Sahib, Begum and Madhes
This past week two very strange events occurred: one, Karima Begum slapped the Chief District Officer (CDO) of Parsa, Mr. Durga Bhandari; two, Jaya Prakash Gupta in his long paper to the Constituent Assembly said--among other usual points about One Madhes, One Pradesh doctrine of his party-that in the Madhes autonomous province as envisioned by his party, Pahadis will be given naturalised citizenship. Minister Begum’s action and Gupta’s statement are not just strange but outrageous, even unheard of even in the violence-wrecked absurdist politics of South Asia.
While Minister Begum’s action has deservedly drawn widespread condemnation from the Nepali press, asking for all kinds of punishment from disciplinary action to imprisonment, Gupta’s statement is just a statement. Gupta’s outrageous statement hasn’t provoked response yet maybe because in the Nepal of today, people have become immune to such outlandish statements.
Now, Minister Begum’s four slaps to the CDO of the important Tarai district perhaps would not have provoked as much outrage if instead of a Madhesi Muslim woman, Begum had been a Maoist cadre of hill origin. Matrika Yadav had to pay dearly for his outrageous act of locking an LDO in the ministerial bathroom but other Maoist cadres got away with such assault on public officials elsewhere.
But more than anything else, such assaults by Madhesi leaders fighting for Madhesi rights can best be read as socially and politically symbolic acts pregnant with historical and futuristic meaning. In other words, they reveal not only Nepal’s repressive past of one culture-, one language-domination but portend unhealthy Bihari-style politics in the future.
At first glance, Minister Begum’s very feminine slaps instead of masculine assault with a weapon or at least fists appears so outrageous because one had never heard of a woman minister physically attacking the chief bureaucrat of a district anywhere. Even in Bihar, where I had witnessed more than once a Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) chasing a BDO (Block Development Officer) with his shoe in hand, the MLAs were men of goonda inclinations with criminal charges pending against them. So, in one sense, Minister Begum’s assault appears even worse than a Bihari MLA’s assault on petty bureaucrats. Nonetheless, Matrika Yadav’s and Karima Begum’s “physical action” against an LDO or a CDO can be taken as the entry of Bihari-style politics in Nepal, a sort of politics in which people’s representatives very often possess criminal background, use physical force to intimidate the voters and do not hesitate to assault the bureaucrats in order to impress their voters about their power and clout. (Although Bihar has been notorious for politicians with criminal backgrounds, one can find such politicians all over India, as the statistics of 2009 Indian general election demonstrates.)
This is so because in Bihar, very often a member of the provincial assembly is like Karima Begum in education, social class, and ethnic or caste origin: a 10th grade pass member from a school in the boondocks of Bihar like Motihari while the bureaucrat very often comes from one of the upper castes and belongs to the upper middle class, has gone through English-medium education in one of the St.-this and St.-that schools spread throughout India’s privileged places of hill resorts or metropolises and respected colleges, and becomes a bureaucrat by taking one of those colonial-style competitive examinations in the English language. In a situation like this, where the politician and the bureaucrat have in the past few decades come from two diametrically opposed social, cultural, ethnic, and educational backgrounds, the politician, like the common people in general, harbors deep suspicion and resentment against the educated, refined, historically powerful people like the bureaucrat. On the other hand, the bureaucrat for his part considers the people whose servant he is like his own servant and himself their traditional master appointed from above, the center, by some superior, distant authority.
In India, especially in Bihar, common people’s subjugation goes back more than a millennium. Until a few decades ago, despite India getting its Independence in 1947, those who ruled spoke a different language, came from a different place, wore a different skin colour, and derived power and influence from the alien centralised authority. They considered the people they ruled or served socially, religiously, and culturally inferior. Why do you think Lalu Yadav was and Mayawati still is disliked so much by the media, especially the English-speaking media, in India? Only after Lalu presented himself as an entertainer, rustic buffoon capable of turning the railways around did he become a celebrity with the media. The Indian media had never seen a politician like Lalu, the brother of a peon, a buffalo herder married to an illiterate or barely literate woman with a strange vernacular name-Rabri-who spoke dehati, shockingly flawed Hindi and acted like an uncouth rustic. Mayawati, too, for her part has been making shockwaves in India with her exaggerated statements and garish actions: building larger than life, megalomaniac statues of her heroic forbears in Dalit politics-Ambedkar, Kansiram, Phule, etc., and herself entertaining a previously unthinkable prime ministerial ambition. Even male Dalit politicians like Ram Bilas Paswan hate her for that.
