THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

THE SPECTACLE OF POWER:

COERCIVE PROTEST AND THE PROBLEM OF DEMOCRACY IN NEPAL

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO

THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES

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IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF
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DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
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DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY
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BY

GENEVIEVE LAKIER

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

JUNE 2014
 UMI Number: 3628085

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 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I have been fortunate to have had a great deal of help in completing this project. I

would like to thank the Fulbright Hays DDRA Program for funding the research and the

Josephine de Karman Foundation for funding part of the writing of the dissertation. Geeta

Manandhar provided helpful language tutoring and Devendra Neupane provided

invaluable research assistance. I could not have completed the ethnography without him.

Prakriti K.C. and Mike Gill provided support and advice while I was in Kathmandu, and

Mark Liechty provided the same while I was in Chicago. John D. Kelly, William

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Mazzarella, John Comaroff, and Beth Povinelli supervised the research, and provided

critical support, advice, and critique along the way. Amy Cohen, Biella Coleman read
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drafts—many times!—and helped me refine my arguments. I owe them both a great debt.
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And of course, my husband, Omar Kutty, lived this dissertation with me, and helped me

keep faith through the long process of writing. What follows is a product of many people’s

labor. The mistakes, of course, are all my own.

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 TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ii

LIST OF FIGURES v

INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF THE BANDH 1

The Problem of Spectacle 16

The Ethnography of Democracy 21

Alternative Democracy 25

Performing Ethnography 33

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Plan of Chapters 37

CHAPTER ONE: THE GENEALOGY OF THE ACT IE 42

Dharmic Protest 45
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Protest in a Hindu Kingdom 65

The Ironies of the Development State 84

Conclusion 93
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CHAPTER TWO: THE HIGHWAY AND THE CHAKKA JAM 96

Development and the Project of Road Building in Nepal 105

Negotiating the Risks of the Road 116

The Moral Economy of the Development State 129

Contentious Citizenship 134

CHAPTER THREE: SHOWING POWER BY SHUTTING DOWN 138

The Language Rights Bandh 141

The Power—and Limits—of Spectacles of Power 158

The Tension between Spectacle and Voice 165

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 Conclusion 170

CHAPTER FOUR: STUDENT POLITICS 172

AND THE PROBLEM OF VIOLENCE

The History of Student Politics in Nepal 179

The Petrol Price Protests 189

The Ambiguity of Violence 201

Conclusion 208

CHAPTER FIVE: NATTAK, RUMOR, AND THE BANDH 211

The Close Link Between Speech and Violence 216

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The Difficulties of the Democratic Public Sphere 234

Voice and its Problems

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CHAPTER SIX: ANTI-BANDH DISCOURSES AND THE 254

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STRUGGLE OVER THE DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC IN NEPAL

The Public Hearing 258

The Erasure of the Political 269

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The Intrusion of Politics 282

CONCLUSION: AGAIN, THE PROBLEM OF THE BANDH 290

BIBLIOGRAPHY 296

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 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Tourist Bus 5

Figure 2: Torch rally organized on the eve of valley shutdown (New Road) 148

Figure 3: Student union cartoon 188

Figure 4: Empty bus park, Kathmandu, first day of bandh 231

Figure 5: Anti-bandh cartoon 232

Figure 6: Anti-bandh cartoon 233

Figure 7: Anti-bandh cartoon 244

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Figure 8: Tulsi Lal Amatya, flag march, Kathmandu, February 18, 1990 251

Figure 9: Public hearing diagram IE 263

Figure 10: Warning banner, Ratna Park, People’s Movement II 286

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 INTRODUCTION:
THE PROBLEM OF THE BANDH

“Power manifests itself in the ability to impose one’s fictions upon the world… The point
is not that anyone is deceived by the charade, but that everyone is forced either to
participate in it or to watch it silently.”
Stephen Greenblatt

On Thursday, September 18th, 2003 in the Gregorian calendar, or the first day in

the month of Ashwin in the year 2060 in the more commonly used national calendar of

Bikram Sambat,1 the kingdom of Nepal closed down. Throughout the country, public life

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came to a halt. Schools shut their doors and factories ceased their operations. Shops

lowered their shutters and traffic on the national highways disappeared. In Kathmandu,
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Nepal’s capital city, the cars, motorbikes and buses that usually clogged its narrow

thoroughfares disappeared from the roads. Along the wide boulevards which faced the
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Narayanhiti Palace, home to Nepal’s royal family, street cart vendors sold popped corn and

snacks to the many passersby, milling about on the suddenly empty streets. They were the
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only form of commerce to be seen.

