(source:
INSN.org)
Madi's Mass-Murder and the Future of Maobaad
Tuesday's setting sun was witness to the cremation of thirteen bodies by the banks of the Reyu, the river that waters the beautiful, fertile, neglected valley of Madi on the far side of the Royal Chitwan National Park. Those cremated were among the 38 who died on the spot when Maoists exploded a bucketful of sulphur compound under a passenger bus packed with 150 people.
Traveling in the bus were a dozen army men in civilian clothing moving between the military posts of Baghai and Bankatta, many of them carrying weapons. For more than a year, the villagers of Madi had been warned by the Maoists not to allow this. It was impossible for the villagers to make such demands of the RNA, however; and the rebels, who seem to be in a violent post-political phase, obviously do not care how many civilians they kill in order to get at a few soldiers.
Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoist chieftan, apologized on Tuesday via email to media houses. But it is not clear from earlier gestures of contrition how much his writ runs any more among the young men whose heads he has filled with the romance of violence and in whose hands he has placed guns and explosives.
Madi is a convenient valley for Maoist activity, surrounded as it is by jungle on three sides, and separated from Bihar by one low range.
To the north, the rebel supply line passes through the national park, across the East-West Highway, past Pithuwa, up to the Chepang Hills, into Dhading and Gorkha beyond. What is known is that the Maoist commander of Madi Valley, carrying the name of Kshitij, was replaced a month ago. It is thought this might be related to the rift that has driven the rebels from top to bottom into 'Baburam' and 'Prachanda' camps.
The week previous to the bus attack, there had been extraordinary nighttime activity on the valley's trails, with dogs constantly barking into the darkness. The wire-guided improvised explosive device (IED) was put in place on Monday night. The rebels placed the sulphur compound ? a chemical used in rock blasting ? in a ten-litre bucket and buried it under sand at the point at which the bus would divert into the dry bed of the Bandar Mudhe stream to avoid a broken-down bridge. Thick intertwined red and black wires snaked away under the sand and through kaans grassland for about two hundred metres to the point at which someone holding a trigger ? most likely a flash mechanism ? would have watched that morning as two tractors drove over the device, followed by one bus making its way up-valley to Baghai, and finally the down-valley bus, crammed with passengers inside and on the roof.
The Shaligram Travels bus, license plate Na 1 Kha 3245, enters the depression of the dry river bed at about 7:55 am. The terrorist presses the switch, and the explosive goes off right under the central chassis. It rips through the passenger cabin, lifts the vehicle high into the air and deposits its shattered remains back on the ground in an explosion of smoke, dust and sand. Underneath, amidst the screams of the mutilated and the moans of the dying, water slowly fills the gaping cavity made by the bomb, as if it were a well. The men who had left their seats to the children, women and elderly and chosen to travel on the roof mostly survive. They are blown away and land on the sand at some distance. Those inside the main cabin do not stand a chance.
Because of incessant flash floods and attacks by wild animals, Red Cross committees are very active in each of Madi's four Village Development Committees. And so within minutes of the explosion, the Red Cross unit from the next-door Tharu village of Kirtanpur was at the site and was soon joined by other units. "There were writhing bodies and torn limbs everywhere," recalled one lad, part of a students' group that cordoned off the site. The local health post ambulance, which could fit four of the wounded, immediately made off for Bharatpur Hospital two hours away across the national park, and buffalo carts were pressed into service to carry others.
By the time the military rescue unit arrived from nearby national park, the locals had already dealt with the civilian wounded, and only the dead lay about. Of the 12 army men who had been on board, three died, four were wounded and the surviving five had dragged their companions to a nearby knoll and waited for rescue. Their guns and magazines were collected by the villagers and handed over to the RNA rescue team.