Those people, who have been marginalised, have never wielded power, tend to speak in hyperboles and overdo things when they first get a taste of power. On the other hand, the mainstream media and the people whose opinions and views count in power circles tend both to highlight these exaggerations and outrages and express shock and demand swift retribution. My point is not that they should not be held accountable for their actions and allowed to get away with things but that one needs to historicize such events and actions in order to understand them fully.
Karima Begum is such a politician and CDO Bhandari is such a bureaucrat in the Nepali context. She is said to have completed 10th-grade education from Motihari, one of the boondocks of Bihar. She is a woman, albeit a woman of hot temperament, and a member of a marginalized Muslim community. And if you go looking for her Muslim caste, I wouldn’t be surprised if she turns out to be a member of, not one of the high castes such as the Sheikhs or the Sayyids, but of one of the occupational Muslim castes. High caste Muslim women, like their counterpart high caste Hindu women, generally do not act so outrageously and excessively in public. Modesty and normality are the hallmark of their personal behaviour.
And then one has to think about the specifics of Begum’s case. Although the media has reported both sides of the story: Karima Begum’s and the CDO’s versions of why the minister slapped the CDO, the columnists and Nepali-speaking public have generally sided with CDO Bhandari’s version of the story and attributed the assault to his refusal to send the desired vehicle to the minister. But what if they put more weight on Karima Begum’s version: that she unsuccessfully invited the CDO to have a talk with her about the law and order situation in the crime-infested town of Birganj whose elected member to the CA she is, that the CDO repeatedly lied every time about his whereabouts when she called, refusing to meet with her; that he kept her waiting at the airport for more than an hour for security cover; and that other Madhesi ministers, like Kushwaha and Karn, of her party have been similarly treated by the CDO?
So, in order to unpack the entire symbolic event, one needs to ask at least three sets of questions: One, why did Minister Begum have to resort to slaps, like punishing an unruly child? She could have taken non-violent measures, such as complaint to the Cabinet, transfer or dismissal of the CDO? Why resort to instant, illegal, unseemly gratification?
Two, why did CDO Bhandari ignore not only her repeated calls to meet with her but those of other ministers of her party and ethnic origin? Why did he send a vehicle without a flag? Surely, other Pahadi ministers, too, had visited Birganj before Begum. Did he treat them the same way when they visited Birganj-i.e., sent an old vehicle without a flag or made the minister wait for an hour for security cover?
Three, why did the media focus overwhelmingly on the CDO’s version of the story in order to prove the minister’s guilt and the CDO’s innocence? Why didn’t they raise the issue of a CDO’s helplessness in the face of so many VIP visits to the districts before? Was it the first time that VIP’s visited Tarai districts? What has changed now from before? Certainly, unproductive practices must be discontinued and better and more efficient methods adopted as new issues and problems emerge. But why are all these questions raised now with CDO Bhandari’s treatment of and by Minister Begum?
If one gets at the root of these three sets of questions and attempts a deep historical answer, one would see a different picture emerging in Nepal. It would show not only the chasm that has historically existed between bureaucrats and politicians as players in the body politic but the power imbalance between Pahadis and Madhesis, between hill high castes or high castes in general and others--and the resultant twisted psychology in both groups in dealing with each other. People of Madhesi origin have never identified with the ideology of the Nepali government and its functionaries. Its leaders have considered the political domination of Kathmandu as colonial domination: rule by alien ethnicity with an alien language in order to extract surplus value for the centre. Well, their perception may no longer hold hundred percent now given the changing political landscape but the administrative picture remains more or less the same. As an example of this, one only needs to look at the names of those who have been recently promoted to the posts of Senior Superintendent of Police. How many of them are Madhesis or even non-hill high castes? On the other hand, Nepali-speaking bureaucrats, too, deal with the Madhesis like colonial officials. One only needs to visit the district offices to see the ethnic composition of the officials and those who come to get things done and assess the nature of their interaction to get the full picture. There’s hardly any environment of ethnic trust and respect between the two, both operating from their own centuries-built mindset of the ruling ethnicity and the ruled ethnicity. The bureaucrats hardly know how to speak courteously to the Madhesis and the people hardly know how to speak normally to the bureaucrats as social equals. Minister Begum’s illegal action, JP Gupta’s outrageous statement about Pahadis, CDO Bhandari’s unconscionable dealing with Madhesi ministers, and the media’s lopsided coverage are all symptoms of what has been wrong with Nepal. There is much that needs to occur to set
things right
Post Your Comment