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.
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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 t
rucks 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.
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“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.
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