Puja Sen

Life for Rohingya Refugees in Nepal Is Better Than in India and Bangladesh, but Only Marginally

The lives of Rohingya Muslim may be much better in Nepal in comparison to the other countries but should this really be question of relative freedoms?

It isn’t enough to be safe from physical violence and state persecution. The Rohingya must be given the right to live and work, no matter where they are.

Rohingya Muslim children who live in a refugee camp in the outskirts of Kathmandu in Nepal. Credit: Puja Sen

On September 28, 2012, three Rohingya Muslim families beat a perilous path, crossing three country borders in South Asia, to reach Nepal. Jafar Alam, Amir Hussain and Abu Takir and their wives and children, all from border villages north of Maungdaw in Myanmar’s Rakhine state, were the first from the Rohingya community to seek refuge in Kathmandu.

Meanwhile, the same year, in India, right wing politicians were stoking up fear against the Bangali migrant in Assam; Pakistan was planning to revoke the refugee status of all Afghans living within its borders; and Bangladesh had decided to shut its borders to fleeing Myanmarese refugees following a fresh spate of violence in the Rakhine state. International attention at the time was riveted on the Syrian refugees. All the host countries’ – both in Europe and South Asia – made arguments about the threat to law and order, security and disruption to local culture to justify barring or limiting entry to terrified populations fleeing persecution, war and terror.

Rohingya refugees have been called one of “the most persecuted minority in the world” by the UN and while a consensus is finally being developed around the fact that there is genocide taking place in Myanmar, neighbouring state governments seem more concerned with amplifying what ‘terrorist’ threat these desperate men and women might pose. Rohingyas are not listed in the 135 ethnicities recognised by the Myanmarese government and are therefore, in effect, stateless – without voting rights, without proper access to education and healthcare, or the right to property. Even as international media and foreign observers have been denied full access to the camps in Myanmar, over the past five years, reports and videos of violence, rape, torture and villages being razed to the ground by state forces have been consistent. After weeks of growing international pressure, state counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi – championed as a crusader for democratic freedom in the past decades – finally broke her silence with lies, half truths and equivocation. She did not use the term “Rohingya” to refer to the Muslim minority, claimed “all people in the Rakhine state had access to education and healthcare services without discrimination” and that the Myanmar government had done nothing to “apportion blame”.

Rohingya refugee camps at Kapan, on the outskirts of Kathmandu. Credit: Puja Sen

On August 25, 2017, the Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army, a Rohingya insurgent group formed five years ago, carried out concerted attacks against government troops, which prompted brutal state reprisal resulting in clashes that left 400 dead and an estimated 160,000 Rohingyas at Bangladesh’s door. The Amnesty International Crisis Response Director Tirana Hassan, based on new evidence gathered by the organisation through satellite imagery, has said unequivocally: “Make no mistake, this is ethnic cleansing”.

For Alam, his immediate experience of Nepal in 2012 turned out to be many degrees less harsh than what he and his family faced in Bangladesh and India. When I met him and other members of the community in their makeshift tin-roofed camp in Kapan, on the outskirts of Kathmandu in March this year, they spoke of how the threat to life, harassment by police and state officials and a culture of fear and xenophobia, seemed non existent in comparison to the other countries. “It is actually possible for me to go to a traffic police here and ask for directions if I am lost. Because no one asks you where you are from, no one bothers you. I could never even think of doing this elsewhere. I would be questioned in my own country and was fearful to do so in India and Bangladesh,” said Alam. His brother Rohit Alam, who reached Kathmandu a year later, in 2013, said, “freedom here is greater than in America.”

The life of a refugee in Kathmandu however, is debilitating in many different ways. Rohit, while extolling the country’s freedoms, in the same breath says, “par Nepal mein humein na jeene de rahe hai na marne de rahe hai (They are not letting us live or die in Nepal).” This is also a sentiment echoed by various Pakistani Ahmadiyya refugees I spoke to, many of whom had to escape direct violence and active persecution by the state and militants as well. Their lives in Nepal over the last five years however, has come to a stand still – a much more sobering sort of violence, but violence nevertheless.

