Banda, violence and grocery
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I asked the taxi driver, a young man in his twenties, what he thought of Nepal these days. We were bumping towards Maitidevi from Kamalpokhari in the dusty morning. I regretted not bringing a mask to cover my nose and defend my susceptible lungs from the accelerating pace of the slumming of Kathmandu. Here in the lap of the Himalayas, my nose and throat were already clogged in the freshness of the morning.
“Things are bad, sir,” the young man said.
“What’s bad?” I said, anticipating a conversation about Kathmandu’s pollution. I had heard people both here and elsewhere expressing either despair or cynicism about the state of affairs in Nepal. I had hardly heard anyone express hope and enthusiasm which I thought the prospective arrival of new Nepal deserved. I had attributed these expressions to the nostalgia of the privileged for their lost status quo. I had felt that most of the stakeholders in new Nepal were too underprivileged to verbalise their desires in public. So, I was a bit taken aback by my man’s judgment on how things had turned out in Nepal.
“Well, first of all, these bandas,” he said. “Every other day, somebody or the other calls a banda and chakkajam and we can’t work. It’s become so hard to make a living here.” But for the lack of initial funding to globalise his labour, he could have been any one of the half million of his brethren working in South East Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. He had chosen to stay back and make a living in his country’s capital, which had turned into a slum of the privileged.
“What else is bad about contemporary Nepal?” I pressed on. People like me -intellectuals, journalists, politically committed activists, human rights workers — think that new Nepal is for the common man as old Nepal was for the entitled. In old Nepal, people with lineage, clan, caste status and connections to the feudal structure had a sway over power; they had been the movers and shakers. But now, the marginalised, the downtrodden and the voiceless had finally had their turn in history making, the chance to feel empowered.
“Violence,” he said. “You never know when you get shot. You never know when you get beaten up. You never know who is a criminal and who is a gentleman. The police, too, call us obscene names.” And he used those popular foul words that I can’t use in print. “In old days,” he continued, “the police didn’t say such bad things to us. When I take out my Taxi from the garage nowadays, I don’t know if I would return home in one piece.”
From 1996 to 2002, the Maoist violence was a second-hand reality for me and others like me who lived abroad and read the news on the internet. Only when a family member or a relative got sucked in the cycle of violence did we feel the pain and helplessness. For example, when the local Maoist commander came to my house in the village and asked my mother if her son lived in “Amrika.” He then demanded an exorbitant amount as donation for the Maoist cause. She had given rice and daal and paid for chickens for the anonymous Maoist cadres who had been coming to the village. More than the amount, which she couldn’t afford because I was a struggling PhD student with a family to feed, it was the fear that temporarily paralysed the left side of her body. For two days, she lost her speech; she, who was the raconteur of the village, feared that her speech would never return. She did regain her voice and her left side came to function normally but she developed a host of other ailments.
In 2002 when I was finally able to visit Nepal after five years, she and others expressly forbade me to visit the village. But in 2003, I did go to the village and planned to stay there no matter. One day, while I was reading under a mango tree by our house, a column of young strangers walked by. The oldest (he might have been in his fifties) with a grimy white jhola hanging by his shoulders lingered.
“Who are you?” he said. And that was a new experience. I had never been asked this question before in my village. I introduced myself as the son of the Budi Aamai.
“Who are you?” now it was my turn to ask about his identity. Used to being recognised or feared readily, and perhaps not used to being asked about his identity, he didn’t seem to appreciate my lack of recognition. He lingered menacingly, hovering in his loose kurta and tight suruwal. “People call me Raju,” he said. I didn’t know this man.
“Are you the doctor who lives in Amrika?” he said, after a pause. “Yes, I live in America but I am not the kind of doctor who cures people’s ill health,” I said. “In fact, I can’t cure even cough and cold.” I could see that both “doctor” and “America” rung all kinds of treasure bell in him. I asked him how things were in the village. How would things be, he said, given the government’s atrocities on people. I asked him to sit but he said he would come back in the morning and left. The next morning, I left the village.
The violence the Maoists had unleashed at the time was an organised violence. It was aimed against the state’s monopoly on violence. It remains a debatable issue whether Maoist violence was absolutely necessary to bring about the changes we see now — the end of Shah monarchy, secularism, restructuring of the state, the idea of justice, etc. Those who subscribe to the old order think that Maoist violence was unnecessary and that these changes could have been achieved by peaceful means as well.
But even if we believe that the Maoist violence was necessary for fundamental transformation, we have to admit that the Maoist violence opened the floodgates for other types of violence in Nepali society. Besides the violence of their YCL cadres (and Prachanda seemed to endorse the environment of terror that the Maoists had unleashed for the non-Maoists), Nepal now has armed ethnic groups, especially in the Tarai, committing organised violence. It is not clear who these people are: cross-border criminals who have found legitimacy in the political cloak or armed political activists showing their criminal propensities and addiction to violence and force as means to achieving their goals. Besides these two groups, there is the unorganised sector of Bihar-style violence: criminal and underworld gangs indulging in kidnapping, contract-killing, extortion and so on. Ethnic injustice and class struggle have given a moral justification to a culture of violence.
Jamim Shah and Arun Singhaniya’s murders have now come to take on the form of Indian national security. Instead of its brilliant politicians, its million-strong Indian army, RAW, IB, India’s paramilitary forces and diplomatic core, it is India’s underworld criminal-patriots who have now taken on the task of defending India’s national interests by killing those who indulge in anti-India activities.
In such a situation, the taxi driver was sure to feel bewildered. “What else is bad,” I asked him.
“The Prices, sir,” he said. “Bandas prevent us from working; violence keeps us cowed; and even when we work, prices have gone so high, I can hardly afford to buy food and grocery to feed my family.” Right to work, security and fair prices were the basic rights the Taxi driver was asking for and for which the Maoists and others have been fighting in the name of democracy, republicanism secularism and justice. What have the political parties to say about the common man’s perception of what they have been doing?
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