The government decision to this effect came in the early 1960s when the idea of a cross-county road project—East-West Highway—was first conceived, apparently for easing travel between different parts of the country without detours through India. An associated idea was to facilitate the migration of hill population to Madhesh to help reduce overcrowding in hills and expand opportunities for hill population for livelihood support elsewhere in the country.There are reasons to believe that this strategy has succeeded in the resettlement of hill population in Madhesh. There are no reliable data on internal migration patterns but hill population has taken advantage of this opportunity in a big way. A number of booming townships and trading centers have emerged along the 1,200-kilometer stretch of East-West Highway to absorb immigrants from hills. In fact, the major new towns along the highway no longer have the ethnic face of Madhesh as was the case 20 or 30 years ago. They have become hill territories in all aspects except for the flatness of terrain.
This remarkable change of face of Madhesh has now become a political issue, in the choice of federalism for the country. Front-line politicians like KP Oli have found the basis for aligning certain Madhesh districts with majority hill states. At present, there are three contentious districts in the extreme east of the country—Jhapa, Morang, Sunsari; and two in the extreme west—Kanchanpur and Kailali; plus one in Mid-Madhesh—Chitwan. At least in the sense of business and official presence in these six districts, they all have overwhelmingly hill features.
Slow asphyxiation
Whatever good the commencement of East-West Highway has done to the country at large—which many would consider immense in terms of its impact on society, politics, and economy—one overlooked outcome has been turning of much of Madhesh into a backwater territory. One just need to look at the stagnation and decay of old district headquarter towns in Madhesh along the India border and compare them with those to the north that have emerged as business and official hubs, taking advantage of access provided by cross-country traffic over East-West Highway. New townships along this highway exhibit all the glitter and affluence of modern Nepal, while their southern counterparts have turned into ghost towns, all of them facing decay and dissolution.
As a consequence, many leaders of mainstream parties led by KP Oli have pushed for moving district headquarters in Madhesh to places closer to the East-West Highway, all of them on northern edges of Madhesh district lines touching the foothills. There is considerable rationale for moving government operations near the places of business growth, industrial potential, and those serving as regional hubs, which the old Madheshi towns no longer qualify for. Also, another likely reason favoring the move is the nearness of Madhesh's old towns to India border which, in some way, appears threatening to the governing elite, known for their discriminatory policies towards Madheshis.
Admittedly, there is much opposition to the idea of emptying Madhesh of government presence because there is little hope of anything else replacing them that could help offset losses to local economy and other benefits that come with official presence. Most Madhesh towns will then be housing just the military and security personnel that would make them look like outposts of a colonial regime, a perception one gets now from the make-up of administrative and security infrastructure that exists in the region today.
New face of Madhesh
Looking back over twenty or thirty years, Madhesh has experienced immense transformation with regard to language, dress, rituals, and the make-up of its professional and business elite that markedly separates it from adjoining regions of India. Part of this transformation has occurred because of the youth population coming under the influence of northerners but most of it has ensued from new settlements of hill population along the East-West Highway corridors who now own more modern businesses and urban real estate, promising huge prospective gains.
In Madheshi towns like Hetuada, Bardibas, Lahan and Damak, most new constructions intended for housing and business developments are Pahade-owned which, along with ethnic Pahades manning local government offices, make them indistinguishable from Pahade towns in the hills. In other words, ethnic integration has worked wonderfully, although that is now limited to places in Madhesh that are relatively developed and accessible to outsiders.
The next phase of integration will now move to villages that still are as primitive and isolated as they always have been and they continue to show the old face of Madhesh. However, change is coming to traditional way of living in Madhesh, maybe in as little as two to three decades. Regional integration at a deeper level will be spearheaded by economic forces, much the same way it has in other regions of the country, including in Kathmandu Valley. The outlook is that new moneyed class from the integrated Madhesh regions would move into inner corridors of Madhesh, making investments in land for settlements and commercial farming. The village economy of Madhesh will slowly wither and so will its distinctive look as Indian villages. In a generation or two, they would become parts of an integrated Nepal but with ethnic Pahade dominance of its culture and economy.
The outlook then is that existing Madhesh will die out and be replaced by a new Madhesh which, however, will be owned and operated by new Madheshis, immigrants from the hills and their descendants. This development will in part be natural reflecting global patterns but in no small way this also will be an outcome of official policy focused on spreading Pahade dominance of the country's economy and politics. The inward looking-culture of Madhesh, social divisions, and stubborn resistance to change will prove an unequal match to face up to powerful forces of integration, albeit carried out in terms of the dominant ruling class.
Abstaining from the value-judgment about fairness and justice, it looks as though this new face of Madhesh will help unite the country—politically as well as ethnically—and lay the foundation for a homogenous culture and modernizing economy, in a more effective way than is possible with ongoing conflicts and clashes that, for most parts, originate in the country's north-south divide and governing elite's resolve to nourish ethnic domination by keeping Madhesh isolated and backward. If the divisiveness is ended by unity and integration—in whatever manner it gets achieved—this still can be considered a preferred route to nation-building.
KP Oli is perhaps unaware of the long-term consequences of his stance on changing of Nepali geography, but it may be that the country will naturally move in the direction of his vision for Nepal.
sshah1983@hotmail.com
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