Gazala Rauf, an Ahmaddiya whose family was repeatedly threatened and targeted in Pakistan before she escaped to Nepal with her husband and two children, said, “In Pakistan, there are many refugees. But I never knew what it meant to be one and didn’t bother finding out then. And now I wouldn’t wish that state upon anyone.” Her husband draws a parallel with the Rohingyas: “Our state is also like the Burmese Muslims – the government and security force is not on our side.”

Also read: Rohingya Exodus the Fastest, Most Concentrated Refugee Movement in Asia Since 1971

Nepal, like Bangladesh and India, is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee convention, nor is it party to the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which would disallow countries from repatriating refugees if the conditions of the home country were still dire. The only refugees the Nepali state recognises are the Tibetan and Bhutanese. There are however nearly 500 ‘urban refugees’ from the subcontinent residing in Nepal. For each day they stay on in Nepal, beyond their tourist visa limit, they accrue a daily fine of $6. For a single person, in four or five years this could be ratcheted up to the hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the event of resettlement to a third country, they can only leave Nepal once they pay this fine. Further, refugees are not allowed to get formal employment of any kind, thus ruling out any possibility of earning a livelihood. Whatever work they can do has to be irregular, informal and under the radar. So they do not earn the minimum daily wage and are hired at rates significantly lower than the Nepali worker.

Husein says: “I know finding work in Nepal is hard. So many Nepali people are leaving to work in Malaysia, Qatar. But still, the government or the UN must find some way to give us work too. Even if we are not citizens. Or I want to return my refugee letter to the UN, because it is of no use to me.”

Jannatula (Jafar Alam’s wife) and their son. Credit: Puja Sen

The refugees have no direct contact with the state and because the UNHCR is the mediating force between the two, it is the only entity helpless refugees can direct their frustration towards. Without any workable legal framework, refugees in Nepal find themselves in a curious bind. The state’s looking away allows them a certain degree of freedom from bureaucratic harassment and the threat of deportation, but it also paralyses any real possibility of a fully functioning life. “We feel like we are in jail,” says Rauf. Without any money to travel by bus, to explore the city, or even go outside it, Rizwana Tabassum, another Pakistani Ahmaddiya living in Nepal for four years, said, “I’ve heard Nepal is a beautiful country. But we haven’t seen it, we are not tourists”. There is nothing to do but wait for something to shift. And if that were not bad enough, waiting comes at the daily cost of six dollars.

The recent August attacks and widespread global news about Rohingyas has brought Kathmandu’s media attention to the miniscule Rohingya presence in the country. And not all of it has been welcoming. Since the beginning of September, journalists and reporters have been streaming in to their camp sites unannounced. Due to this, for the first time, the surrounding neighbourhood has started asking questions. “In the five years that we have lived here, the police has never come to our homes. Suddenly now they have been coming to check, asking who we are,” Alam told me on September 14.

The Rohingya are particularly upset with AP1, a conservative Nepali TV channel, which, after taking a few interviews, has been misrepresenting their stories, providing a sensationalised narrative by citing uncorroborated and false figures on the apparent increased influx of Rohingya Muslims. The footage mentions Kiren Rijju’s resolve to deport 40,000 Rohingya living in India, drumming up the fear that these 40,000 may then attempt to come into Nepal. Sallaudin Khan, a Rohingya who came to Nepal last year after he lost many of his family members in October, says “what if they deport us from here too? Muslims are in the minority here as well. Where will we go?”

Also read: In Myanmar, India Has Got the Diplomatic Plot All Wrong

At present there are 147 registered Rohingya Muslims refugees in Nepal, with 100 more in the process of getting documentation. And none of them arrived after August. On September 14, UNHCR Nepal released a statement stating “To date, UNHCR has not detected a surge in the number of Rohingya refugees arriving to Nepal due to the [recent] violence which broke out in Rakhine state… and does not forsee an influx of Rohingya refugees via Bangladesh and India.”

Either reviled or pitied in the dominant narrative, the lives of Rohingya Muslim might seem much better in Nepal in comparison to India and Bangladesh. And perhaps in many ways it is. But sometimes these stories make us forget that this shouldn’t be a question of relative freedoms at all. It is not just enough to be safe from physical violence and state persecution. Refugees must be accorded their full humanity and with that, the right to work, to live, no matter where or who they are.

Puja Sen is a Kathmandu-based journalist.