Soldiers, as citizens, can travel by public transportation anywhere they like when they are off-duty. All over the country, however, they also do so while on patrol, sometimes in civilian clothing with their M-16 rifles under wrap. This amounts to using civilians as shields against ambush by Maoists, who are increasingly relying on landmines instead of launching frontal attacks against military positions. In using public transportation, the soldiers are also presumably relying on some level of humanity amongst the rebels, assuming that they would not willingly endanger civilians. The soldiers from the Baghai post, for instance, may not have reckoned that they and their fellow travelers would encounter a rebel depraved enough to press a switch and watch a public bus packed to the brim with villagers blown to smithereens. Nirmal Sapkota flies to Bharatpur to discover the fate of his wife and child Nirmal Sapkota flies to Bharatpur to discover the fate of his wife and child
Krishna Chaudhary, an active social worker known by one and all up and down the Madi valley, kept the master lists of the deceased and the wounded on two separate sheets. There they were in the list of the departed: Tharu, Gurung, Magar, Chepang, Bahun, Chhetri, and one Shrestha; a Little Nepal of migrants who had settled this fertile, picture-postcard valley originally inhabited only by the Tharu. In Chaudhary's list of the deceased was noted: 'Woman, wife of Nirmal Sapkota' and 'Child, son of Nirmal Sapkota'. I had flown with Nirmal Sapkota to Bharatpur from Kathmandu earlier that day. When we landed, he had headed straight to Bharatpur Hospital by riksa in search of his wife and son. He would have already learnt the terrible truth.
Says Krishna Chaudhary, "Madi has a very close-knit community, because it is isolated from the rest of the country by the national park and its regulations. We suffer flash floods and the trepidations of wild animals. We have evolved the culture of looking after each other. Each villager of Madi feels the pain of what happened on that bus, because we are a special kind of community within Nepal." Looking despondently over his list, Chaudhary says, "The people we pulled out of the wreckage were all people we knew ?18 from Kalyanpuri, 17 from Ayodhyapuri. There was a family of four from Jhapa, one from Dhading and one from Lalitpur."
The attack occurred Monday, 6 June. It is now Tuesday, and the wounded are in Bharatpur Hospital and Chhauni Military Hospital in Kathmandu.
The bodies of the dead have been dispatched for cremation, each according the rituals of the individual's community. Two Chepang passengers are said to be still missing. An eight-year-old boy's body is found in the sand, headless and unclaimed. Already in a state of decomposition, he is buried under a foot of earth which is then covered with a straw mat extracted from the wreckage; he is left there to await a claimant. Scattered about are several infant's bonnets, scores of chappals of children and adults alike. There are mangoes and a bagful of sel-rotis scattered in the sand, someone's koseli from Madi to a relative far away.
The bodies are all gone, and only the carcass of the bus remains. The inside is a mass of twisted steel, protruding beams and bloodied seat cushions. The twin-beams of the main chassis are bent like putty.
Nobody in the center of the passenger cabin survived, the rest of the seated passengers were severely injured. Everyone crowded into the driver's section in the front seems to have survived, including the driver himself, 21-year-old Bikram Mahato. Only his body aches, he says, but he walks about as if in a daze. "Why did they do this to a public transport bus?" is all he is able to express. His fellow villager and Red Cross volunteer, Ram Chandra Gurou, is eloquent in his plea: "Madi was such a peaceful place. What had we done to deserve this? Nobody has cooked a meal here since yesterday, we are in such shock. Let not something like this happen ever again, anywhere in Nepal."
A Mahindra jeep hired by Ramanuj Bhandari carries the body of his mother Sumitra Bhandari, 52, to Gaidakot by the banks of the Narayani for cremation. She had gone to her sister's for a wedding. On their way back from the same wedding, a family of Lamsals ? father Dinesh, mother Ganga, and daughters Dipa and Dipika ? all perished and were cremated by the Reyu on Tuesday. Four sons of Ram Chandra Subedi, a 56-year-old local activist for the Nepali Congress, are already deep into mourning ritual. His 80-year-old mother comes and sits by the four sons, while his bereaved wife stands alone, vacant-eyed and lost. Says the eldest son, Krishna Subedi, "Why do they ambush the public like this? And why does the army take public transportation?"
