House of Snow

by Sir Ranulph Fiennes Ed Douglas

  But the ground was not yet ripe for ethnic identity- or language-driven politics. The big battle of the decade was for prajatantra, democracy, and the symbol of the democratic struggle was the B. P. Koirala-led NC. Structurally modelled on the Indian National Congress, the NC drew inspiration from the democratic and socialist guard of the Indian politics and gave space to leaders from diverse regions and ethnicities, including those of plains origin. Along with Kathmandu, it was the Taraibasis, the Tarai-dwellers, who were most active in the politics. The Koirala family itself was a pahadi family from Biratnagar, and the major battles against the Rana regime were fought in the Tarai towns.

  Unlike royalist or communist parties, the NC was also the most inclusive in its symbols. Its leaders had spent a long time in exile in Banaras, Patna and Calcutta and were comfortable with the culture, lifestyle and habits of the Gangetic plain and North India. This helped the people in the Nepali plains relate to NC leaders at various levels – when they saw them wear dhotis, eat paan, speak in Hindi, or use familiar idioms, the pahadi-Taraibaasi divide became secondary. That many of these leaders had been associated with the Indian freedom struggle, and with political stalwarts across the border, gave them an additional aura.

  All this meant that in the first elections of 1959, the Nepal Tarai Congress suffered a rout, and even Vedanand Jha lost his election deposit. The NC swept the polls nationwide, winning a two-thirds majority. In the Tarai, its image of a national, democratic and inclusive party, the co-option of the relatively influential upper-caste leaders of plains origin, and its appeal to the intermediate castes and the landless with a radical land-reform agenda helped. Identity and regional politics had lost out for now, both due to limited political mobilization around these issues but also because the NC had remained sensitive, at least symbolically, to the concerns of the people in the plains, it had treated them like citizens, and had won their confidence.

  But the NC’s efforts to build Nepali nationalism and the state in an inclusive, non-violent, liberal, gradual and democratic manner – which may or may not have succeeded – received a jolt almost immediately. The royalist project of aggressive nation-building, with faith in coercion, homogenization, integration and the construction of the “other”, began in full earnest. Nationalism as propagated by Mahendra kept the land united, but it divided the people, apparent in the mutinies which were to rock Nepal four decades later.

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  King Mahendra took over in a royal coup in December 1960, sacking the elected government, dissolving the Parliament, and arresting all the top party leaders.

  Mahendra’s apologists built a case for autocracy. Their argument went along familiar lines – the monarch was concerned about keeping the “territorial unity” of the country intact. Nepal was among the “least developed”countries in the world. Literacy was in the single digits; geography had been unkind, with rough terrain and inaccessible mountains; the state had little money; and the country was just not ready for the populist aspirations a Westminster parliamentary democracy would have unleashed. A democracy “suited to the soil”, akin to Ayub Khan- or Sukarno-style guided democracies in Pakistan and Indonesia, was more appropriate. An elaborate Panchayat system was designed, with layers of notionally representative bodies, culminating into a national Panchayat. But the bottom line was clear – the Palace was the source of all authority.

  For the king, the biggest challenge in sustaining a relatively autonomous, autocratic regime was India.

  The day after Mahendra’s takeover, Jawaharlal Nehru called the move a “setback to democracy” in the Lok Sabha of the Indian Parliament. Recent accounts have suggested that Nehru knew of the coup in advance but did little to prevent it, for he shared an uneasy relationship with Bishweshwor Prasad Koirala and was happy to see him go. Senior Nepali lawyer Ganesh Raj Sharma, who was a close confidante of B. P. Koirala, believes that Nehru knew that the king would dismiss the government but not that he would dissolve Parliament. This goes against the image of Nehru as a committed democrat, but the idea is plausible, for India’s approach, in dealings with Nepal at the time, was imperial in nature. This is reflected quite clearly in the letters of “advice” Nehru wrote to Matrika Koirala, a Nepali prime minister during the 1950s and BP’s elder half-brother – which have been made public now – and the actions of some of the earlier Indian ambassadors who behaved, in BP’s words, as though they had been sent to run a district, not represent a foreign country.

