Dark side of democracy

KATHMANDU, Nepal — Dr. Roshan Raut had a life to save and little time to waste as he raced on his motorcycle toward the hospital. 

Rallies called "bandhs" rampage through the streets, setting fires in protest.  (GlobalPost/Edwin Koo)

But between him and the hospital, young men wielding clubs and knives attacked any motorist or cyclist trying to run their blockades. Called a bandh, this one in June was another in many violent protests that shut down entire swaths of the country on a whim. This time, Maoists protested the alleged murder of a member of their youth militia: It was later revealed he had committed suicide.

Unspoken rules that previously governed the conduct of bandh — safe passage for journalists, U.N. vehicles and doctors — have been discarded, as Raut learned when he was pulled from his motorcycle and beaten. Near the holy Boudhanath Stupa, the most revered Buddhist temple in Nepal, his motorcycle was set aflame.

“No one is safe," said Raut, a soft-spoken cardiologist, during a break between patient consultations. “Even ambulances with patients inside are getting attacked. I am worried about this trend. Now we are afraid to go to the hospital during bandhs.”

A bandh — from the Hindi word for “closed” — can spark from a strike over wages, a political party sending a message or a village demanding restitution in the aftermath of an auto accident. Bandh has been perfected in Kathmandu’s snaking streets, and the isolated hills and verdant plains that lie beyond. Bandhs have even gone viral — you can track them online with the Nepal Bandh Calendar.

Raut was one of many victims. Several days earlier, mobs protesting the death of a motorcyclist rampaged through the streets and smashed the windows of a school bus filled with children. When two Indian tourists traveling to Pokhara got stuck in a bandh last month, they were mistaken for kidnappers by local villagers and attacked. Eastern Nepal has witnessed 171 bandhs in the last year, with one district shut down for 81 days.

A bandh might excite the salivary glands of the activists slapped with bruises and fines after they protested the World Trade Organization in Seattle or the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. Used sparingly, bandhs can transform the masses into a force to be reckoned with.

But in Nepal, where bandhs have cost an already impoverished nation 12 billion rupees ($1.6 million) in the first 120 days of this year alone, they reveal the dark side of people power. Nepal’s poorest citizens are already suffering amid political instability, economic mismanagement and skyrocketing commodity prices. Each day that bandhs close an artery of commerce it is the common people — shopkeepers, taxi drivers, truckers, farmers — who lose tens of millions of desperately needed rupees.

Bandhs have occurred for years, but have morphed into the most visceral manifestation of the disillusionment, anger and frustration with the result of a decade of war in Nepal. While hopes were high in the heady days following the jan andolan, or people’s movement, today the political backbiting is often dismissively referred to as a peace process with neither peace nor a process. The utopian rhetoric of the country’s leadership dramatically raised the expectations of the Nepali people, then failed to deliver.

Today, those expectations have fueled rising public anger. The frequency and ferocity of these eruptions of mob violence has caught many Nepalis off guard.

“Impunity has given rise to this phenomenon. There’s nothing spontaneous about it. It is lawlessness at its worst,” said Kunda Dixit, editor and publisher of the Nepali Times. “A bandh is the use of terror. It is enforced with the fear that harm will come to you if you venture out, if you open your shop, if you open your school. And that fear exists because of the nonexistence of the state and the absence of capable law enforcement.”

When the rush of empowerment that followed the people’s movement was not accompanied by improvements in governance, people began to take the law into their own hands. A recent report by the Overseas Development Institute found a widespread absence of formal justice institutions across all communities regardless of caste, ethnicity or geography. In this security vacuum, bandhs become a way for the poor and marginalized to gain some control over their environment after a lifetime of powerlessness. Safety in numbers empowers a small village to extort restitution from a careless driver. There is a hidden logic to this distinctive brand of road rage.

Additionally, massive rural-urban migration has pushed Kathmandu’s capacity to provide services to its inhabitants to the breaking point. Nepal’s 2001 census pegged Kathmandu’s population at 671,846. Now, the already overburdened city’s population is predicted to nearly double by 2011.

Raut, like many Nepalis, said he remains hopeful against all odds.

“This negative trend, it won’t change in a day," he said. "We need peace, stability and law and order. These things take time.” With that, he turned back to the seemingly endless swarm of patients clamoring for his attention.

This report comes from a journalist in our Student Correspondent Corps, a GlobalPost project training the next generation of foreign correspondents while they study abroad.