Yet, the regime in Singh Durbar can confidently ignore voices of protests from the distant district headquarters. The way polity of the country is currently structured, the periphery has little way of influencing the center.
The highway connecting Janakapur with the border settlement of Bhitthamod in Bihar (India) passes through Jaleshwar. Its surface hasn’t seen a drop of asphalt for over a decade. Regular maintenance was not done on the pretext that the road was to be upgraded. Meanwhile, the pavement has deteriorated to such an extent that it would have to be completely reconstructed now.
Bridges washed away by floods over several years remain to be rebuilt. Residents along the highway appear to be happy that buses don’t ply anymore due to prolonged bandha: The dust that passing vehicles kicked up had made their lives miserable. Absence of motorized vehicles from the road also means that rickshaw-pullers make good money. In that sense, bandha may be doing more for poverty reduction and public health than government offices entrusted with such responsibilities! However, what enrages locals most is the insensitivity of the center.
The district capital has failed to attract any major profit-sector bank. Higher secondary students from local schools have to be taken on educational trips to familiarize them with ATMs before they leave for jobs in West Asia.
Perhaps that too is a blessing in disguise. All that the local branches of public sector banks do is collect deposits from remittance economy and channel their loans somewhere else. It may be that the credit-deposit ratio figures are also covered by government secret directives. Off-the-record conversations with bank employees however confirm the suspicion that banks here do little lending.
With long neglected and stagnant agriculture, little industrial activity and dwindling trade, removal of government offices from Jaleshwar would be the death knell of the ancient town. But that’s what the government has been doing in installments. The forest, land conservation, and water supply offices have already been relocated to Bardibas up north.
The local administration has completely ignored its previous commitments of bringing those offices back to the district capital. The fear is that other than customs, army and the police—instruments of border management—no government office would remain here. Little wonder, the town is behaving irrationally. The bandha hurts its residents more than anyone else and yet it is living up to an old Nepali proverb which says that it’s better to embrace insanity rather than quietly accept one’s demise.
TRUST DEFICIT
The face and tone of the state in Tarai-Madhesh are distinctively Pahadi. Kathmandu may justify its assessments on the basis of meritocracy, but lists of appointments and nominations made in the capital are scrutinized carefully for their communal color. It is possible that the government genuinely believes no Madheshi deserves to be its secretary or ambassador. There was no Madheshi name in the recently published rolls of high-level appointments. The feeling in these parts of the country however is that Maoists are rulers of the country and Madheshi ministers can do very little to influence its decisions.
The hope that Maoists would be more considerate towards concerns of Madheshis than the UML has been dashed. NC abandoned the region soon after the CA elections. Maoists have begun to look like a smeared carbon copy of Marxist-Leninist trendsetters of sectarian politics.
That leaves the field wide open for Madhesh-based parties. That could be the reason different factions of Madhesh-based parties compete with each other in shrillness of their slogans. Jaya Prakash Prasad Gupta has promised a storm upon his return from Kathmandu. Mahanth Thakur doesn’t speak much, but his cadres are getting restive. The fear is that if this region heats up again, its flames may take unpredictable turns.
The callousness of intelligentsia and the indifference of the ‘national’ media towards issues of concern to Madheshis are so pronounced that few believe their indignant outbursts anymore. Other than government employees, party activists and NGO-operatives, nobody buys newspapers published from Kathmandu. A credible media may have played a moderating role and help cool passions. The overall image of mediapersons is apparently so low that even a politico of JP Gupta’s stature has little qualm in openly challenging them in an open press conference. Last week he told reporters to watch out and be prepared for the impending tempest.
The development industry too has failed to build bridges of trust. For one, per-capita investment in this region is too low to create confidence in their delivery capacity. An equally important factor is the nature of foreign assistance that have to be implemented through properly established procedures and where duly filled forms are infinitely more important than functions.
In grossly unequal societies, no matter how noble the intention of international donors and lenders, main beneficiaries of their largesse are most often the entrenched elite. There is very little difference in the atmosphere of government offices and NGO-outlets where a few Madheshis are seen trying their best to ape intonations and manners of the masters community in order curry favor of their Pahadi patrons.
Foreigners that claim to know the ‘local’ language are conversant in Nepali, not Maithili. The interpreters of societal maladies are mostly enthusiastic Pahadi youngsters—suitably armored with bottles of disinfectant, mosquito repellent dispensers, fancy netbooks, latest iPods and stylish smartphones—that justifiably fail to understand why there is so much resentment against them even though they have left comforts of ‘home’ and come to the boondocks to be of some help.
Thus, with so much disconnect between the national state, market, media and the civil society on the one hand and the restive populace on the other, local politics is poised for unpredictable turns. The much-reviled State Restructuring Committee (SRC) reports may help create some space for political conversations. Other than federalism—the main claim of Madhesh Uprisings—nothing else would help alleviate fears of Madheshis on the margins that the state is intrinsically inimical to their vital interests.
FEDERAL FUTURES
When the permanent dissident leader of NC muttered recently that all the 75 districts deserved to be transformed into provinces, the taunt in his tone was unmistakable. However, Sher Bahadur Deuba is not the only mainstream politician who continues to believe that containing Maoists is the main issue confronting the country. It may have been so when the royal-military government of Deuba faction and UML were running the show in Singh Durbar. The ground beneath their feet has since irredeemably moved.
The Maoists also appear to be renegading from their promise of substantive federalism. Critics of Marxist, Leninist and Maoist ideology have always held that apparatchiks may talk about ethnic autonomy, but there is no place for federalism under any form of communist regime. Chitra Bahadur KC and Mohan Baidya speak differently about the same theory: The centrality of unified authority under any ‘people’s regime’.
The very idea of a system of government in which power is divided between a central authority and constituent political units is antithetical to the premise of the dictatorship of the proletariat or a benevolent authoritarianism of the enlightened technocrats.
Cessation of armed conflicts once held the promise of peace dividends. That too has proved illusory. It was expected that once the insurgency was over, government instruments would become more humane. The contrary has happened in Tarai-Madhesh where the state machinery has become even more brutal and exploitative.
Parliamentary parties had vowed to mend their discriminatory ways. But their character has not changed as parochial politicos of the past continue to dominate national polity. Positive discrimination in recruitment to lower posts have shown that hopes of fair treatment raises competence as intended beneficiaries gain the confidence to compete even in general category vacancies. But openings at local levels are few as the government accelerates the privatization process for the benefit of its collaborators in the edifice of crony capitalism.
A negotiating team has headed for Kathmandu to make a last-ditch effort of ending the deadlock. Ironically, the team leader Ram Kumar Sharma is currently a Maoist with a political trajectory that encompasses stormy stints in UML and TMDP. When all else fails, what is left for a politico except hitting the streets with even more inflammatory rhetoric? The winter in Mahottary is on the wane. The promise of springtime of peoples never appeared as alluring.
cklal@hotmail.com
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