Manisha Koirala is an ace actress in Bollywood and often excels in offbeat roles. Most recently, she glowed magnificently in Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Heeramandi: The Diamond Bazaar drama series on Netflix. In the politics of her home turf, Koirala seems to have taken the well-trodden path of regressive conservatism that advocates for restoring the Hindu Kingdom with the Shah monarchy as its nucleus.

Ever since Rabindra Mishra left a stable career with the BBC Nepali Sewa to join the hustle and bustle of politics in Nepal, he hasn’t hidden his conservative convictions in any political party he has formed, joined or merged with within a short period. When he finally found his innate home in the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) a few years ago, it was natural for ethnonationalist Koirala to campaign for a fellow monarchist in the national elections.

Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli gained some notoriety during the April Uprising of 2006 for publicly thundering that abolishing monarchy was as far-fetched an idea as “attempting to reach America in a bullock cart”. After becoming one of the biggest beneficiaries of the republican order, he revised his previous position and often batted against the restoration of the monarchy with the fervour of a neo-convert. All his ethnonational agenda—preferment of nationalist Hinduism and exertion of Khas-Arya supremacism, for example—remains intact.

If the coalition government Sharma Oli is currently heading succeeds in introducing the promised amendments to the constitution, ethnonational majoritarianism in the country will be further institutionalised until credible political challenges erupt in fresh conflicts. Premier Sharma Oli is the political personification of the sociocultural aspirations of ethnonationalists across party lines in Nepal.

The differentiation between a solid social structure where “people live in peace and harmony” and “socio-political degradation and despair”, as Lok Raj Baral—a fellow columnist—recently hypothesised, forms the bedrock of the regressive vision so common among the cultural conservatives, political liberals and social progressives. The description of “solid social structure”, as Baral admits in the same piece, is inherently “syncretic and synthetic”.

Syncretism is sometimes defined as “the large-scale imposition of one alien culture, religion, or body of practices over another that is already present”. There can be no better depiction of formulating the culture of the Khas-Arya community of the Gandak region as “national” and then forcing the Janjatis of hills and mountains and the Madheshis to adopt it as their own. Hegemonic assertions about Nepal having enjoyed “a culture of peace and harmony” at any point in time are purely synthetic. The proposition fails the verification test in the light of subaltern experiences.

Fictitious formulations

The manufactured nostalgia of an imagined past in Nepal begins with the emergence of the Gorkha Empire in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Perhaps in tune with the times of colonial expansion elsewhere in South Asia, the Gorkha Empire was a culturally missionary and politically expansionist power. The victors from Gorkha encouraged the promotion of Brahminical religion, Gorkha Bhasha and hierarchical practices wherever possible and imposed them everywhere in the annexed territories if necessary.

Since the Gorkhali pandits were entrusted with proselytising the defeated population from animism, shamanism or other indigenous practices prevalent in the mountains, hills and plains of the extended Empire, they often weren’t too learned. They used the myths and stories of the Puranas rather than the edicts of the Vedas. Fatalistic, misogynistic and Brahminical values of what is called the “Nepali society” perhaps owe more to the Bhagavata and Garuda Puranas than to the Mahabharata and Ramayana epics.

After being roundly defeated in the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814-16, the courtiers in Kathmandu badly needed an apologia to save face and keep the morale of their troops intact. The narrative of escaping from the colonial ambition of the East India Company (EIC) was manufactured to hide the humiliation heaped upon the Gorkha Empire through the Treaty of Sugauli. Beginning with his exploratory and submissive mission to Europe in 1850-51, Jung Bahadur Rana concluded the acceptance of being a loyal servant of the Company Bahadur—as the EIC was popularly called in the Indo-Gangetic plains—by offering his personal as well as official services for the brutal suppression of the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857.

In addition to honouring the Gurkha sacrifices in World War I and ensuring a steady supply of recruits for the British troops, perhaps an additional objective of the Treaty of 1923 was to keep Nepal safe from the Soviet-backed nationalist regime asserting itself in China. Since Chandra Shamsher had readily agreed to remain a loyal vassal, there was hardly any need for the British to occupy a subsidiary kingdom. The balloon of ‘never been colonised’ is a divertissement to deflect attention away from a subservient status. The Rana oligarchy ruled because of unflinching loyalty to their British overlords, and the Shah monarchy survived by advancing the interests of the Western bloc throughout the Cold War.

Despite the diplomatic dance of turning alternately towards Beijing and New Delhi, the loyalty of the republican Nepal to the Western bloc remains intact. Prof Leo E Rose, an academic proponent of Pax Americana in the Himalayas, slyly termed Nepal’s attachment with the West the “Strategy of Survival”. Therein lies the source of strength of Gorkha imperialism in the hills and mountains and its internal colonialism in Tarai Madhesh.

Resigned resilience

The Hinduisation campaign of victors—the Bhagavata Purana, the King as a divine being and Brahminical rituals—helped the Gorkha Empire establish its hegemony in the hills and mountains. This approach was unlikely to work in Kosala and Videha, where the refinement of Aryan civilisation predated its ascent along the river valleys into the mountains.

The colonisation approach in Madhesh was patterned after successfully implementing the subjugation model in the Gangetic plains, where challengers to the British were derided as “non-martial races” while loyalists that included Gurkhas were declared “martial races”. Exclusion of nationalities of vanquished territories from the military services of the colonial power is a proven way of instilling collective inauthenticity and internalised inferiority.

The term gaslighting is relatively new, but the concept of blaming the victim is as old as human history. Structural gaslighting, defined as “one of the ways oppressors maintain hegemonic ideologies and sabotage conceptual resources that might accurately theorise the nature of the oppression and promote resistance”, succeeded in creating helplessness, inertia and subsequently abject submission among Madheshis. The peace of graveyard prevailed in Madhesh as the will to question—let alone challenge—the Gurkha colonialists, which was first backed by the British and then the Americans, never took root in the absence of an “organic ideology” in the Gramscian sense of the term.

The poet and activist Langston Hughes once sighed, “In America Negroes do not have to be told what fascism is,” and then added, “We know.” Forced to participate in the erasure of their own identity and dignity, Madheshis know what resistance under an ethnonational majoritarian regime entails. Silent acquiescence, apparent conformism and abject docility are masks of self-preservation rather than sociocultural traits of the colonised population living in peace and harmony.