Shradha Ghale is a Nepali writer and editor who lives in Kathmandu. Her writings have appeared in The Kathmandu Post, Record Nepal, Nepali Times, and the Indian online magazine The Wire. Over the past year she has been leading relief and rebuilding efforts targeted toward marginalised communities in the earthquake-affected districts of Nepal.
I first travelled to Rasuwa district some ten years ago. Just a day’s drive north of Kathmandu, yet it seemed a different world altogether. High, rocky mountains and pine forests instead of gentle foothills and valleys, mani walls, chortens and Buddhist prayer flags instead of Hindu shrines and temples; elderly people who spoke their own language and greeted me with a ‘tashi delek’ instead of a ‘namaste’; Tamang women dressed in angdung and syade and men who spoke Nepali with an accent that would invite ridicule in Kathmandu. Everything I encountered along those trails seemed new and unfamiliar, far removed from what I, with my middle class upbringing and education, had been taught to imagine as ‘Nepal’. And yet this, too, was Nepal.
In this less familiar Nepal, in the upper regions of Rasuwa district lies Gre, a village that is part of Gatlang village development committee (VDC). All 166 houses in the village were destroyed when a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck on 25 April 2015. Two people were killed. Dozens more would have died had the entire village not been gathered outside to watch an excavator pushing boulders down a ledge, a sight that offers much entertainment to people in Nepal’s hill villages.
Lakpa Tamang, a 46-year-old muleteer, was not among the lucky survivors. He was with his mule in Langtang when a quake-triggered avalanche buried him along with hundreds of others, including many foreigners trekking in the region. A few weeks after the earthquake, I met Lakpa’s wife Pasang Bhuti when I arrived in Gre as part of a volunteer relief group. Like everyone else, Pasang’s family was living under a sheet of tarpaulin and surviving on meagre rations provided by a monastery. She only spoke Tamang, her mother tongue, and barely understood Nepali. So her young neighbour, a tenth-grade student at a school in Syafru Besi, served as our interpreter. Pasang was as traumatized by her husband’s death as by the prospect of having to rear four children all by herself. The wages Lakpa earned as a muleteer were her family’s main source of income. The crop they grew on their tiny piece of land was not enough to feed them for the full year.
During our conversation, Pasang asked me at least three times if I could take her youngest child, a three-year-old girl, to Kathmandu. She wanted me to place her under the care of an organization that could provide her a good education. “Kathmandu is far, you won’t get to see your daughter often. Are you sure you want to send her away?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “I am helpless here. I cannot support her in any way.” Next I learned that Pasang’s older daughter, aged 9, had already been taken to Kathmandu by some organization. Neither Pasang nor her sons or neighbours knew its name. I was alarmed. There had been reports of child traffickers entering quake-affected villages in the guise of saviours. How could she risk sending her daughter with an organization about which she knew nothing?
“Sadly, parents here are willing to take risks,” said Dawa Norching, who had been helping us with our relief work in the village. “The last thing they want is for their children’s lives to resemble their own. They see no future for them in the village.”
To get to Gre village from Kathmandu, we first drive for nine hours on blacktopped road and stay overnight in Syafru Besi, a starting point of the Langtang trek. Next morning we drive uphill for two hours on rough road, and then walk for about an hour. In terms of physical distance, Gre is far, but not very far, from the capital. Yet you can’t but describe it as a “remote village”, a term that denotes, in my mind at least, not just the physical distance from Kathmandu but also the degree of poverty and deprivation enforced by Kathmandu. It is one of those places where a Kathmandu dweller might travel as a well-meaning tourist, admiring the beauty of rural landscape, lamenting the condition of people who live there, and turning every observation into a lesson to be shared with her kind. (As it happens, there are many “remote villages” even within and right outside the Kathmandu valley, in places like South Lalitpur, Bhaktapur and Kavre.)
Most people in Gre are subsistence farmers who grow just enough crop to make ends meet. They have to walk for 2–3 hours to reach the nearest health facility. There is one school that provides education up to eighth grade. According to Dawa, the quality of education is dismal, language being one of the main problems. The few teachers employed at the school do not speak Tamang. Teaching takes place in Nepali, a language the local children can barely grasp. As a result they have to repeat the same grade for several years. Students who complete eighth grade usually try to continue school in Syafru Besi, but eventually drop out as they cannot keep up with their peers. This leaves them with little hope and low self-esteem. “If the school was any good,” said Dawa, “maybe I wouldn’t have dropped out after seventh grade to become a driver.” He thought for a moment and added, “But maybe I would have. There was no money at home.”
