The moment Madheshi passengers disembark from the aircraft at Janakpur, their pretentious masks of appearing to be proper Nepali falls off the face. Telltale signs of stress disappear from the body, and the gait improves the moment the feet touch the ground. Energy begins to flow with higher intensity as one breathes the earthy air, and the language of conversation changes to Maithili or Hindi.

Critics of federalism have no idea about the empowering force of the sense of the self of the people that have spent their entire lives being apologetic about their identity and trying to be something they could never become. At least in Madhesh, federalism has little to do with better governance or faster development. It’s simply the people’s freedom to be what they really are without any qualms. Madhesh has been relentlessly sucked dry of its resources for over two centuries. Most Madheshis had internalised their subjugated condition. Once the people’s confidence is restored, positive changes in polity, society and economy will probably follow.

The claim of development professionals that prosperity cures all ills is rather simplistic. They may never have experienced the psychological poverty institutionalised discrimination produces. The indignity of having to hide one’s identity can be debilitating. Depressing indicators of prolonged exploitation are easy to enumerate and even simpler to explain if only someone showed the courage to face realities on the ground in a conquered territory.

Even if the situation of the Madheshis in the entire Tarai-Madhesh is kept aside for a while, the condition of Madhesh province presents a bleak picture. It is the smallest province by area with the highest population in the country. It has the highest population density, lowest human development index, lowest forest area, almost no glacier-fed river and no known mineral deposits other than the boulders of the fragile slopes of the Chure Range. The per capita income in Madhesh is less than two-thirds of the national average.

Madhesh is least represented in the system of national governance in population ratio. Even though agriculture continues to be the mainstay of livelihood, less than one-fourth of the cultivable land has access to any kind of irrigation facility and essential fertilisers are perennially in short supply. Other than the Birgunj-Simara belt that primarily serves the Kathmandu Valley, there is no significant industrial activity in the entire province. It sends more people to work in the sweltering heat of West Asia and Malaysia than any other province, but it has no publicly funded centre of excellence for technical training.

There is no properly functioning university in a province with a slightly higher population than Denmark. With the lowest per capita income in Nepal, about half as that of the average figure for Sub-Saharan Africa, Madhesh isn’t an attractive destination for the profit sector to invest in institutions of higher learning. The dire situation isn’t accidental; it’s the result of severe exploitation till the 1950s and the institutionalised discrimination thereafter.

Internal other

In keeping with the conventions of the time, a Gorkhali ruler handed out the land and property of Madhesh to his band of warriors soon after the conquest of Makwanpur. The tradition of land grant in Tarai-Madhesh to the loyalists of Gorkhali court continued till the 1980s under the guise of resettlement of the landless. The colonisation of Tarai-Madhesh “othered” the natives and conferred the legitimacy of conquest upon titleholders from mid-mountains.

The Sugauli Treaty and subsequent transfer of confiscated territories in eastern Tarai in 1816 and western Tarai in 1860 from the victors—East India Company—to the vanquished—Gorkhalis—for strategic reasons completed the process of othering the Madhesis. Jung Bahadur Kunwar did try to lure the ousted population back into eastern Tarai even as he kept the so-called Naya Muluk for his pelf and pleasure, but his policies had the unfortunate consequences of further empowering the dominant castes.

When Bir Shamsher began to export timber to British India on a massive scale, large tracts of denuded land in Madhesh was again available for redistribution to the loyalists of the regime. Most beneficiaries of Bir’s munificence from Kathmandu, however, were unwilling to till the land in the malarial plains. Most of them brought in property managers from mid-mountains. The othering of the Madheshis got entrenched.

During his 28-year reign, Chandra Shamsher sanctioned more forest to be cleaned, resettled more people from the mountains in Madhesh and secured the foundations of ethnonational identity through administrative instruments and land management measures. The Gorkha Bhasha Prakashini Samiti established in 1913 became the fountainhead of the ethnonational state.

King Mahendra completed the othering of the Madheshis that had begun with the military conquest of Makwanpur with his Eutai raja, eutai desh, eutai bhasa, eutai bhes (one king, one country; one language, one dress) model of producing uniformity. The last brick in the wall of exclusion was the massive resettlement programme for people from mid-mountains of Nepal in the Chure-Bhavar region that formed a demographic barrier erected to protect the cultural purity of Gorkhali heartland from the ‘polluting’ influence of Madhesh.

External complicity

The three primary interests of British India in Nepal were countering the possibility of Chinese incursions; stopping Nepal from giving shelter to fugitives from its territories; and having a free hand in recruiting cheap mercenaries from supposedly martial races for its imperial ambitions around the world. Madheshis didn’t figure in their calculations of managing a nominally independent country.

When the United States assumed charge from the British in advancing Cold War objectives in South Asia after World War II, Americans had even less use for Madheshis that had neither presence nor voice in Kathmandu. The malaria eradication programme was one of the largest US-funded projects in the early 1950s that created conditions for the large-scale population transfer from mid-mountains into Madhesh once again. The Nepal Punarvas Company was established in 1964 to complete the job under the close supervision of Israeli experts who are considered to be some of the best in the world in resettling people in newly-claimed or freshly-occupied territories.

Considering itself to be the successor state of British India, the regime in New Delhi after 1947 has continued the colonial policy of looking at Nepal purely from a security perspective. Like all geostrategic orphans of permanent minorities everywhere, the Madheshis seem to be learning slowly that they have to wage struggles or make compromises on their own without any hope of external support.

On the penultimate morning of five-day long Chhaith rituals, there was a traffic jam near the Jaleshwarnath temple. A truck-mounted bitumen mixer, a fancy car brimming with noisy children, an SUV carrying grinning visitors and several motorcycles idling patiently were jostling for the right-of-way on the 3-way junction. A policeman was using Nepali, the language of power, to direct the traffic. The language of resistance of drivers was Hindi in the Maithili heartland.

Having seen only stray cows and wandering bulls obstructing the roadway, the commotion of the street gave an oddly uplifting feel. Chaos is the precursor of change and order. The apparent anarchy is perhaps a necessary correction for the transformation of the long-suppressed population in Madhesh.