Political Context

When Nepal’s king declared a state of emergency in 2005, the country was at a political breaking point. It was the height of an almost decade-old civil war between the royal state army (which ultimately ended with a death toll of over 16,000 lives lost) and Maoists and the ongoing Movement Against Regression (which was being carried out by eight political parties whose democratically elected government had been dismissed by the king in 2002).

Tired of the ongoing political instability, the general public first welcomed the king’s autocratic intervention; however, by the spring of 2006, the king’s attempts to control the chaos were viewed as eroding civil freedoms and undermining economic and personal well-being. En masse people joined the Maoists and political parties on the streets, which caused the protests to shift from a political party movement to a mass movement, popularly known as the People’s Movement 2 (Jana Andolan II). This movement went further than the first People’s Movement (Jana Andolan) in 1990, which ended the partyless Panchayat governing system and established a multiparty democratic constitutional monarchy.

This, however, was not necessarily a smooth transition. The success of the 2006 April uprising (The People’s Movement Part Two) resulted in three buzzwords: “new Nepal,” “inclusion,” and “secular republic.” Ten years of Maoist war were responsible for bringing these issues to the forefront of both the political and social arenas. The Maoists raised the issue of many inequalities: caste, ethnic, and gender inequality. However, they did so under the unifying rubric of class. Yet the experi­ences of marginalization in Nepal have been multiple; citizens living with inequality and suppression for generations have defined it through the particular historical and cultural experiences of their community. Some were not willing to flatten their experiences into the one category of class exploitation.

The Madhesi Movement of 2007 was a key example of this because it highlighted regional-based exclusion (cf. Gaige 2009; Hachhethu 2007; Jha 2014). The Madhes, the Tarai region in which Parsa district is a part, are the plains that spans Nepal’s southern border. Over 50% of Nepal’s population lives in the plains, and it is the agricultural breadbasket of the country.

The Interim government’s willingness to accommodate the Madhesi parties’ demands allowed the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections to take place in 2008. The elections were declared free and fair. To the surprise of everyone, the Maoists won both the first-past-the-post and proportional election and thus held the majority of the 601 person bodies elected to rewrite the constitution and restructure the state. They forged a coalition with the Madhesi parties and smaller leftist parties as well as tried to garner all party consensuses in the spirit of the peace process as stipulated by the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and Interim constitution. However, consensus proved elusive, and the first CA shifted into the type of power struggles that threatened past democratic governments (cf.

Unfortunately, the political stagnation has jeopardized Nepal’s postwar transition. The Constituent Assembly has become a serial process, dragging on for 8 years (5 years overdue), involving two elections and six governments run by different parties. This has also caused stagnation at the local level. Nepal has not had legitimate elections at the local level since 1997. During the king’s rule from 2002 to 2008, appointed bureaucrats ran Village Development Committees and municipalities. The king’s government held local elections in 2006. However, all the parties boycotted them, and the results were never instituted because of the second People’s Movement and the king’s resignation 2 months after elections. In 2008, the political parties and Maoists agreed that All-Party Mechanisms (APMs) should operate and oversee local level expenditure and governance. This setup benefited the post-conflict transition because it forced all local leaders to work together for the first time in over a decade (Adhikari 2010).

The postwar political negligence impacts everyone all the way down to the village level and seriously undermines the national and transnational aims to estab­lish peace and stability in Nepal. It also impacts how my interlocutors’ relationship with their government and the role they see it playing in their lives. One young man laid it out plainly for me by saying, “In our case, politics has spoiled everything” (Main ta yaha politics Ie khaisakyao). Ayoung woman sitting to his left interjected saying that there are so many political parties in the country; she did not even know how many there were. She explained that they all want to be leaders but she asked rhetorically, “How can a family be run if every member wants to be the guardian?” The young man agreed that all the political parties’ ideas will never converge. “They can’t come together to run the country, let alone make progress... the nation is being run on an ad hoc basis.” (Group discussion at Thakur Ram Campus, Birganj Parsa, September 23, 2013). This diatribe echoes the frustrations of many young people I met. Geopolitics has disrupted socioeconomic progress in a way that undermines education’s aim to socialize good citizens, particularly in the postwar context wherein courting young people to invest in the nation in order to ensure peace and stability is central to both the government and international interests. I now shift my attention to how people articulate educational distinction in order to parse out how it is contributing to people’s sense of belonging and citizenship.

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