Things were more or less the same in the next village, Gatlang, which has the same name as the VDC of which it is a part. All the houses had been flattened by the quake. Seven people had lost their lives. For weeks after the earthquake, no relief could reach the village as landslides had blocked the roads. Now the road was open but people had yet to receive adequate help. Some locals complained that their village had been severely neglected compared to Langtang, which had received much attention in national and international media not only because it suffered terrible devastation, but also because it happened to be a popular trekking destination. “Our people have no connections in Kathmandu or abroad,” lamented Ashok Tamang, who grew up in Gatlang. “Everyone is poor and illiterate. We have produced no role models. Can you imagine, not a single student who sat for the SLC board exam passed this year.”
The villagers chatted with us and fed us potatoes boiled in their makeshift kitchens before lining up to collect the relief supplies. We distributed cooking pots and some water supply pipes, essentials they lacked even in the best of times, and for which they would have queued up even if there had been no earthquake. Their weathered hands and faces spoke of years of unrelenting hardship and deprivation. They had suffered the impact of a catastrophe far deeper than a sudden tremor of the earth: a history of systematic exclusion and exploitation.
*
Few other communities suffered as directly at the hands of Nepal’s ruling class as the Tamang people from the villages now ravaged by the earthquake. For centuries after the creation of the modern Nepali state in 1769, the Tamang were virtually enslaved by Kathmandu’s high-caste rulers. In their valuable study of the Tamang of central Nepal, David Holmberg and Kathryn March have shown how the Tamang people in present-day Rasuwa, Nuwakot and Dhading – some of the districts worst affected by the quake – were compelled to work as labourers for the ruling elite during the Rana regime (1846–1950). The Tamang, classified as “enslaveable alcohol drinkers” in the 1854 civil code, had to collect fodder for royal herding operations; walk for several days to carry dairy products to Kathmandu; work at royal fruit plantations around Trishuli; grind charcoal at the gunpowder factory in Nuwakot; produce paper for the administration; and serve as porters for the military and civil administrations as and when needed. Not only were these workers unpaid, they even had to carry their own rations. Meanwhile, they were forbidden from collecting firewood for themselves or grazing their cattle on land controlled by the royal herding operation. If a Tamang family’s cow strayed into the royal pasture, the high-caste authorities would beat the owner, not the ‘sacred’ cow.
Further, high-caste people who migrated into the Tamang heartland used deceit and unscrupulous lending practices to dispossess the indigenous Tamang of fertile fields. As Holmberg and March write, “Almost all Tamang have direct experience – if not in their own lives in the lives of their kin – of the appropriation of land through the manipulation of writing related to land.”1 The descendants of Ranas continue to own large tracts of land in Rasuwa. Locals still remember the late Sachit Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana, former army chief and advisor to the king, as the wealthy owner of the apple orchards in Gatlang. Another Rana family is said to own vast stretches of land in Dandagaun.
The end of Rana rule did not mean an end to the oppression of the Tamang. Acts of resistance by the Tamang were met with violent state repression. In 1959, when the Tamang of the aforementioned areas rebelled against exploitative Brahmin moneylenders in their villages, King Mahendra’s troops swept into the area to reassert order. Many were arrested and beaten; others were summarily executed.2 Over the past half century, Nepal has witnessed three major waves of democracy, including an armed communist movement, but the situation of the Tamang has changed little.
The Tamang community of Yarsa was among those exploited and forced into poverty. Yarsa VDC, which lies on the eastern side of the Trishuli River, was an area in which the Ranas ran their herding operation. Until a few years ago, Yarsa was inaccessible by road. A rough gravel road now connects the VDC to the highway, but due to lack of public transport, locals still have to trek long distances to get to the nearest health facility or market. Throughout the bumpy four-hour ride from Syaubari through Yarsa, we did not come across a single vehicle; only locals bent double under the loads on their backs. The earthquake and aftershocks had left parts of Yarsa extremely vulnerable to landslides. The entire community of Ghormu village had been displaced. Many cracked and unstable hillsides were likely come down in the monsoon rain. Villagers who came to collect relief supplies had to walk, sometimes for up to five hours, past such dangerous hillsides.