  But soon after the takeover, the government of India did provide a degree of support to NC dissidents who had escaped arrest and were based in India. Mahendra, his aides recall, felt that India would constantly try to weaken and topple him by using arashtra tatva, anti-national elements, which became synonymous with NC in the decades of Panchayat rule.

  Mahendra got lucky, for China and India went to war.

  As relations between Nepal’s neighbours to the north and south deteriorated, he played what has come to be known as the “China card”, subtly threatening the Indian establishment with the prospect of Nepal developing closer ties with Beijing, both politically and in terms of greater infrastructural connectivity. This would have left India vulnerable on another front. The policy of using the Himalayas as India’s security frontier – as articulated by Nehru – would be in tatters, and Nepal would no longer remain a buffer state under the Indian arc of influence. Delhi quickly realized that it had to develop a more cordial working relationship with the Palace. Even if the king did not go all the way with China, the risks of antagonizing him entirely were too high. India snapped the support it was offering to Nepali democratic activists in exile; an armed movement launched by a section of the NC, using India as its base, fizzled out; and Mahendra found enough space and time to consolidate his regime.

  But to do so, he had to deal with his biggest internal challenge, the Tarai, for two reasons. The plains were an NC stronghold, and had been the site of the struggle for democracy in the past. “Royalist nationalists” were insecure that activists for democracy, either on their own or prodded by India, could use the open border to destabilize the regime through actions in the plains. The short-lived armed movement after the coup, led by NC exiles, was concentrated in towns in the Tarai which reinforced the fear and led to the feeling that the plains must be controlled.

  The other reason was the fact that the ruling elite just did not trust the Madhesis. They were seen as “migrants”, “people of Indian origin” or “Indians”, who had continued to maintain cultural practices and spoke languages which were distinct from the hill Nepalis. Their national loyalties were suspect, and the Palace felt that this was India’s natural constituency which it could use to weaken the regime, or even to “break the country”.

  Besides being lucky, Mahendra was shrewd – perhaps the shrewdest leader Nepal has seen in modern times.

  He constructed a narrative in which the monarchy was the symbol of the unity of the nation. And faith in the “glorious” history of the Shah dynasty, a common language (Nepali), a common religion (Hinduism), and a common dress (daura-saluwar) tied the country together. This definition of a “true Nepali” immediately privileged a certain group of people – the hill Bahuns and Chhetris – who fulfilled the above criteria. His suspicion of India as the biggest threat to “national unity” and “Indian-origin people” as swamping Nepali territory was visible in internal formulations as well, since Nepali citizenship required one to possess attributes which would distinctly set one apart from “Indians”.

  Like nationalisms of all hues, Mahendra’s nationalism was fundamentally exclusionary. Muslims were second-class citizens since the state was officially Hindu. There was little chance that Dalits would be able to rise up and challenge the caste hierarchy given the manner in which the Hindu religion, with its entrenched hierarchies, had been given formal state sanction. The bulk of the indigenous people – Tharus, Magars, Tamangs, Gurungs, Newars, Limbus, Rais and others – were left outside the mainstream since many were
neither Hindus, nor did they speak the Nepali language, and continued to maintain distinct cultural practices.

  The Madhesis, too, were not true Nepalis since they could not speak the Nepali language, continued to wear dhotis which were reflective of a distinct culture and lifestyle, could not be trusted to support monarchy, and had “Indian attributes” given cross-border links and a shared culture.

  Their exclusion happened not merely in theory, but in practice. An education policy, with the primary objective of perpetuating the royal regime and its version of nationalism, was introduced.