Second Phase of Local Elections Finds Nepal Severely Divided

Some Madhesis continue to demand a constitutional amendment before participating in the polls, but in much of the rest of the country, there appears to be little solidarity with their cause.

A CPN-UML protest in Nepal. Credit: Puja Sen

Kathmandu: Once again, Nepal’s Terai region is simmering with protests. The recently formed Rastriya Janata Party Nepal (RJPN), a coalition of six Madhesi parties, has been leading protests in the southern plains of the country since the national government announced that the second phase of local elections will be conducted on June 28.

The first phase of elections took place successfully in three of the newly delineated provinces on May 14 – marking the first time in 20 years that the country has held local elections. The decision to split the elections into two phases was significant. It was based on the understanding that before the later phase, the current coalition government would honour the constitutional amendments that the Madhesis have been demanding. Now the government has announced a third phase in which elections will be held for the plains-only Province 2, seemingly as a concession to RJPN.

The constitution itself has been deeply contested. Promulgated shortly after an earthquake devastated Nepal in 2015, the constitution was met with immediate protests in Terai. About 60 people, most of them civilians, lost their lives in the police crackdown that followed. The Kathmandu media at the time did little to accurately reflect the situation in the plains, choosing instead to put greater focus on the India-assisted economic blockade and its effects in the capital. This cavalier attitude was noted in the Human Rights Watch report titled ‘Like We Are Not Nepali‘, which documented the months of agitation that took place in the plains, noting that these events received scant coverage in the rest of the country.

Key to understanding the Kathmandu-Terai conflict is the question of federalism. How should a new democratic republic devolve power? How should it carve new states? Madhesi and other indigenous actors feel that the 2015 constitution reneged on promises made before, that is after the Comprehensive Peace Accord and a Madhes andolan fought to include the word ‘federal’ in the interim constitution. These were promises of federalism based on ethnicity, proportional representation and more egalitarian citizenship laws. To hold local elections without fulfilling these promises is now being seen as a move to entrench a constitution that is not acceptable to many.

Indeed, people in the Terai speak of the 2015 agitation with a mix of pride and bitterness. Pride for forging a civil rights movement, and bitterness because all of it – the lives lost, the hardships suffered – might have been for nothing. And yet these questions of nationality and belonging that evoke such heightened feelings in the Terai are being received very differently in other parts of the country. Some of this difference is a reflection of Nepal’s great diversity – of geographic terrain, unequal access to resources and the graded quality of citizenship across the country. What kind of democratic aspirations do the people of Nepal have? Why are they at loggerheads? And what is at stake here?

In the first weeks of April, the town of Musikot Khalanga in the mountainous Rukum district of mid-western Nepal was buzzing with a different kind of energy. Preparations for the local elections were on in full swing. Nearly 800 young men and women from neighbouring villages were being trained by the local police in the empty open-air courtyards of village schools. These trainees were to assist in the upcoming electoral activities. The excitement in the streets and homes was palpable.

The energy in Rukum is a testament to how well this region is integrated within the electoral system. This notwithstanding its geographical distance from the capital – 280 kilometers that take at least two days to cover. It may not be obvious today, but it was in the remote regions of Rukum that the Maoist insurgency began. The insurgency spurred a ten-year war that eventually overthrew the monarchy. Even as scars of the war are fresh in living memory, most people in Rukum feel its promises will be realised with the local elections.

Local police conducting training in Rukum district. Credit: Puja Sen

When I met Bimal Kumar Jha, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) (CPN-UML) president of the district committee of Rukum, at the Asian hotel in Musikot, he discussed the challenges facing parties such as his own and Nepali Congress. He argued that the crucial difficulty in this region was “how to create a reasonable opposition to the Maoists,” which is seen as their natural constituency.

When asked about the constitutional crises in the southern region of the country, he seemed sure the juggernaut of local elections would make Madhesi leaders fall in line: “This constitution is not for particular parties or for particular people but for everyone. And if they refuse to join the process, somebody else will fill the vacuum.” Evidently in Rukum, the anxieties of the Madhesi people seem even more remote than in Kathmandu. There appears to be no ambivalence regarding the constitution, and thus perhaps for that reason, little solidarity with the south.