Denied basic rights and opportunities in their country, most young people of Yarsa have no choice but to seek employment abroad. A large number of young women from Yarsa are working as domestic help in Kuwait and Lebanon. Men mostly work as labour migrants in Malaysia.
“The factory job was tough, but at least I was earning something,” said Gore Ghale, a father of four small children. After years of trying his luck, Gore finally found a job last year in an iron factory in Malaysia. He took a loan at thirty-six percent interest from a neighbour to bear the cost of travel, recruitment agency fees and initial expenses at his destination. But a month after he started working, he sustained a serious head injury on the job and had to be hospitalized for three weeks. After a long recovery process, Gore finally resumed work and was beginning to hope for a better life for his family when he heard about the earthquake. He rushed back home in a state of panic and anxiety. All the houses in the village including his had been destroyed. Nine people had lost their lives, including his wife, who was buried by a quake-triggered landslide when she was collecting firewood in the forest. Dazed and distraught, Gore was now living under a tarpaulin sheet with his children. If he returned to Malaysia, there would be no one to look after his children; his youngest was only three years old. If he stayed back, he would neither be able to support them nor pay off his loans. “If only,” he said, hesitant to make a direct request, “if only someone would help send my kids to a good school.”
*
Ashok Tamang, who had been helping us with relief work, was the most educated member of his community in Gatlang. He was, in his own words, “I.A.-failed, meaning, he passed the tenth grade board exam but could not make it through twelfth grade. He was among those who had been working round the clock to bring relief into his home area – coordinating with relief organizations and groups, preparing lists of households, assessing people’s needs, mediating potential conflicts, orienting Kathmandu visitors with local social and political dynamics, and ensuring that relief is distributed in an organized and equitable manner. But he did not have a stable source of income. He had tried his luck at various organizations that ran development projects in Rasuwa, but to no avail. He lived in the village, spoke the local language, knew his people and was deeply committed to improving their lives, but was not “qualified” enough to work in organizations that boasted of their “bottom-up” approach. If he got very lucky, he would be hired as a local “social mobilizer” for a few months. A stable, full-time job perennially remained a distant goal.
In every affected village I visited, I met young people like Ashok who had played an indispensable role in ensuring their communities’ survival in the aftermath of the earthquake. Youth who had been working in extremely challenging conditions, despite personal losses, amid immense physical risks, without any material reward. They have intimate knowledge of their place and people and tremendous potential to bring change in their villages. But they have little formal education, cannot speak English, and have no access to networks of power in Kathmandu. This leaves them with very few avenues of personal development. Those fortunate enough to get an NGO job are usually at the bottom of the aid system’s hierarchy, a mere “local” with no authority to shape the organization’s programmes and policies.
One way such youth might hope to expand their network and gain access to power is by becoming a member of a political party. Most of the local volunteers I met on the ground were members of one of the major political parties. We realized only later that the young people who had been helping us reach the most vulnerable populations of Rasuwa were all members of the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). They had kept silent about their affiliation for two reasons. First, most of them had thrown themselves into rescue and relief work out of genuine concern for their community, not out of a desire to raise their party’s profile. Second, they knew we belonged to the class of people who consider themselves to be above narrow political interests, and so they assumed we would be squeamish about associating with the rank-and-file members of a political party.
The “locals” are understandably wary of displeasing visitors from Kathmandu. Even the most naïve among us are in a position to question, correct, interrogate or repudiate them according to our assumptions. Stressing the importance of localised radicalism, historian David Ludden has observed how every nation has an imperial history and retains “imperial inequalities” between its elites at the centre and people at the periphery.3 Such inequalities become evident even during a casual interaction between, say, a Kathmandu-based development professional and “field staff”. Those from the “centre” will assess, evaluate and decide while the latter will listen, oblige, call them “sir” or “madam”, and earn ten times less. These inequalities, so entrenched in Nepal’s development aid world, were reenacted during relief work in the quake-affected villages. While Kathmandu dwellers saw their relief trips as noble and intrepid missions to disaster zones, for most people in the affected villages, coming to others’ aid was almost like reflex action. In the face of such catastrophe, helping their community was the only thing to do. No photos of them handing out bags of rice and tarpaulin sheets on social media, no fulsome praise for being disaster heroes. An implicit assumption was that youth like Ashok were just doing their duty while youth from Kathmandu, like myself, were venturing out of our comfort zones in a spirit of magnanimity.
