"Peaceful banda"

A stern-looking woman with her hair tied up in a bun enters a pasal in Patan, and leaves a printed letter on the counter. The young girl reads the demand for Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000 to finance the Tesro Jana Andolan. The shopkeeper says she doesn’t understand. “What don’t you understand, haven’t you heard of the Maobadi?” asks the woman in a threatening voice, and warns her to have the money by tomorrow, or else have her shop trashed. This is not a fancy store, it is a mom-and-pop kirana pasal. The girl looks at the other customers with utter terror in her eyes.

We saw it throughout the late 1990s as Nepal’s hard-won democracy degenerated into the messy horse-trading of coalition politics. Any time the kangresis wanted to dislodge the eh-maleys from power they punished the people by inflicting bandas. And when the kangresis got to power the eh-maleys would retaliate in kind. The Lalitpur Jilla Hulak, I remember, got it from both sides. When the NC was in power, the UML carried out todfod on its windows, and when the UML was in power hired goons of the NC broke all the windows. What the Maoists are doing now is no different, it just has the threatening edge of more extreme violence and bhautik karbahi.

Because a banda is the protest of choice for all big parties in Nepal, it is classified as a 'peaceful' form of protest even though it works by the use of terror. You spread the fear of a smashed windshield to ground all buses, taxis, private cars and motorcycles. You send goons door-to-door to threaten shops to close so that the banda can be declared 'successful' and 'peaceful'.

Even bicycles aren’t spared. Today, a band of 14-year-olds manning a tyre barricade at Sat Dobato asked bicyclists to get off. I got off my  bicycle to push it around the Lord of the Flies kids armed with sharpened bamboo staves. Further on, I passed a tea shop to overhear Baburam Bhattarai telling an FM radio interviewer that this was a 'non-violent' agitation and it would go on until the prime minister resigned.

Out in Balwatar, the besieged Madhav Nepal seems in no mood to oblige. So, the country is headed for a long-drawn confrontation in which the more vulnerable sections of Nepalis will suffer the most. A restaurant that has been forced to close indefinitely and therefore has no income for the unforeseeable future is told to feed 500 people masu-bhat every night. A butcher in Kalimati had just killed two khasis, when a bunch of YCLs came and took the carcasses away. They gave the man Rs 2,000, saying: “So you won’t say we stole from you.” The goats actually cost Rs 6,000 each.

For the organizers, the problem with 'indefinite bandas' is that after a few days the law of diminishing returns takes over. Frustration, necessity and boredom reach a critical threshold where it begins to overcome the fear factor. And when people start coming out despite the terror threat, it has a snowball effect as more and more people venture out. The organiser then has to quickly find a face-saving way to call off a banda lest it be labeled 'unsuccessful'.

Some of the Maoist-mobilised masses themselves seem to have got too bored to stay. Sagarmatha TV on Sunday broadcast the scene of a long line of people who decided to head back to their farms to plant corn. So, today the Maoists have prevented other TV crews from filming at Thankot. Tempers are flaring even between the Maoist cadre, a fistfight broke at Shahanshah sports complex over turf and in Kalanki there was a heated exchange over rotten rice.

A bunch of Maoists entered the offices of an internet service provider and demanded rudely why they were working. “Don’t you know we have called a banda?” they yelled and threatened to close down the servers. Fortunately, they were in a hurry to join a julus, and till the time of this posting they haven’t.

Housing and feeding the andolankaris has won the Maoists no friends among the capital’s traders and middle class. A new block of apartments in Tahachal that had just been furnished is occupied by 2,000 karyakartas. Most hotels in Kathmandu are feeding between 500-1,000 out-of-towners bussed in for the banda because if they refused the Maoists would have demanded to be given rooms. A church in Jawlakhel, boarding schools, factories, have all been forcibly turned into dorms. No one is talking to the press about all this  because they are afraid.

The influx of so many people has overburdened an already crowded city. Water tankers are allowed to ply to quench the thirst of tens of thousands at the street sit-ins, and demonstrators have been seen drinking straight off the pipes. Many have fallen sick and there is the threat of a typhoid epidemic. Nepal Telecom reports it has detected a spike in 55,000 roaming mobile users since May Day, and this has meant that it is impossible to make a call.

Pregnant women, elderly sick and newborns all trudge to hospitals while blue-plated cars, journalists in yellow vests and Maoist vehicles, flying their signature red flags, zoom about the empty streets.

Monday afternoon there was a brief hailstorm as I bicycled back, the kids at the Sat Dobato barricades had all melted away as I took shelter under the awning of a padlocked store. I got home to hear the Breaking News on tv: “The second day of the Maoist indefinite banda passed off peacefully all over the country.”

See also:

Pictures from the banda

Die Nepal Banda Die , a facebook group for a banda-free Nepal