In the tenth year of their insurgency, the Maoists have carried out an attack that has killed more civilians than ever before. It has been claimed that of late politics has taken a back seat in their organisation as the military-minded hardliners have had the upper hand. But killing innocent civilians is not a military act: it is terrorism. The Madi murders, as one terrible incident, represent the continuous acts of violence perpetrated by the rebels upon the population; individual killings, maimings and acts of terror that force the people into shocked submission.
The abysmal record of the Royal Nepal Army when it comes to civilian casualties is an issue in itself, and there is also a list of those culpable for having brought the country to this pass, from the royal palace to the political party leaderships and every institution in between. But more than any other person or institution, it is the Maoists who have been responsible for stealing the people's future. They have made political killings and violence commonplace in Nepal. They have dragged the army out of the barracks. They have made the monarchy arrogant and ambitious. They have weakened Nepal internationally and vis-à-vis India. And, most importantly, they have exploited Nepal's under-educated rural youth, tempting them with the promise of change imposed by the power of the gun, shunning the much harder but more fulfilling path of social revolution.
The Maoists have changed the nature of the country, and at this late date their leadership obviously understands that the 'revolution' is slipping out of their hands even though their cadre may for the moment have the run of the countryside. But does Pushpa Kamal Dahal have what it takes to come in from the cold? He has apologized often enough, as he did after the Madi mass-murder, but his fighters seem not to be marching to his drum. He has told them, he says, to allow political parties to function on the ground. They do not listen. He says "Do not target civilians," and they do. It is entirely possible that Pushpa Kamal knows he cannot beat the RNA and the existing international geopolitical alignments, but he does not have the strength or the courage to sue for peace. There is today a real question as to whether the fighters will heed the call of the high command. And it is quite likely that the ground-level fighters are unwilling to put down their guns because they know that they will be run out of the villages and the districts the moment they do so.
There are some who have always said in defence of the Maobaadi that "they have a point" when they call for social justice and the emancipation of the downtrodden. What very few of us did as the 'revolution' gathered steam, either out of fear for self or out of mistaken romanticism, was to stand up for ahimsa and challenge the central tenet of the Maobaadi rebellion: that it is justifiable to kill for a political goal. Reflecting the change in attitudes that augurs uncertain times ahead countrywide for the Maobaadi, one elder in Madi says, "They had some friends here. Now, they have none. Some people used to give them shelter. But now no one will." A letter in Kantipur daily on Thursday, written from Baghauda village in Madi, reads: "This question is particularly addressed to Prachanda, Baburam and Mahara: Why kill the people? You may or may not want to recall spending a full month in a particular part of Madi fourteen years ago. Do you remember who looked after you then? Just try and come back toMadi now, and you will see how the folks will chase you and your cadre away. They despise you?"
Despite their ultra-nationalist rhetoric, the Maoists are evolving into what can only be called anti-nationalists as they continue to kill civilians across the land. Let them not fall further into the abyss, into which they will drag all of Nepal. Let the Madi incident serve as a watershed for the Maoists. Let the horrified reaction of the populace bring about a realization to the rebel leadership that they have done the Nepali people grave injustice. That they have tried an unprincipled and impractical short cut to social change by seeking to force change at gunpoint. That they have helped militarise our society and that they have mistreated our trusting young. That there is no future in what they seek. That they must announce an absolute ban on attacks on civilians, followed soon by a willingness to lay down the gun. They must allow political parties to function in thevillages.
The mea culpa by Pushpa Kamal Dahal is not enough. To wipe the bloodstains from his hands, he must make a definitive move to bring his fighters and activists back to the realm of peaceful politics.
First, stop attacking civilians. Desist from the use of
assassinations, ambushes, landmines and IEDs. Make sure directives from the high command get implemented on the scorched ground. Next, drop the gun.
Kanak Mani Dixit is editor of Himal Southasian.
(A shorter version of this article appears in the Nepali Times of 10 June, Friday.)
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