*
After exploring various ways to support Pasang Bhuti’s daughter, I found a safe and trusted children’s home in Kathmandu with an excellent track record. The home usually took children who had lost both parents, but this time they were willing to make an exception. On learning that Pasang’s daughter might be able to go to school in Kathmandu, several more parents sent me similar requests from the village. I could not help them. In fact, despite all my efforts, I could not even bring Pasang’s daughter to Kathmandu. The local volunteers spent weeks gathering required paperwork from Pasang’s family and the ward administration office. But just when we thought everything was ready, the District Child Welfare Board refused to issue a permit for the child to leave the village, citing cases of rampant child trafficking. Another child we had identified for admission to the orphanage was Asmita Chepang from Dhading district. Her house was completely destroyed by the quake. Her father died many years ago and her mother had left the family and married someone else. Asmita’s sole guardian was her ailing grandmother, who sold cucumber slices to passengers on the highway and was desperate to find a sponsor for her grandchild. But due to travel restrictions imposed by the government, Asmita could not leave the village.
There was no question that the government had to make every effort to prevent trafficking of vulnerable children. But were blanket restrictions an adequate solution? What would happen to those children after they were protected from the hands of traffickers? Had the government done anything to safeguard their future, or to ensure that mothers were not desperate enough to give their children away? Far from it. Four months had passed since the earthquake struck. Nearly 5000 schools in the affected districts had been completely destroyed. Amid all the noise about ‘reconstruction’, the government had not even started building temporary classrooms in many remote areas.
One example was Alampu VDC in Dolakha district, epicentre of the 7.3 magnitude earthquake that struck two weeks after April’s massive quake. Alampu’s population is almost entirely Thami, an indigenous ethnic group that has historically suffered from problems common to many indigenous communities – economic deprivation, illiteracy, cultural discrimination, appropriation of land by high-caste groups, heavy debt, and alcoholism. Men in the village mostly work as migrant labourers in Malaysia and the Gulf countries. The women are left to shoulder all the household responsibilities and the burden of debt.
The quake had destroyed all 685 houses in Alampu as well as the three public schools and the micro hydro station that supplied electricity to the village. To collect relief, villagers had to walk down to Babare, spend the night crammed together under a tarpaulin sheet, and then trek back next day along precipitous trails with loads of supplies on their backs. It was a long, perilous journey. The tremors had formed deep cracks in the hills, and in several places, survivors returning with relief had been wounded or killed in landslides. Those carrying corrugated iron sheets for roofing had sustained serious injuries when the sharp-edged sheets slid down their backs and cut their legs. On 4 July 2015, a woman who was returning with roofing sheets to build a temporary shelter fell ill on the road and died soon after reaching home. Her husband, a wageworker, has been mentally unstable since and her seven children have been left in the lurch.
Four months after the earthquake, children of Alampu still had no idea when classes would resume. The micro hydro plant lay broken and people were living in darkness. The government, which had been amassing billions of dollars from foreign donors for post-quake reconstruction, had virtually no presence in Alampu. The VDC secretary lived in the district capital Charikot and had little clue about what went on in the village. The chief district officer, a Brahmin man now replaced by another Brahmin man, was known to be irresponsible and apathetic. According to Bikesh Thami, a local of Alampu and president of Thami Youth Association of Nepal, almost all the relief that came into the village was provided by non-governmental organizations and volunteer groups. Bikesh and his friends were now hustling around in Kathmandu in search of private donors willing to help rebuild vital infrastructure: schools, toilets, the micro hydro plant and drinking water reservoir. Needless to say, rebuilding such essential public facilities should have been the government’s top priority. “But we can’t rely on this government,” said Bikesh. “I know they have collected lots of money for reconstruction, but who knows when it’ll reach the victims.”
For the poor and marginalized survivors, it is a battle even to be recognized as victims. They have little information or access to government bodies, which are dominated by high-caste men. They cannot forcefully articulate their needs in Nepali or navigate the bureaucratic maze. Many are still struggling to obtain the “earthquake victim identity card” without which they will not get relief or compensation from the government. In Bhorle VDC of Rasuwa district, at least 23 families who became homeless after the disaster had yet to be officially recognized as victims even four months after the earthquake. They had not even received the small cash grant that the government had pledged for building temporary shelters. Meanwhile two temporary residents of Rasuwa with houses in other districts had each obtained a victim identity card that entitled them to full compensation. One was section officer at the district development committee (DDC) and the other secretary of Dhaibung VDC. Similarly a technical assistant at the Bhorle VDC office was known to have arranged a victim identity card for his son-in-law who lived in Kathmandu. The identity card was issued from an area in Dhaibung where the officer’s wife was chairperson of the Ward Citizens’ Forum. What was more, his nephew was a computer operator at the DDC office. It was not a mere coincidence that the well-placed individuals in that advantageous network all belonged to the high-caste group. This in a district where more than 80 percent of the population is Tamang.
