the paper has cried out for help from the government in Delhi.

Proprietor-editor Kumar Pradhan wrote to Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, Union Home Minister L K Advani, Information and Broadcasting Minister Sushma Swaraj and Press Council of India chairman Justice P B Sawant pleading for their intervention. But none of them cared to respond.``As the last resort, I'm moving a petition in the Calcutta High Court in a day or two,'' Pradhan told The Indian Express on Wednesday.

Ghising's party, the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF), imposed a ban on the Siliguri-based Nepali daily Sunchari on March 23 for what it termed ``false propaganda'' againstthe party and its chairman. Technically, the ban was imposed by the Darjeeling branch committee of the GNLF.

The paper carried articles and letters from readers which called Ghising's bluff on the so-called petitions to the International Court of Justice at The Hague, questioning Darjeeling's accession to India. The GNLF boycotted the last Lok Sabha polls in Darjeeling on the plea that no elections there would have ``legal validity'' until the International Court clarified the area's ``legal and constitutional status''.

``All we did was publish several articles and the letters which questioned Ghising's position,'' said Pradhan. But that was enough provocation for the man who has been calling the shots in Darjeeling ever since the bloody agitation for a separate Gorkhaland state in the mid-1980s.

The ban on the paper was imposed on March 23. Two days later, GNLF activists snatched 3,000 copies of the paper from a vendor at Pankhabari. On April 1, packets containing copies were looted from a bus atKalimpong. ``I was scared, so was my agent,'' Pradhan said over the telephone from Siliguri.

Nine political parties including the Communist Party of Marxist Revolutionaries (CPRM), a breakaway group of the CPI(M), the Congress, the BJP, the Trinamool Congress and the Akhil Bharatiya Gorkha League put up a resistance against the ban. The CPI(M) however ducked the issue and only on April 11 did state Home Minister Buddhadev Bhattacharyya appeal to Ghising to withdraw the ban.