A further six hours from Musikot, at the Jhumlawang village headquarters, the terrain gets rougher and harder to negotiate. The villages of this area have only one health post and a couple of schools. But although development is slow paced and requires painstaking coordination from Kathmandu, the people do not experience any pressure to prove they are really Nepali. They are focused on and energised by the prospect of seizing administrative control of local affairs. One hour away at Sima village, the story is much the same.

On April 15, the Maoist Centre party members gathered at 11 am to discuss campaign strategies and to file their nominations. But the meeting didn’t start until 3 pm as one of the candidates they wished to nominate, Dilman Roka from Kyangsi village, was running three hours late. This is not unusual given the distance people have to travel by foot and the volume of daily responsibilities in these mountains. As the party members waited, there was a vigorous discussion about campaigning efforts, punctuated by anxious remarks about how time was running out. This was in mid-April, at a time when the government was yet to split the elections in two phases. As of today, Province 5 is yet to go to vote.

Even as the questions that define politics in Rukum appear removed from those in Terai, there are noteworthy connections. On November 30, the recently installed Nepali Congress-Maoist Centre cabinet had proposed an amendment that, had it gone through, would have seen the hilly regions of Province 5 be parceled out and amassed to the adjacent Province 4, thus creating another purely plains state out of Province 5.

Both the opposition CPN-UML and various Madhesi groups rejected this outright. The CPN-UML, in particular, led agitated protests in Kathmandu all through December, making it a plank to push their brand of hyper nationalism. During these protests, the CPN-UML aggressively upheld the ‘sanctity’ of the 2015 constitution, attempting to naturalise the document and accord it a consensus it had not – and has not – yet achieved. At one point, agitators prostrated themselves before the current map of Nepal with its seven provinces intact. At a protest in the heart of Kathmandu, I met Vijay Paudel, polit bureau member of the CPN-UML. Paudel told me, “We want himal, pahad and terai to be present in every state. Our bottom line is that they should not be separated. This is being suggested by New Delhi to keep us divided.” The CPN-UML won an overwhelming number of seats in the recent local elections in Kathmandu, including the mayorship, indicating perhaps that this populist brand of nationalism has found success.

Meanwhile, in the Terai towns of Birgunj, Rajbiraj and Janakpur, tire burning, lathi marches and sporadic violence began to escalate once it became clear that the Centre was not likely to amend the constitution before the second phase. In order to prevent obstruction, many RJPN leaders have now been arrested.

When I was in Birgunj earlier this month, people told me they had no objection to local elections per se. They were eager to participate, but the issue of the constitutional amendment remained paramount. Brijeswor Prasad Choudhury, a social worker and retail shop owner, said, “Sometimes we don’t feel like we are Nepali. Is there something wrong in being Madhesi?”

Parties across the board in Madhesh find themselves in a peculiar position where they have to simultaneously jockey for political power, while continuing to dissent parts of the present constitution. The latest face of this contradiction appears to be Upendra Yadav, president of the Federal Socialist Forum Nepal (FSFN). In a surprising volte-face, Yadav, considered to be the architect of the 2007 Madhesh movement, decided to both contest polls in the first phase and affirm his party’s participation in the second. This move broke FSFN’s alliance with other protesting Madhesi parties. It also broke another Madhesi coalition – Sanghiya Gathbandhan that was at the forefront of the 2015 agitations – leaving the RJPN coalition as the only political coalition that is demanding constitutional amendment before elections.

Surendra Kurmi, vice president of the RJPN in Parsa district, tells me why his party continues to ask for amendments first and elections later. “People remain dissatisfied with the constitution. On that front, nothing has changed since 2015 when the young and old, Muslims and Tharus, all came out in lakhs to protest. Now the only difference is Madhesh people are fatigued”. Omprakash Sarraf, also a member of the RJPN, concurs with Kurmi. Even on a pragmatic level, he says, it makes little sense to go into local elections when it appears that the game is rigged: “With our participation at this stage, not only will the issue be considered over, but we would not even get votes.”

Nepalese Madhesi protestors in Birgunj. Credit: Puja Sen

With the acquiescence of leaders such as Yadav, those who continue to resist local elections without the amendments have been accused of holding the democratic process hostage. Bhagyanath Gupta, a firebrand Madhesi activist, has little patience for this argument: “And what kind of democracy is this right now? What kind of constitution is there in the world where the central government decides the date of the election, and not the election commission? That two men decide to make themselves prime minister for nine months each? This is upside down logic. If there is a danger to democracy, it is not coming from people who are asking for greater inclusion.”