*
A large body of disaster literature has amply shown that vulnerability is closely linked to race, class and ethnic inequalities. Unsurprisingly, more than 60 percent of the earthquake victims in Nepal were from marginalized ethnic groups.4 Although obvious to anyone travelling in the affected districts, this observation was not made openly in the days following the earthquake. A different narrative had taken hold at the time. For instance, at a meeting of former bureaucrats held soon after the earthquake, one speaker stressed that Nepalis were helping their fellow citizens “out of a feeling of humanity, irrespective of caste or ethnicity”. This, he said, had discredited those who claim that our society suffers from caste and ethnic problems. The high-caste bureaucrat saw no irony in the fact that he was making that statement in a room full of former bureaucrats, all of whom belonged to his caste.
Many others would voice similar sentiments in the coming weeks. “The crisis has united us all”; “The youth have shown we are first and foremost Nepalis”; “A new civil society is in the making”; “We will rise and rebuild the nation”. There was no dearth of commentaries applauding the resilience of the Nepali people. For some time the chaos bred heady optimism among the least affected. While the relief initiatives of Kathmandu’s young volunteers were undoubtedly necessary and commendable, the self-congratulatory optimism also allowed many to preempt any questions about the deeper causes of the tragedy. The disaster was seen as entirely natural and inevitable, shorn of its social and political meaning. It was only after the initial excitement subsided that we started pointing out some fundamental features of the catastrophe. Kathmandu had not been “flattened” as some reports in the international media suggested. Districts outside the capital had suffered much more. Both in and outside Kathmandu, the hardest hit were the poor who could not afford strong houses. More women died than men. Dalits were among the worst hit in areas with mixed populations. An overwhelming majority of the victims belonged to the Tamang community.
A week after the earthquake, we raised some funds from friends and family and made our first relief trip to Sindhupalchowk, the district that suffered massive destruction and the highest number of casualties. On arriving at our destination in Badegaun VDC, we realized that the population in the village was predominantly Brahmin and Chhetri, with a few Dalits who lived in a separate settlement. All of the 165 houses in the village had been destroyed. At least 19 people were killed, mostly women (two of whom were pregnant) and children. There were parents who had lost their children, a man who had lost his wife who was almost due to give birth, and others whose elderly parents were killed. Families huddled under the open sky next to their collapsed houses. Their livestock had been buried and there was a stench of death in the air. The body of a ten-year-old Dalit girl had yet to be recovered, and her father’s hands were bruised from digging through rubble for days.
Naturally, in the face of such indiscriminate suffering, the last thing on our minds was the caste or ethnic identity of the victims. It did not occur to us that the chain of contacts that had led us to the village, as well as the locals who were coordinating the distribution were all Brahmin men. Educated and articulate men dedicated to their community; it was thanks to them that the distribution went so smoothly. No tensions arose; everyone seemed satisfied. Relieved, we were on our way back when we ran into some angry locals from a village further up. They were all Tamang. They had seen our supplies trucks and were hoping to get some of the rations. “No one has brought us anything,” they complained. “These Brahmins are clever and know how to get relief. We heard the government is sending them food supplies. If this goes on, we’ll have no option but to seize the supplies.”
After we returned to Kathmandu, we received a number of calls requesting support for Sindhupalchowk, each from a high-caste person. This was somewhat disconcerting. More than 3500 people had lost their lives in that district; nearly half of them belonged to the Tamang community. How could we ensure that our support reached the most vulnerable communities – those who lived higher up in the hills, far from the road and the gaze of media, without access to information, support networks, or connections in Kathmandu? We had to be more rigorous in our search, less willing to take things at face value.
