Dark side of democracy

KATHMANDU, Nepal — Dr. Roshan Raut had a life to save and little time to waste as he raced on his motorcycle toward the hospital. 

But between him and the hospital, young men wielding clubs and knives attacked any motorist or cyclist trying to run their blockades. Called a bandh, this one in June was another in many violent protests that shut down entire swaths of the country on a whim. This time, Maoists protested the alleged murder of a member of their youth militia: It was later revealed he had committed suicide.

Unspoken rules that previously governed the conduct of bandh — safe passage for journalists, U.N. vehicles and doctors — have been discarded, as Raut learned when he was pulled from his motorcycle and beaten. Near the holy Boudhanath Stupa, the most revered Buddhist temple in Nepal, his motorcycle was set aflame.

“No one is safe," said Raut, a soft-spoken cardiologist, during a break between patient consultations. “Even ambulances with patients inside are getting attacked. I am worried about this trend. Now we are afraid to go to the hospital during bandhs.”

A bandh — from the Hindi word for “closed” — can spark from a strike over wages, a political party sending a message or a village demanding restitution in the aftermath of an auto accident. Bandh has been perfected in Kathmandu’s snaking streets, and the isolated hills and verdant plains that lie beyond. Bandhs have even gone viral — you can track them online with the Nepal Bandh Calendar.

Raut was one of many victims. Several days earlier, mobs protesting the death of a motorcyclist rampaged through the streets and smashed the windows of a school bus filled with children. When two Indian tourists traveling to Pokhara got stuck in a bandh last month, they were mistaken for kidnappers by local villagers and attacked. Eastern Nepal has witnessed 171 bandhs in the last year, with one district shut down for 81 days.

A bandh might excite the salivary glands of the activists slapped with bruises and fines after they protested the World Trade Organization in Seattle or the Republican National Convention in Manhattan. Used sparingly, bandhs can transform the masses into a force to be reckoned with.

But in Nepal, where bandhs have cost an already impoverished nation 12 billion rupees ($1.6 million) in the first 120 days of this year alone, they reveal the dark side of people power. Nepal’s poorest citizens are already suffering amid political instability, economic mismanagement and skyrocketing commodity prices. Each day that bandhs close an artery of commerce it is the common people — shopkeepers, taxi drivers, truckers, farmers — who lose tens of millions of desperately needed rupees.

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