“We cannot see each other prosper. I am thinking of a career change,” he concluded. I was taken aback. For as long as I have known him, he had been a dedicated activist for Madhesi causes. And then, a few days ago, I was surprised once again. Here he was, back his old self, complaining no longer about other Madhesis but about the state’s treatment of Madhesis. Within three weeks, he had morphed back to his crusading Madhesi activist persona.
Every profession has its own daily rough-and-tumble, and with civil society, small as it is in Nepal where everyone knows everyone and all their idiosyncrasies, work can become disaffecting. But it is when we lose touch with the “fire in the belly”, when we become detached with the idealism that first led us to choose our professions that the disaffection turns into disillusionment, and in extreme forms, even resentment towards it. What my friend had lost and found in a matter of three weeks was just that—Madhesi idealism has made a comeback.
“The Tarai is tinder dry,” wrote Navin Jha in a recent issue of the Nepali Times, and all it is waiting for is a spark. Ever insightful, the commentator par excellence CK Lal has been warning for some time now, in column after column that the center’s attitudes towards Madhesh—what some see as deliberate provocation—is making the region angrier, edgier, and likely to erupt anytime. Even the unwaveringly conciliatory and dispassionate Birgunj based commentator Chandrakishore was moved enough to evoke the dual standards of the Kathmandu intelligentsia in an unusually emotional column in Kantipur recently.
If Madhesi politics has any recurring theme, it is neither frequent divisions nor corruption of our leaders; it is constant rebuff by big parties.
What is going on here? Weren’t we Madhesis supposed to be disgusted by our own leadership? Had not our gaze turned inwards? Were we not ourselves to blame for our woes? That, in fact, had been the driving narrative in Kathmandu’s media—how frequently our parties split, how corrupt our leaders were, how divided and unequal our society was. Forgotten was the fact that in every change of government, it was the Madhesi parties that had ended the farcical deadlock between the three major political parties (remember the 16 rounds of voting to find a replacement?).
And, all but once, the apparently ever-divided Madhesi parties had presented a common set of agendas and a common front. This, it was said, was only because the Madhesi parties hungered for power, as if the others did not and the demands made by the Madhesi parties were not consistent enough to their liking. Yet it was the big three parties that, having accepted the demands, once comfortably in power, chose to ignore them. When some governments did make an effort to honor the agreements and legislated along the lines of the demands, in stepped the Supreme Court to nullify it.
If Madhesi politics has any recurring theme, it is neither frequent divisions nor corruption of our leaders; it is this constant rebuff by the big parties who backtrack on the agreed-upon Madhesi demands. Among the more intellectual types, this mistrust of national-level political leaders runs deep. They can walk you down the memory lane. They will remind you of the bitter language controversy of 1957-58, when a backlash against the recommendation that Nepali be made the sole language of instruction in all government schools ignited a movement of such intensity, led by the Tarai Congress, that all the major political parties of the time (the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal, the United Democratic Party, and the Praja Parishad) expressed solidarity with the protests.
Mollified by this show of support, the Madhesi people put the linguistic agenda, so central to them then, in the backburner to let the election go forward. And the result: the Tarai Congress failed to win a single seat. Then, within a few years, Mahendra Shah went on and imposed his one-language policy, nary a protest. When I asked a prominent Madhesi scholar why they were pushing ahead with the second Madhesh Movement in 2008 while they could let the elections go ahead and push their agenda later in the Constituent Assembly, this is where he began. He then went on to list a long litany of betrayals by the Nepali state towards the Madhesis.
Since the unexpected eruption of the Madhesh Movement and its unparalleled assertion of ethnic demands, Madhesis have nursed their wounds quietly, away from the purview of the national media. When Dr Ram Baran Yadav was elected president, we were smugly content—even if he was vehemently opposed to the Madhesh Movement, he was after all a Madhesi. Even if the Supreme Court halted the recruitment of 3,000 Madhesi soldiers in the Nepal Army, declaring shamelessly that it was already inclusive, we told ourselves that not many Madhesis are interested in joining the Army anyway. When the Vice President’s oath-taking ceremony was censured for his choice of Hindi, we bickered among ourselves about the primacy of our mother tongues—Maithali, Bhojpuri and Awadhi.
As Madhesi parliamentarians were forced to forfeit their seats, we deemed it constitutional due to existing parliamentary laws. When our politicians were charged with corruption and crime, we agreed that these were indeed corrupt people. When armed group members who had laid down their arms for peace talks were nevertheless arrested, we said, yes, they deserved it. When debate ensued about citizenship rules granting easier accessibility for Madhesi, we too were unsatisfied with how Nepali-born Madhesis were overlooked while politically connected Indians had received it because of ulterior political motives. When the then Defense Minister Sarat Singh Bhandari had to resign due to his alluded comments on secession, when Sanjay Sah was suspended and then expelled from the CA, when Shyam Sundar Gupta was arrested for abduction, all along we all agreed that there were legal grounds for these actions. The controversy about Jay Prakash Gupta over his statement about cutting off relations with what he calls the Kathmandu regime appears to have hit the raw nerve, and despite several clarifications on what he intended to say, the controversy did not die until yesterday when we was indicted for corruption.
But the tide appears to have changed now. Many believe that leaders of Madhesi parties are being specifically targeted, unjustly accused and vehemently persecuted. The small nicks on the body-politic of Madhesh have now become a festering wound. Of course Madhesi political parties have disappointed us, but which party has not disappointed its constituency?
Increasingly, we have come to look at Madhesi politics through a jaundiced eye—somehow whatever happens in the Tarai is representative of the politics of Bihar of a decade ago, consistent with what the center has always thought of Madhesh. We have been accused of anti-nationalism, Sikkimization, Fiji-fication, Nigeralization—you name it. But like snowballing turns a chunk of ice into an avalanche, unless some conciliatory measure is taken by the state, the motion has been set and the inertia will eventually lead to the inevitable.
daulat.jha@gmail.com
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