In the following weeks, we visited several affected communities that have always been far removed from access to power and resources. Dalits of Rakathum, Ramechhap, who were hesitant to come down to the distribution point because crossing the river on a rafting boat would cost them 50 rupees each way; landless Dalits of Kafalsanghara, Nuwakot, who were already struggling for daily survival and burdened with loans taken from high-caste families when the quake destroyed their huts; Majhi families of Sukhajot, Ramechhap, whose traditional livelihood, i.e. fishing, is increasingly threatened by anti-poor conservation policies; Tamang families of Thuman and Chilime VDCs in Rasuwa, who would walk for 3–4 hours each way in the scorching sun to collect rations that would barely last them two weeks; Tamang people of Haku, Rasuwa, whose entire village was swept away by a landslide and who were now being shunted from one temporary camp to another because private landowners could only allow them on their land for so long. In short, people whose vulnerability to disaster is inextricably linked to decades of exclusion and whose path to recovery is going to be painfully slow and difficult.
*
“Relief worth millions of rupees is sitting at Kathmandu airport while our people are hungry, homeless and sick,” said Prem Tamang, a member of the constituent assembly (CA) between 2008 and 2012. “But we can’t bring those supplies to our villages unless home minister Bamdev Gautam is sufficiently appeased.” A small, soft-spoken young man with incredible drive and an unfaltering commitment to his people, Prem had been leading relief efforts in the most hard-to-reach areas of his home district Rasuwa. The government’s inept response to the disaster did not surprise him. After all, most of the authorities coordinating rescue and relief could not even understand the accent of the local people, let alone their problems.
14 out of the 18 VDCs in Rasuwa are principally inhabited by the Tamang; three have mixed populations; and in one, the population is predominantly Gurung. But the current CA member representing Rasuwa, the newly appointed chief district officer, and the outgoing one are all Brahmin men.
Things were never different. Even if a Tamang reaches a decision-making post against all odds, he has to struggle to fit in a system dominated by high-caste men. Kulman Ghising, former managing director of Chilime Hydropower Company, is one example. The 22 Megawatt Chilime hydropower project supplies electricity to the national grid and is based in Chilime VDC, Rasuwa. One of the few Tamangs to reach the top position in the company, Kulman had played a key role in ensuring that the local community had 10 percent of shares in the hydropower project. During his tenure he had also created employment opportunities for the locals and initiated socioeconomic development activities in the project areas. He was thus a well-liked and respected figure among the locals of Rasuwa. But immediately after the November 2013 election to the constituent assembly, the newly elected CA member from Rasuwa and other Brahmin political leaders are known to have lobbied the energy minister and home minister to remove Kulman from the post. He was sacked soon after, in July 2014. Locals of Rasuwa, members of the Nepal Electricity Authority’s trade union, and members of different political parties launched massive protests demanding Kulman’s reinstatement, but in vain. The government cited the end of his tenure as a reason for his dismissal. But Prem and other locals assert that he was removed to serve the vested interests of the water mafia, commission agents and powerful shareholders, who had long felt threatened by his sympathetic relationship with the indigenous locals of Rasuwa.
“Why do you think the Tamang are so poor despite living in an area so rich in natural resources?” Prem asked. “Development mostly comes to us in the form of extraction. The Chilime hydro project makes a profit of hundreds of millions of rupees each year. This year the project made a profit of 850 million rupees, but less than 3 percent of that amount was allocated for the district. The profit is made at the cost of local resources and environment. So how do you justify the local community receiving such a negligible fraction?”
Another example he cited was Langtang National Park, which was declared a protected area in the 1970s by the former royal elite. Indigenous locals within the park area have suffered enormously since the park was established, especially during the first two decades. Their daily livelihood practices – collecting forest resources, grazing and swidden agriculture – were criminalized in the name of conservation. Wild animals from the park destroyed their crops and threatened their survival but they could neither hurt the animals nor seek redress from park authorities. They were routinely harassed, arrested and fined. Despite the creation of a buffer zone in 1998, the heavily militarized park area continues to arouse resentment among locals. Forest use is still severely restricted. Local participation in park management amounts to tokenism. And the unequal power relations between the park authorities and the indigenous population remain unchanged.
Excluded and impoverished for too long, the Tamang cannot even benefit from the developments now taking place around them. For instance, the Rasuwagadhi transit route opened in 2014 to boost cross border trade between Nepal and China. Locals of Rasuwa can even obtain a special permit to travel across the Tibetan border to Kyirong bazaar. But it is outsiders who have gained the most from this opening, not the indigenous Tamang, who lack the social and economic means to start a profitable business. Many of them serve as porters for high-caste and Newar businessmen, carrying their merchandise for wages.