Indeed, the high politics of Kathmandu’s Singha Durbar is the force field against which the Madhesi demands are straining. In July 2016, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ of the Maoist party (CPN- Maoist Centre) and Sher Bahadur Deuba of the Nepali Congress struck an agreement that ousted CPN-UML’s K.P. Oli from the premiership. In this ‘gentleman’s agreement’, Prachanda became prime minister for nine months with the support of the Nepali Congress. Honouring his end of the bargain, Prachanda relinquished control of the office to Deuba on June 7 after overseeing the first phase of the elections. Deuba is now the presiding prime minister, the third time in his political career, responsible for overseeing the next phase of election.

A section of the local leadership in Terai that wants to be part of national and local political processes finds itself dealing with an existential crisis. The Madhesi cause is certainly facing fragmentation as national pressure mounts on the RJPN to facilitate, and not obstruct, the elections. Monica Singh, a prominent member of the Baburam Bhattarai-led Naya Shakti Party, will not boycott the elections but does say, “Even if you cant see it on the street these days in the form of protests, every person is in agitation. If we go into elections without constitution amendment, we will certainly be deprived of development. How can we answer the families of martyrs who died in 2015. Our participation will be a compulsion, and will be done without excitement, as if under a shadow.”

There are others still in Madhes who believe that elections, whatever their circumstances, is the way for marginalised groups in Madhes to realise their powers. Karima Begum of the Sanghiya Samajwadi Forum is a former state minister for agriculture. She says: “No one works for the poor. We have had to fight very hard to be taken seriously. We have so far had to fight empty handed. We do not have power in the form of governance and administration. We need power in whatever form.”

Nowhere in the world would a process as formative and foundational in the life of a nation-state as the adoption of a constitution be easy. However, Nepal, with its diverse polity, deep inequalities and successive political configurations – from a partyless panchayat system to a constitutional monarchy to the republic that it is now – is a particularly tough setting for consensus building. And yet, progressive and transformative social and political change has for decades been brought forth by strong people’s movements here.

Nepal has to decide what its hard won democracy will mean for its citizens. Will its democratic experience be enacted simply as a set of formal rules, driven by dry proceduralism? Or will it continue to evolve a dynamic and inclusive system, allowing the constitution to become a living document whose guiding spirit is social justice? How this is answered may determine what kind of social fabric the country will be able to foster for its people, from Himal to Terai.

Puja Sen is a Kathmandu-based journalist.

What Are Nepal’s Madhesis Fighting For?

The series of protests in Nepal’s southern plains can be traced back to the long fight for federalism, anger against state violence and the people’s struggle for fair representation.

A board announcing the martyrdom of Sohan Sah Kelwar. Source: Puja Sen

Birgunj (Nepal): A board hangs outside a tea shack in Pani Tanki, Birgunj, a city in central-southern Nepal bordering Bihar, announcing the martyrdom of Sohan Sah Kelwar. Inside, the recently widowed 21-year-old Binita Devi has doubled her effort to keep the bhojanalaya running, the sole source of income for her family since Kelwar’s death. Her husband would occasionally help run the kitchen, but he was one among the large number of men in Birgunj absorbed in the city’s informal economy, doing various odd jobs to make a living to supplement a meagre income. He would bring consumable goods across the open border from Raxaul to sell it to local kirana stores inside Birgunj.

Devi had been wary of her husband leaving the house on September 1, 2015. The day before, 21-year-old Dilip Chaurasiya was shot in the back by the police when he went to Radhemai Chowk to buy vegetables with his friends. The sixth killing within a span of two weeks in late August, Chaurasiya’s death immediately accelerated the Madhesi agitations in the Terai, the southern plains of Nepal bordering India. Devi recalls how she tried to dissuade her husband from joining the protests, fearful now that there had been so many deaths. But Kelwar was adamant. Later that day, the police would shoot him in the left eye when he peeked out from behind Hotel Bawa, where nearly 4,000 people from Musharwah village had come to join the protests and a standoff with the police had ensued. To Devi’s objections, he had said, “Ghar kaise baith sakte hain, jab desh ki ladai hai? (How can I sit at home, when the fight is for our country?)”