  Nepali was the sole medium of instruction. Textbooks told children that Nepal was the creation of the Shah kings, conveniently glossing over the fact that the unification was seen as a conquest by most indigenous people who cherished their own tales of resistance, and that much of the Tarai’s inclusion in Nepal was a result of arbitrary border demarcation after the Anglo-Nepal War of 1816.

  The rulers were lauded for keeping the country independent even when India next door was colonized. Students were, of course, not told that Nepal had been humiliated in the 1816 war; the Rana rulers had accepted a subservient status to British India; Nepali Gorkhas, largely from ethnic communities, served as mercenary soldiers for the colonial army; and Nepali rulers had a slavish attitude to the British masters, reflected starkly in the way they rushed to their aid during the Sepoy Revolt of 1857. Nepali exceptionalism was based on Mount Everest and Lumbini, privileging spaces which merely happened to be in Nepal. And, along with pride, a sense of vulnerability was planted – Nepal was a landlocked country, external powers posed constant threats but the great king had successfully protected “national unity”.

  From a historical and political perspective, the Tarai found no mention at all in school curricula, except as a breadbasket. There was little a Madhesi could relate to when he was taught in classrooms – the language of instruction, the historical figures which were being mythologized, and the hill-centric cultural practices were all alien to him. But that was the aim, to make him more Nepali through pedagogy and force him to be ashamed of his own roots.

  Discriminatory citizenship laws with impossible requirements to prove “descent” and to speak Nepali were framed, making it difficult for those of plains origin to acquire citizenship papers. This virtually disenfranchised them, since they could not buy land, access state services, or participate in politics. They had little choice but to be meek and pliant for survival. At the same time, people of “Nepali descent” – which could include Nepali speakers from Darjeeling and Sikkim in India, or Bhutan – were granted citizenship and encouraged to move to the Nepali hills and plains.

  Mahendra also systematically built up on the trend that had first begun in the 1950s. With the clearing of forests and the eradication of malaria, people from the hills had slowly started moving down to the Tarai in large numbers. This was, to some extent, a natural process since the hills remained remote and the plains were seen as the path to progress and prosperity. But he made it state policy to encourage this migration, changing the demographic balance of the region and ensuring that it was not the Madhesis but hill-origin people who controlled local politics and economy. The Rana regime had distributed enormous tracts of land through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the Tarai to their loyalists, relatives and bureaucrats – all of hill origin. Through a flawed and selectively implemented Land Reforms Act, Mahendra did the same, giving land to recent settlers of hill origin while using the Act to make those influential landowners of the Tarai, who were potential dissenters, fall in line.

  His suspicion of India and Madhesis was clear from the way in which the East-West Highway was constructed. An old postal road, Hulaki, connected the various Tarai towns, and was a mile off the Nepal-India border. Instead of upgrading that, the Palace made a conscious decision to construct the national highway several kilometres away from the border, even if that meant destroying extensive forest areas. The underlying fear was that building it next to the border, in Madhesi-populated areas, would give India enormous leverage. Instead, poor pahadi families from the hills were settled to the north and south of the new highway where small towns and economies sprung up. Lahan in the Siraha district, Dhalkebar in the Dhanusha district, Bardibas in the Mahottari district, Navalpur in the Sarlahi district, and Chandranighapur in the Rautahat district – all with a sizeable pahadi population – grew in importance at the time and became alternate political centres.

  The country was also divided into zones where the Tarai, the hills, and the upper Himalayas were clubbed together vertically. So, for instance, the Sagarmatha zone had both the Everest Base Camp in the extreme north and Rajbiraj town – which shares a border with Bihar – in the same zonal unit, which made little administrative sense. Advocates of the model at the time used two arguments to justify the division – the optimum utilization of resources, especially river systems, and “national unity” which would result from the cohabiting of people of different regions. Madhesi activists have since claimed that this was a deliberate ploy to keep Madhesi-populated areas from developing a coherent regional identity. Either way, what is indisputable is that all the zones, and even the Tarai districts, were run by pahadi officials who viewed the Madhesis as outsiders.