The development ventures in Rasuwa have thus largely failed to improve the lives of the indigenous population. Due to poverty, illiteracy and lack of access to state institutions, the Tamang cannot compete with outsiders in benefiting from these “enclave developments”, to use anthropologist Ben Campbell’s phrase. As Campbell has shown, the steady institutional growth of Dhunche, the district capital, has in many ways further weakened the economic potential of Tamang villagers, subjecting their small-scale enterprises to new regulations and criminalizing their traditional livelihood practices, such as making homebrew alcohol, cutting timber and fuelwood, and slaughtering female buffaloes.5 Further, he writes: “If any unity of reason is to be found in these diverse developments it is perhaps most evident in the multiple roles of the military at the periphery.”6 The police and army check posts along the Pasang Lhamu highway, the army base at Dhunche, army patrol squads in Langtang National Park, the army base at Rasuwagadhi – the Nepali state may be apathetic to the needs of indigenous people but it can deploy enough armed troops to make them behave.
“That is precisely why we have been demanding federalism that recognizes our identity,” said Prem. And he is not alone in expressing this demand. For the past decade, marginalized groups in Nepal have been campaigning for the establishment of a federal system that grants them greater control over governance in their home areas. While federalism may not be a panacea for the embedded structural inequalities, they argue that only a federal state structure will loosen Kathmandu’s stranglehold on the rest of the country and give the marginalized populations a chance to improve their economic, political and cultural life. If Rasuwa were part of a federal province with a degree of autonomy, the indigenous population would have much stronger chances of using the resources in their territory – land, river and forests – to develop their villages, create job opportunities and boost the local economy. Their children could get an education that respects their language and culture rather than one that instills shame and feelings of inadequacy. The Tamang could join local government bodies and get involved in making decisions that vitally affect their lives. They would not have to wait for Kathmandu’s approval even to build a short stretch of road in their village. And in times of disaster, relief and reconstruction aid could be sent directly to the affected province instead of being stuck or stolen in Kathmandu.
Sadly, there is no sign that this vision will become reality anytime soon. The ruling parties had agreed to establish a federal system back in 2007 owing to pressure created by the decade-long Maoist rebellion and various campaigns by marginalized groups. The process of drafting a new constitution began in 2008 but dragged on for years, with high-caste political leaders gradually wresting control of it. The earthquake presented a perfect opportunity for the ruling parties to assert their will over the citizens, who seemed too traumatized and vulnerable to offer much resistance. As I write this, they are trying to ram through a new constitution that will reverse even the few gains made during the last two decades. They have agreed on a political map that delineates provincial boundaries in a way that further entrenches the power of the traditional elite. Protests have erupted across the country and the government has resorted to violence, killing several people and injuring many more. In the latest incident, six policemen were killed in west Nepal when Tharu protesters demanding a federal province turned aggressive. The Tharu are among the most disadvantaged indigenous groups in Nepal. Exploited for generations as bonded labourers, they were systematically targeted for torture, killing, rape and enforced disappearance by the state during the civil war.7 Those opposed to Tharu demands are now burning Tharu homes, shops and radio station in retaliation. Any hopes that a new and just society might be built on the ruins of this historic disaster lie shattered, though it seems unlikely that the marginalized people will give up the fight.
1 David Holmberg and Kathryn March with Suryaman Tamang, “Local Production/Local Knowledge: Forced Labour from Below”, Studies in Nepali History and Society, Vol. 4, No. 1, June 1999, pp. 5–64.
2 David Holmberg. “Violence, Non-violence, Sacrifice, Rebellion, and the State”, Studies in Nepali History and Society, Vol. 11, No. 1, June 2006, pp. 35–64.
3 David Ludden, “Where is the Revolution?: Towards a Post-National Politics of Social Justice”, The Mahesh Chandra Lecture, Social Science Baha, 2008.
4 ‘The Tamang Epicentre’. Nepali Times. Issue No. 776, 10–16 July 2015.
5 Ben Campbell, “Heavy Loads of Tamang Identity” in Nationalism and Ethnicity in Nepal, eds. David N. Gellner et al. Vajra Publications, 2008, p. 220.
6 Ben Campbell. Living Between Juniper and Palm: Nature, Culture and Power in the Himalayas, Oxford University Press, p. 183.
7 “Conflict-related Disappearances in Bardiya District”, United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. December 2008.