Hours after Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal
Dahal submitted his resignation to President Ram Baran Yadav in
Kathmandu on 4 May, highway blockades that had closed the country for
two weeks were suddenly lifted. The Tharus called off their banda of
the Tarai, the Limbuwans suspended their agitation in the east, and
even the sukumbasis who had set up road blocks to demand land rights
went back to playing carom.

It was like Moses had parted the
Red Sea. The floodgates were open and literally thousands of trucks and
buses stuck at the Indian border were moving up to Kathmandu. People
stranded in the east were moving west, and those marooned in the west
were moving east. The normalcy of everything was unnerving this week as
we once more savoured the luxury of travelling unescorted across Nepal
in the daytime.

For the past month that we have been on the
road with nepa-laya's 'Yuddha Chitra' documentary and 'Never Again'
book tour, there have been bandas, chukka jams and curfews snapping at
our heals. After a touch-and-go tour of eastern Nepal, we traversed the
entire Tarai from east to west, from Bhadarpur to Mahendranagar. The
government fell just in time, otherwise we were ready to fall back on
our Plan B: to drive from Birganj to Nepalganj via Indian territory.

Which
has got us all thinking: this country seems to run better when there is
no government. Why else would everything get back to normal when the
prime minister resigns? Answer: governments make lots of mistakes, so
if there is no government there are fewer mistakes.

And we
should finally start calling bandas by what they really are: acts of
terrorism. There is nothing voluntary or spontaneous about a hartal, it
has long lost Gandhi's civil disobedience character. It is now enforced
by a handful of lumpen hired goons who terrorise road-users. It is a
form of political protest that works by punishing ordinary citizens to
make one's presence felt.

A banda is also suicidal, it hurts
people from the very community that calls for it. A bicyclist is run
over, villagers block the highway for three days demanding
compensation. In those three days the village economy that depends on
the highway loses much more than the compensation the family would get.
But no one cares because in this free-for all democracy, freedom is all
about rights and has nothing to do with a citizen's responsibility.

In
BBC's Sajha Sabal in the west during the Tahruhat banda, locals grilled
Laxman Tharu about his car and how come he was flying around the
country, while people on the ground had to suffer the consequences of
his
shutdowns. He gave the usual platitude about how "the liberation of the people came at a cost".

From
Butwal, heading west towards Dang we pass Madhyabindu the midway
milestone on the East-West highway that marks 507km in both directions
to Kakarbhitta and Mahakali. All along this forested stretch for 100 km
or
more, trees have been chopped down to block the highway. The
Tharuhat banda was a great time to log the Tarai's remaining forest, it
seems. Whoever felled these mighty trees must have made a killing
selling it to
saw mills.

Travelling by day, one sees the
effect of the past three years of post-conflict lawlessness. On either
side of the highway, there are kilometers upon kilometers of squatter
shacks of sukumbasis. We felt bad for the abject living conditions of
the landless until we find out that only a few of them are kamaiyas.
Most are hill settlers brought down here before the elections last year
by the Maoists to pad up their vote bank. They all have property in the
mountains of Darchula, Baitadi, Dadeldhura and Doti to the north. This
is sort of their winter home.

Seven thousand illegal settlers
have occupied the eastern edge of the Sukla Phanta Wildlife Reserve,
using a dispute between the 700 or so villagers that were evicted in
1999 to make way for park expansion. At the rate the Tarai's land grab
is going on there won't be any forests left, and now even the national
parks are being encroached upon.

The lifting of the bandas
shows how quickly life springs back to normal. The fish restaurants at
the Chisapani Bridge over the Karnali are full of bus passengers again,
the trucks carrying boulder and sand to India are
once more trying
to get through the border without paying anything, the night buses from
Attariya to Baitadi are back in service and passengers are sitting on
the roof to avoid the stifiling heat inside.

In the end it will
be the fabled resilience of Nepalis that will save us. Our capacity to
withstand and adapt to any hardship. After the last screening of Kesang
Tseten and Prem BK's documentary 'Frames of War' in
Mahendranagar on
Thursday the audience made up of college students, civil servants and
political leaders sat in silence for a moment before bursting into
spontaneous applause.

Ever family here in the far west was
affected in some way by the conflict. But the war was just another
adversity people here had to grapple with, and they say that having
survived that, highway closures are not so bad.

Previous EAST-WEST travelblogs
Courtesy: www.nepalitimes.com