Constructing the new Nepal: Religious Billboards in Nepal’s Second People’s Movement

Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 35 | Number 1 Article 8 July 2015 Constructing the new Nepal: Religious Billboards in Nepal’s Second People’s Movement Michael Baltutis University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Baltutis, Michael (2015) "Constructing the new Nepal: Religious Billboards in Nepal’s Second People’s Movement," Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: Vol. 35: No. 1, Article 8. Available at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol35/iss1/8 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized Constructing the new Nepal: Religious Billboards in Nepal’s Second People’s Movement Acknowledgements This research was conducted with the assistance of a Fulbright grant (2005-2006). Many thanks to Binod Pokharel, Dina Bangdel, and Ramesh Parajuli, who assisted me with the translations of the billboards, as well as to Jessica Vantine Birkenholtz and Megan Adamson Sijapati, who provided comments on an earlier version of this paper. This research article is available in Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol35/iss1/8 Constructing the New Nepal: Religious Billboards in Nepal’s Second People’s Movement Michael Baltutis Accompanying King Gyanendra’s February First, 2005, efforts to consolidate his loosening grip on national power, the royal Nepali government raised a series of highly visible billboards throughout the cities of the Kathmandu Valley. A small subset of these boards were explicitly religious, encouraging Nepal’s citizens to perform their patriotic bhakti (devotion), karma (action), and dharma (duty). This rhetorical support of a ‘universal’ Hinduism contradicted the inclusivism that was widely regarded as part and parcel of the ‘new Nepal’ and resulted in a contradictory vision of the same: a modern secular nation composed of citizens, rather than of subservient subjects, unified by and working together with a Hindu monarch for the betterment of the nation. This conflict contributed to the widespread skepticism with which these signs were met, indicated by the multiple acts of graffiti, vandalism, and outright destruction brought against them, and by their removal by the 24 | HIMALAYA Spring 2015 royal government fifteen months later. This paper will detail the form and content of these religious billboards and argue that this religious language was one of the reasons behind their failure to deliver a message amenable to the middle class citizens of Kathmandu, as diverse parties throughout contemporary Nepal worked to define the multivalent ‘new Nepal.’ Keywords: Nepal, politics, religion, media, royalty. Introduction “It is our faith that we will all join together for the construction of a strong and successful new Nepal that is firmly committed to constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy.” saṁvaidhānik rājtantra ra bahudalīya prajātantra jagmā adiera sabal ra samunnata nava nepāl nirmāṇ mā hāmī sabai juṭnu pardcha bhanne hāmro viśvās cha – Billboard on Kathmandu’s Kanthipath Road, attributed to Śrī 5 Gyānendra The multivalent term ‘new Nepal’ (N. nayā Nepāl) used in the billboard quoted above has become the watchword of parties in many quarters of Nepali society to name the social, developmental, and political processes currently at work in post-monarchical Nepal.1 Due to the official processes of bringing to an end the Nepali monarchy in 2006-2008 and the absence of a constitution since 2006, many citizens anticipate this desired ‘new Nepal’ while transitioning from an implied ‘old Nepal,’ a nation that was ruled by an active monarchy and racked by a decade-long civil war with Maoist rebels. The issues at stake in the new Nepal are generally those that had been rejected in the forty-point demand that the Maoist party had attempted to negotiate in 1996: nationality, democracy, and livelihood (Hutt 2004: 5, 285-287). Similarly, scholarship on the new Nepal, in positing and predicting the nation’s trajectory, builds off of these same concerns, taking up such additional issues as freedom of the press (Hutt 2006), the political power of indigenous groups (Hangen 2007), the role of informal institutions in the political exclusion of marginalized groups (Lawoti 2008), the sociology of the conflict itself (Lawoti and Pahari 2010), and the 1990 Constitution that reinforced the institutional problems to which Maoist rebels and social and ethnic activists responded (Malagodi 2013). Much of this scholarship specifically utilizes the term ‘new Nepal’ as it accounts for, projects, and occasionally prescribes the characteristics of the democratizing nation and largely focuses on the concept of inclusion (N. samābeśi) that counters the “monolithic” Nepal whose constitution “had been blamed for institutionalizing, legitimizing, and engendering patterns of exclusion and discrimination” (Malagodi 2013: 3).2 In his 2010 book New Nepal: The Fault Lines, strategic analyst Nishchal Pandey describes the new Nepal as an “inclusive and democratic” nation that includes “the concept of federalism based on ethnicity” (Pandey 2010: 38, 44). The new Nepal, Pandey writes, represents a “‘positive transformation’ of the state from a centralized, unitary, feudal rule of only a certain privileged section of the society to an inclusive, federal and a truly democratic republic…” (Pandey 2010: 2). Similarly, journalist Rita Manchanda emphasizes the shift in national conflict from one between monarchy and democratic forces to one dealing with ethnic and regional issues where inclusion becomes key (Manchanda 2006: 5035; Manchanda 2008; Snellinger 2009). In separate articles on the education and performance of Maoist rebels and organizations, Kristine Eck (2010: 44) and Amanda Snellinger (2010: 80) see a welcoming of traditionally excluded groups and individuals as one of the primary features of the new Nepal desired by opponents of the Nepali monarchy. Despite the high degree of consistency among these applications of the term, Mahendra Lawoti and Anup Pahari warn that it functions as little more than a metaphor that entails “no more than a skeletal consensus on what a ‘New Nepal’ means in practical terms, or how to get there” (Lawoti and Pahari 2010: 319). The new Nepal, then, represents the process of constructing a nation along more openly democratic lines more than it represents any single static moment in time. Before its dissolution, Nepal’s royal government communicated its own vision of the new Nepal through its (...truncated)