What was this fight and what exactly where they fighting for?

Following the April 25 earthquake that killed near 9,000, major parties in Nepal fast tracked a constitution that reneged on key promises made in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2006 that had put to an end a decade-long civil war. The constitution was to signal a new social contract for the young republic, one that honoured the lessons and commitments arrived at following the 2006 people’s movement that overthrew the monarchy and ensured a ‘safe landing’ for the Maoists to come overground and join parliamentary politics. As a part of that agreement, all the involved parties, even when they didn’t directly refer to federalism, made an overarching commitment to end the “unitary centralised” state structure of political governance in Nepal. A chief consequence of that centralised monopoly of power and resources has been the collective dispossession of a people based on class, caste and ethnicity – a history that had been the vector on which various revolutionary mobilisations had taken place.

Historically, it has been the Bahun, Chettri and Newari groups in Kathmandu who have held political power and cultural sway over the national narrative of Nepal. Traditional associations of the Nepali-speaking hill Brahmin as representative of a Nepali national – at the cost of half the country’s diverse population who live in the Terai-Madhes, speak various languages such as Hindi, Maithili, Urdu and Bhojpuri, and have deep cultural continuities with Bihar and Uttar Pradesh – were challenged in the new documents, forging the way ahead for a plural, progressive and inclusive polity.

Source: Puja Sen

The series of protests that Nepal’s southern plains saw last year can be traced back to how the promise for more inclusion had been hard-won in the first place. In 2007, when the interim constitution of Nepal was promulgated, Upendra Yadav, then the leader of Madesh-centred activist group Madhesi Jana Adhikar Forum, burned a copy of the document at the Maitighar Mandala, an area close to the government complex in Kathmandu. This symbolic protest by the soon-to-be prominent Madeshi leader sparked the biggest Madhesi movement the country had yet seen. Their demands: the inclusion of the word ‘federalism’ as an abiding promise towards state restructuring that would take into account ethnic identity, proportional representation for Madhesis and increased representation for electoral seats in the . And indeed, the inclusion of the word was the first amendment made to the interim constitution, guaranteeing Nepal a federal structure. Federalism had, by then, begun to be articulated as an instrument that would not only devolve power to the future states, but also would correct the course of history in which Madhesi and indigenous janjati groups were left out of power sharing and remained structurally marginalised.

On the day Sohan Sah Kelwar was shot, Dharma Raj Singh was leading a contingent of nearly 5,000 protestors from Maniriyari village to agitate against the killing of Dilip Chaurasiya. This was despite a curfew being imposed in Birgunj. As they drew near the Ramraj bridge, the police fired at the crowd, injuring a protestor in the leg. Dharma Raj Singh carried the injured protestor, but minutes later a bullet bore through his head, exiting from the left side to injure the neck of another protestor.

Dharma Raj’s brother Sikender Singh was at Ghanta Ghar while this was happening. When he was finally able to reach his brother, Dharma Raj Singh was dead. Sikender told me, “Before this no one even knew my brother. He used to stay at home, he never went anywhere. Now that he is a martyr, everyone knows him.” In 2007, it was the killing of 16-year-old Ramesh Mahato, who was protesting the arrest of Upendra Yadav for burning the interim constitution, which had escalated the movement to a higher pitch and intensity. Sikender spoke similarly of how the growing number of deaths was further spiking anger in the villages. He says, “We won’t back down, we will fight for our rights as long as it takes”

It was in these circumstances that on September 20, 2015 the new constitution was promulgated: with the Terai under curfew, with violent clashes between the protestors and the police, with over 35 civilian and nine police deaths. Following the passage of the constitution, a six month long blockade ensued that affected the country’s economic and social life all the way to Kathmandu and polarised its polity. Famously, the mood in Kathmandu has tended to be at odds with the anger and discontent in the plains. While a majority of residents in the capital saw the blockade as unwanted Indian interference in the sovereign decisions of the nation-state, Nepalis in the Terai carry a profound sense of ownership over the movement.

