I am sure I am not the only one out there who finds it extremely difficult to intellectualise acts of physical violence. I had hoped that phase was over for us once the Maoist insurgency ended, as did the violence in the Tarai a few years later. But with deaths being reported from various parts of the country now as a result of protests against the proposed constitution, I am being forced to engage with it willy-nilly

for the simple reason that writing is my vocation.

Despite the weeks of demonstrations, bandhs, riots, and deaths, a belief had got hold that with a wiggle of a boundary here and there, the outpouring of anger could be contained. It took the killing of some police officers in Kailali to shake us out of our stupor. Could the violence have been averted? I certainly think so, but it would have required a radical reorientation of the minds of some of the people who are in charge of the country today.

Falsifying facts

Two of the most vocal proponents of an Undivided Far-West, Sher Bahadur Deuba and Bhim Rawal, felt compelled to explain their positions. Flanked by Tharu Constituent Assembly members from the Nepali Congress, Sher Bahadur Deuba thundered how someone like him, who had freed the overwhelmingly Tharu Kamaiya bonded labourers, could be considered anti-Tharu. (For the record, it was the Girija Prasad Koirala government that issued the proclamation in July 2000 freeing the Kamaiyas, although it was under Deuba’s watch a year and a half later that the law prohibiting the practice was passed.) But the way he put it, he would have us believe that it was a sudden flash of self-enlightenment that had moved him to do something about a situation he would have witnessed all his life and about which he did absolutely zilch when he first became prime minister in 1995. Ignored are years and years of struggle by the Kamaiyas seeking freedom and we all know that the government proclamation came when it was no longer possible to ignore the matter.

Rawal, a CPN-UML Vice-Chair, surrounded himself with UML MPs from the Far-West to argue that the Kailali violence was instigated by external actors. Similar was the sentiment expressed by the UML Chair, KP Oli, that the ones who indulged in violence cannot be Tharus—whatever that means. The paternalistic manner in which both infantilised the Tharus reminded one of the ‘Old Nepal’ when the Chaudharys, as many hill people still call Tharus, was considered to be staunchly loyal to the Pahadi master. But equally worrisome was the fact that both leaders seem to be completely out of sync with the reality that has seeped in apparently unbeknownst to them.

Could they actually be blind to the cumulative impact on many of the Tharus of Kailali of being a Kamaiya and then being freed with little recompense from the government; being caught in the vortex of the Maoist conflict; and then exposed to the extreme political socialisation of the politics of identity since 2006?

Legacy of violence

A 1998 study by Shiva Sharma found that Kailali was home to 37 percent of all the estimated 15,152 Kamaiya families spread across the five districts of the Far-West Tarai: Dang, Banke, Bardiya, Kanchanpur and Kailali, which means that Kailali was the district with the highest concentration of Kamaiyas.

The everyday violence faced by the Kamaiya has been well documented and I provide just some examples from the time of their bondage. Anthropologist Suresh Dhakal and his team found that one landlord refused to give the day off to a Kamaiya couple even on the day their son had died. They were forced to work the whole day in the fields with the wife carrying the lifeless body of her son strapped to her back, and only at the end of the day could they conduct the funerary rites.

There was also sexual violence to the extent that, as Adam Robertson and Shisham Mishra wrote, in one village all newly-married Kamaiya brides had to spend the night of their wedding with the landlord. And, of the children, according to a report by Action Aid, “Once the Kamaiya lord or his wife set their eyes on the Kamaiya’s children, that put paid to their childhood. They could, and did, insist that the children of the Kamaiya be pulled out of school to do domestic work—either in the Kamaiya lord’s house or in that of a relative far away. The Kamaiya had no option, but to comply...Beating and abuse was common, and they were bound to pay the debt of their fathers.”

During the Maoist conflict, although it is Bardiya that is better known for the atrocities visited upon the Tharus by the state particularly since it was the district that reported the highest number of forced disappearances, it is Kailali that suffered more deaths. Years of wanton violence, mainly by state security forces, and the involvement of Tharu youth in the Maoist movement, can surely have had a more-than-marginal effect.

After 2006, it was a period of ethnic politics. In the Tharu strongholds of western Tarai, the formation of the Tharuhat Autonomous State Council (TASC), which provided a forum for Tharus to begin pressing for their rights included the demand for a Tharu homeland. As reported by The Carter Centre as far back as 2009/10, TASC activists in Kailali had been extorting money from offices of the village development committees as taxes for the use of natural resources, holding up ILO 169 as justification. Along with Dang, Kailali is considered a stronghold of TASC, and as Mathew Maycock points out, “the volatile post-conflict situation in many regards helps to explain some of the specific aspects of the TASC, not least the propensity of specific kinds of often low-level violence and bandh.”

True federalism

Given this history, it is simply astounding that our political leaders cannot believe that Tharus can mobilise for their rights—with violence, if need be, since it is a condition they have been steeped in for a long time, and which the state has done nothing

to change.

The tragic event of Kailali is also a good illustration of the need for federalism in its true sense—and that need not necessarily lead to the creation of Tharuhat. After the April-May earthquake, all the focus from constitution-drafting shifted to the immediate task at hand of relief and then reconstruction, which itself provided the impetus for the 16-point agreement and a ‘fast-tracked’ constitution. The scale of the disaster notwithstanding, it, after all, affected only 14 districts seriously and another 17 districts not so seriously. But because the Capital was also hit badly, the instinct of those leading the four parties was to assume once again that Kathmandu is Nepal, and that they could ram through a constitution of their liking when everyone was busy with the aftermath of the earthquake.

In their enthusiasm, they seem to have forgotten that much as all Nepalis felt for those who were affected, the quake had changed little of the conditions of life for the vast majority. And, if they were looking for a constitution that would do away with any number of structural inequities that kept them down, they were to be sadly mistaken. Even the progressive sections of the Interim Constitution had been watered down

to reflect a mindset among the coterie of leaders in charge of the constitution

who seem content with the status quo. In the case of Kailali, policemen on duty

paid with their lives for the folly of their political masters.