The spring sun has begun to warm up Nepalgunj. However, the road to Gularia in an early March morning remains shrouded in misty haze characteristic of Indo-Gangetic plains. Unlike in the countryside of central and eastern Tarai-Madhesh, loudspeakers blaring from temples and mosques do not pierce the peace along the narrow road that has very little traffic except for occasional motorcycles fitted with aluminum milk tanks and plastic vegetable boxes. A herder somewhere on the banks of Maan River sings like a peacock and wakes up passengers of a vehicle heading towards the headquarters of Bardia.
Gularia is now a municipality, but it continues to be a one-horse town where the flashiest facility is a meeting hall, built perhaps to cater to the needs of NGOs that have begun to swarm like bees congregating to establish a new colony. Writer Khagendra Sangraula observes that the oval table in the seminar room is comparable to the best available infrastructure of international agencies in Kathmandu. Other amenities such as the sound system, toilets and catering, however, have a lot of catching up to do even with neighboring Nepalgunj.[break]
Bhagiram Tharu chairs a public consultation on interface between society and instruments of the state in a district notorious for the excesses of security forces. Without a hint of rancor, he opens the interaction with the bland announcement that his district has largest number of ‘conflict victims’ in the country. Almost 20 percent of all “forcibly disappeared” persons during years of armed conflict were from this Tharu-majority (nearly 53 percent) district that has less than two percent of the national population.
Image: triarchypress.com
Agencies of the state seem to give little importance to such hearings. Apart from moles and informers ubiquitous to such events, no responsible authority of the state considered it worthwhile to listen to the grievances of the public. Their terror, however, is palpable: Most participants prefer circumspection to candor in expressing themselves.
The suffering of people in Bardia has attracted international attention but to little avail. In December 2009, envoys of the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Switzerland, Denmark, Finland, Norway and the Representative of the OHCHR-Nepal had traveled together to Bardia to meet families of victims and declared collectively that crimes of conflict years be duly investigated. The communiqué had stated unambiguously, “Although the cases have been well documented by OHCHR and the National Human Rights Commission, and despite a ruling by Supreme Court in 2007, no official investigation has taken place into these serious human rights violations.” The then Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal had refused to take note of the censure, presumably because the Indian envoy had not been in the team!
Jungle Raj
Bardia National Park has made the district famous. It is the largest surviving piece of wilderness that spanned the foothills of Chure Ranges all over the country till the mid-twentieth century. For the Tharu inhabitants of the region, however, the wildlife sanctuary brought nothing but misery. It has snatched away an important source of livelihood, placed the forested commons beyond their reach, and put their lives at the mercy of security forces ostensibly ‘guarding’ flora and fauna on the verge of extinction.
Native to the forested foothills of Shivaliks that once stretched from the Tarai of Kumau to the foothills of Kamrup, Tharus have been hunter-gatherer, herder, fisherfolk and farmer for millennia. In the Tharu dialect of the Babai-Karnali belt, Bardia actually means herdsmen. When this region was under the control of Nawabs of Awadh, householders from the lower ground would usually take their cattle to the safety of grasslands upstream during rainy season to escape floods. From the mountains, hardy herdsmen would bring down their livestock in the forest below to escape the chill of snowy winter. The greenery irrigated by Karnali and Babai recuperated during the autumn and the spring. The idyllic arrangement was broken with the Gorkhali conquest.
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Gorkhalis virtually put their flags without encountering resistance on the frontiers of by then disintegrating Awadh Empire. Absentee Muslim landlords from decadent towns of Ganga-Jamuna floodplains paid little attention to their holdings in the wilderness where tigers and Tharus roamed free. Other than traveling uplands during winter to hunt blackbucks or angle in Karnali for Mahashir—a few of their scions maintained the tradition till the early seventies when the security forces severely curtailed their movements and forced them to abandon the practice—these landlords had left their holdings in the Tharu hands. Hungry for lands to pay their burgeoning soldiery, Gorkhalis quickly appropriated all cultivable area. Many Tharus were forced to retreat into the jungles that is now the Katarniaghat Wildlife Sanctuary in India.
The Anglo-Gorkha wars of 1814-16 pushed Gorkhalis beyond Chure-Shivalik and the Tarai plains between Mechi and Kaali fell under the control of East India Company. In order to buy peace on an important frontier and acquire the right to recruit mercenaries for its expanding possessions in the Indian subcontinent, the Company returned parts of Tarai east of Rapti to the Gorkhalis. The flatlands between Rapti and Kaali had already been used by the Company to pay back loans taken from Muslim landlords. Tharus were once again relatively free. They easily absorbed fellow Tharus were pushed westwards from Chitwan and Dang by aggressive Gorkhali settlers.
The Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 changed the relationship between the Muslim aristocracy that had supported the rebellion and the East India Company. The British confiscated holdings of Muslim landlords in the Babai-Karnali region and handed over the territory to the Gorkhalis in the 1860s in recognition of mercenary services rendered during the Mutiny. The colonization and subjugation of Tharu population intensified with the declaration by Jang Bahadur that it was the Naya Muluk.
New Dominion
Gorkhalis have a hoary tradition of practicing victor’s justice. Like several ethnicities of hills and mountains, Jang got Tharus declared as an ‘enslaveable’ tribe and distributed the land of the new dominion to his relatives and henchmen. The Tharus retreated deeper into Chure ravines. However, it was the land survey conducted under the orders of Chandra Shamsher that pauperized Tharus beyond redemption. With the exception of few local caretakers of their holdings, appropriation of commons by Gorkhali aristocracy pauperized most Tharus and turned many of them into Kamaiyas. Bardia is still home to the largest number of ex-Kamaiyas (freed bonded domestics) who are free but not yet fearless.
Tharus have never been Nepali in the sense of the term that associates the description with eponymous language, Brahmanic religion, caste-based culture, lifestyles of the mid-mountains, myths and lore of Gorkhalis, and the idea of Nepalipan conjured up by diasporic intelligentsia of Assam, Banaras, Calcutta and Darjeeling. Despite the declaration of Nepal as Federal Democratic Republic by the dead Constituent Assembly, the country continues to be Pahadi-centric in the imagination of its ruling elite.
The Tharus too need to free themselves from the serfdom of Gorkhali dominion and become respectable citizens of a federal republic. However, when habits of centuries of subjugation have seeped into the soul, articulation of freedom becomes frightening. Pregnant pauses between what people of Bardia dare to express are more eloquent expressions of their sufferings than words pronounced under the shadow of vengeful PEON instruments.
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