“But we are not Indian, no? The people, numbering in the lakhs, who turned up day after day were Nepalis, weren’t they?” asks Nizammudin Samani, district president of the Nepal Sadbhavna Party. Samani was responding to a particularly unsavoury strain of Nepali nationalism that is suspicious of Madhesi demands and denounces their political activism as actions engineered by the Indian state. Chandra Kishore Jha, a journalist based in Birgunj, is clear that if the relationship between India and Nepal needs to be understood in any adequate way, one has to account for the ‘roti-beti’ relationship between the Terai towns and UP and Bihar. He draws a distinction between Kathmandu-New Delhi tensions, that are often the product of high politics, and border-town relationships that naturally exist among the people of the two neighbouring countries.

The blockade ended on February 5, 2016, and, seemingly, a degree of stability was restored. According to Pradeep Yadav, district president of the Federal Socialist Forum in Parsa, a crucial thing the andolan achieved was to map Madhes onto the international imagination, to see Nepal as a country beyond Kathmandu and Himalayan peaks. Still, he says, the Terai remains a tinderbox. “Hum log sukha hua lakdi jaise hein. Phoonk denge aur phir se andolan khada ho jaega (We are like dried up sticks. If set fire to, it can start another revolution).” He fears, however, that a future movement – if the demands of the Madhesi and Tharu (an indigenous group in Terai) communities continue to be ignored – may turn violent, if outside the control of the party leaders.

Some like Krishna Kumar Singh, central president of the Terai-Madhes Youth Front, the youth wing of the Terai Madhesh Democratic Party feel that one of the setbacks for the movement was that it did not bring up any younger, recognisable leaders. The representatives of the movement continue be the older cadre, who shot to prominence during the 2007 protests. Many Madhesi leaders are viewed with suspicion once they join politics at the centre. Bhagyanath Gupta, a Madhesi activist, expresses a deep distrust towards the representatives of the movement in the political parties, especially those who join national politics. He argues they become less connected to the people and the fight for human rights, and more beholden to the promise of gaining power at the Singhadurbar. “Change can only come from revolution on the street now.”

At any given time, according to Jha, there is a triangulation between the Madhesi agenda, the people and the parties. Although discordant on occasion, the six month Terai protests saw an effective alignment between all three factors. As Omprakash Sarraf told me, “The biggest weapon of the andolan was the issue itself.” And whatever weariness there is among the people about the often-talked-about opportunism and internecine strifes within Madhesi leadership, the anger about being treated as second-class citizens assumes a more urgent proportion.

By mid-May, in what they called a series of capital-centric protests, a loose coalition of 29 Madhesi and indigenous parties under the banner Sanghiya Gatbandhan, or federal alliance, restarted their agitation in Kathmandu. From June 7, 2016, at the Khullamanch stadium in Tundikhel (an open ground and a prominent political site in the centre of the city), the various leaders of the parties staged a relay hunger strike for 39 days. Apart from an initial and sparse spurt of interest in the Kathmandu media, the strike has found negligible print space in the main dailies. It appears as a speck on the larger mosaic of political intrigues in the capital. Not suprisingly, the turnout for this protest was negligible in both the number and intensity compared to the protests of last year.

Relay hunger strike in Kathmandu. Source: Puja Sen

I spoke to Upendra Yadav on July 15, the final day of the ansan, about how far he thought the movement had come and whether they had been able to capitalise on the momentum after the six month long agitations. “That was a mass movement that brought a political and structural change,” he said, describing the 2007 Madhesi movement. The ongoing protests, he said, are there to “implement that change”. For him, the strength and intensity of the movement has not abated, only its form has changed. “Revolutions in this country have toppled governments, reinstated democracy. The system here was concentrated at the centre, we have weakened that. And now we have a federal democracy. ”

Meanwhile, the ruling coalition has not been paying the protestors any attention, in part because it is having problems regarding its own viability. The day before the conclusion of the relay hunger strike, the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist-Centre), with the support of the opposition Nepali Congress, pulled out of the coalition in a bid to topple the current K.P. Oli-led government. A potentially new government at the centre would make it the 24th in 26 years. Amidst this instability, the Madhesi parties continue to attempt to centrestage their demands and struggle, and might have a role in deciding what parties command the new government. But in a country whose patience has long been tiring, and which may even be excused for a certain degree of cynicism, they will need to find a way to return to crucial questions about inclusivity and progressiveness – the questions that were at the centre of political transformations of the last decade.

Puja Sen is a Kathmandu-based journalist.