  Mahendra made room for the elites of all communities, including Madhesi castes, to be included in the Panchayat polity. If they were willing to accept the monarchy’s legitimacy and hegemony, and become more “Nepali”, a Jha, a Mishra or a Chaudhary could be accommodated in local power structures; be allowed to impose his writ and continue with his zamindari in localized areas; be given membership of the national Panchayat or bureaucracy and receive opportunities in the state-dependent economy.

  My grandfather, Jogendra Jha, or Tatta, as we called him, was among those Madhesis who actively supported the monarchy. He was a trained doctor, but set up Nepal’s first private construction firm. He indirectly dabbled in politics, financing leaders like Tulsi Giri, who was the first prime minister under the Panchayat system. Giri and Tatta had studied medicine together in Darbhanga, and Giri had encouraged my grandfather to migrate to Nepal after they completed their degrees. Bishwobandhu Thapa, who would serve as Giri’s home minister, was a close family friend. Giri’s and Thapa’s children, and my father and aunts, grew up together.

  Tatta had close links with political actors in Delhi, and often served as an intermediary between the royal regime and the Indian establishment as well as the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which he had joined as a student at the Banaras Hindu University in the early 1940s. Before his death in 2001, he had often told me that he served as an intermediary between Mahendra and Pandit Nehru in the run-up to the royal coup in 1960. Nehru, he claimed, was in the loop about B. P. Koirala’s dismissal.

  On King Mahendra’s request, Tatta co-produced Nepal’s first private feature film, Maitighar. In the 1970s, he partnered with Mahendra’s younger brother, Prince Basundhara, to set up Nepal’s first private shipping company – a wildly ambitious project that fell flat, leaving him financially vulnerable. My grandmother would always remain furious at his overreach, but Tatta was a first-generation entrepreneur, a risk taker, and a survivor who knew how to navigate the power corridors of his times.

  The point here is to highlight the fact that despite being a Madhesi, he was close to the establishment of the day. This indicated the slight opening that the system had for people of varied ethnic backgrounds. In return for loyalty, he got unprecedented access and opportunities – and we have benefited from those privileges. But he, and people like him, operating in the Tarai districts on a much smaller scale, were exceptions.

  The larger pattern of how the Madhesis were to be dealt with was clear. Deprive them of citizenship and the rights that come with it; inculcate a deep suspicion about their “nationalism” among other population segments through organized propaganda; destroy their self-esteem by making them feel like outsiders in a land they consider their own; ensure that they ha
ve little political power; give control of areas where they are in the majority to state officials and people of hill origin; use their resources without granting representation; co-opt, bribe and coerce local upper-caste elites so that they maintain peace and order in a feudal, patronage-based economy; and locate the entire strategy in a broader context of a “foreign hand” which is out to attack “national integrity”.

  What you then get is an image that was common across the Tarai. A poor Madhesi villager visits a distant government office in the district headquarters, his hands folded, speaking subserviently to a pahadi official, struggling to stitch together a line in Nepali for the sahib who does not know the language of the area which he has been sent to administer, and pleads for citizenship, to become Nepali. And the only response he would receive: “Oye saale dhoti, go back to where you belong.”

  This was Mahendra’s abiding gift to the Nepali nation.

  THE LIVING GODDESS

  Isabella Tree

  Isabella Tree is an author and award-winning travel journalist. She was senior travel correspondent at the Evening Standard from 1993–1995. She has written several highly praised books including The Bird Man: The Extraordinary Story of John Gould and Islands in the Clouds: Travels in the Highlands of New Guinea, which was shortlisted for the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award. She writes regularly for the Sunday Times, Evening Standard, Observer and Conde Nast Traveller and her work has also appeared in Reader’s Digest: Today’s Best Non-Fiction, Rough Guides Women Travel and The Best American Travel Writing.