ON THE EAST-WEST HIGHWAY: It's a normal day between Dhalkebar and Lahan, two highway towns in eastern Tarai. By late morning, four different bandas have already been announced.
A family of farmers is enforcing the first one. With a loan from the Agricultural Development Bank, they had bought a buffalo few months ago. It was killed by a hit-and-run truck. With their main source of income gone, the family has blocked the road to demand compensation.
Second, ex-Maoist Matrika Yadav has called for the blockade of the national highway to pressurise the DDC to release funds for a local school. Why the DDC is holding back the money, if they are, no one knows. It could be that the school committee wasn't keeping proper accounts.
The third highway hartal is against a search operation conducted by the APF. Since the beginning of the Maoist insurgency, villages along the Kamala-Balan River had been left to their own devices. They were considered too dangerous to patrol. Now, the APF has begun to try to bring this lawless land into the ambit of state control. But the survival of too many villagers here is tied with criminal activities of armed gangs. The banda is so strict, only a wedding procession is allowed to pass. There is no explanation for the fourth impromptu barricade put up near the shade of a tree where a couple of half-naked teenagers are smoking beedis.
Welcome to the banda capital of Federal Democratic Republic of New Nepal (FDRNN). By eight in the evening, Lahan is shut down. Eateries that serviced long-distance truckers and passengers wear a deserted look. Under the duel stress of rampant lawlessness and unpredictable load shedding, towns in the Tarai have lost the characteristic commotion of late summer evenings when the local intelligentsia debate national and international politics over lassi and pan.
Pahadis and now also fashionable Madhesis have all migrated to Kathmandu. "We don't stock good quality leather chappals anymore," explains the owner of the boot house in the bajar. "Everyone who could afford them have gone to Kathmandu."
The Rauniyars were the first ones to transform Lahan from a sleepy village to a thriving bajar. The Rauniyar Dharmshala is the most popular community building. The Shardas turned Lahan into a functioning town. Then came the Chaudharys and Yadavs from surrounding villages as the settlement gained prominence. All of them lived happily with Bahun government officials posted here and Chhetri jamindars coming down from Kathmandu once in a while.
The fourth wave brought Pahadi entrepreneurs from the hills that laid the foundation of service industry and enjoyed lucrative government contracts as the town burgeoned. Once the Pahadi community gained a critical mass, government officials began to invest part of their earnings here in land and buildings. Remittance-beneficiaries from the inaccessible interior of the district are the most recent settlers.
Today, Lahan is a town with overflowing drains and an overpowering odour of sewage. At a roadside tea-stall, the debate is over who would be a better bet to put an end to all this anarchy: the military or the Maoists.
Even the town where the Madhes movement was born seems to have lost all hope. That perhaps is the real cause of the spreading lawlessness: an affronted sense of fairness and loss of hope that the system will correct itself. It prompts everyone to take the law in their own hands. The looming anarchy has begun to frighten people into the embrace of the devils they know, and have learnt to live with.
