Indigenous politics after a war and an earthquake.

(This post originally appeared in June 2015 but was lost when the server was hacked in 2015. This is a recovered version.)

For those trying to understand the deep-seated suspicion towards the ruling classes in Nepal felt by many indigenous activists in the aftermath of the earthquake, this is a expressive Facebook post in Nepali. It connects indigenous politics, the struggle of the 1996-2006 civil war, and the present sense that existing elites are using the earthquake to harvest aid funds and goods as well as solidify their position. The author is intensely disillusioned with the upper-caste Maoist leaders who, in his opinion, used the blood of young indigenous guerrillas to shore up the power of the upper-caste elites while their own children were offered a good education.

Bhawana and I drafted a rough translation below. The comments on the FB post are combative, to say the least; the second comment accuses the leaders of the indigenous parties of being drunk all the time. They’re also in Nepali. (Fancy learning Nepali?)

“In 1996, for their own sake, Pracanda and Baburam gave guns to our indigenous sons and daughters. They gave their own children paper and pencils. They gave the rest of the Bahun children various little jobs. They sent all our indigenous children to fight with bullets, with their own Nepalese brothers in the army and the police. And now, how much have we learned? Even now, they say they give us recognition and make us fight in the police and the army, but they
make the apportioning and the mechanisms to rule the own country themselves. For how long will we indigenous folks shed blood for the benefit of others? We must learn to shed blood for our own rights! What else can I write beyond this? For those who get it, it’s sandalwood; for those who don’t, their house is on shaky foundations. Victory to the Mongol peoples of Nepal! Victory to the indigenous peoples! Finally: I’m not saying another party is good—other parties, well, you and I already know how and what they are.”

The argument here compresses two decades of history. 1996 was the first year of the ten-year civil war in Nepal, which had the Maoists on one side and the Royalists on the other. The Maoists recruited widely among indigenous communities that were traditionally disenfranchised. Much to the surprise of many international observers, when the war ended and elections were held, the Maoists won a solid victory. In the post-war settlement, many of the former Maoist fighters were integrated into the army, armed police force and regular police. However, high hopes for ethnic autonomy collapsed when the Maoist-led government failed to finalise a constitution creating an ethnic federal system. The subsequent election returned a centre-right government that was opposed to ethnic federalism and the Maoist party broke into factions. Negotiations over the constitution have been repeatedly postponed, but the national crisis provoked by the 2015 earthquake gave fresh urgency to efforts to resolve the constitutional deadlock—and it has sparked even more intense political debate than usual.

From the perspective of the FB poster here, all that has really happened is a further concentration of power in the hands of the existing upper-caste elites, and a more effective exploitation of indigenous communities in Nepal through their inclusion in the state enforcement apparatus.