In other, more residential neighborhoods of Kathmandu, the absence of traffic and

the shuttered shops produced an atmosphere that was uncannily quiet. In the center of the

city, however, the sheer numbers of people on the streets evoked the scene during Dasein,

Nepal’s most important national holiday, when crowds would also gather around the palace

to await the blessing of the king, and the ordinary activity of the city would be similarly

suspended. The cessation of public activity on this day was not, however, the consequence

1
Nepal has used the Bikram Sambat calendar to mark dates since the reign of Prime Minister Chandra
Shamsher (1901-1929 A.D.). Bikram Sambat is 56 years, 8 months and 17 days ahead of the Gregorian
calendar. Although for most dates, I will provide only Gregorian dates; when relevant, I will provide the date
in Bikram Sambat as well.

1
of either religious decree or government calendar, but instead was evidence of the political

protest known in Nepal as a bandh. The word bandh in Nepali, and in many other North

Indian languages, means closed. Bandhs can therefore be translated as closures; during

successful bandhs like this one, public life throughout much of the nation closes down.

Buses and taxis stop operating. School children stay at home. And at least the major

shopping districts of the major towns, like Kathmandu, remain shuttered at the behest of

the party calling the bandh.

Bandhs are familiar features of life in the South Asian subcontinent. A 2005 United

Nations Development Project report asserted that bandhs “have become an inexorable part

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of the political culture of South Asia” (UNDP 2005:16). Indeed, in the wake of Indian
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Independence in 1947, bandhs emerged as an important and relatively common mechanism

for the expression of political opposition to the policies of the postcolonial Indian, Pakistani
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and Bangladeshi states (Spodek 1989:766; UNDP 2005; Lukose 2005). They were also

used on occasion to protect other acts or institutions. In 1989, for example, a Muslim youth
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group organized a bandh of the city of Bombay to protest the publication of Salman

Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses.2

In Nepal, by contrast, bandhs were relatively rare events prior to 1990, when the

popular uprising known as the People’s Movement (Jan Andolan) swept from power the

royalist Panchayat regime that had governed Nepal from 1961 to 1990 and enabled the

establishment, in its place, of a system of parliamentary democracy. The repressiveness of

the Panchayat regime made it extremely risky, and often logistically difficult, to organize

2
Asghar Ali Engineer, “Anti Rushdie Disturbances in Bombay,” Economic and Political Weekly, Aug. 11,
1989:492-494.

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and enforce protests of this kind.3 This is not to say that the protest was unknown in Nepal

prior to 1990. Despite the repressiveness of the regime, groups in Nepal did, on occasion,

organize bandhs to demonstrate their opposition to the Panchayat regime, and to demand

concessions from the state. Bandhs also played an important role in the People’s Movement

(Ogura 2001; Brown 1996:214). By enabling those otherwise unwilling to come to the

streets in more active protest to participate in the uprising simply by closing their shops

and refraining from activity, the bandhs of the People’s Movement widened the sphere of

its popular participation and appeared to demonstrate, T. Louise Brown argues, “popular

opposition to the Panchayat System in an incontrovertible manner.” (Brown 1996:214).

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Nevertheless, it was the new freedoms of speech and assembly guaranteed by the
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1990 Democratic Constitution that allowed bandhs to emerge as a common, even routine,

tactic of political assertion and demand in democratic Nepal. Leftist parties and their
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affiliated student unions organized literally dozens of bandhs in the 1990s to dramatize

their opposition to the policies of the Nepali Congress government. Other, non-party,
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groups also called bandhs on occasion. So too did the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist),

which in 1996 officially declared a “People’s War” against what it claimed to be the “feudal

and reactionary” democratic regime (Sharma 2004:37-38).

The September 18th bandh was the result of a Maoist “call” (arvhaan) for a three-

day bandh. The Maoists called the bandh after peace talks between the rebels and the

government broke down. According to a public statement issued jointly by two senior

Maoist officials—the party chairman, Commander Prachanda, and Dr. Baburam Bhattarai,

one of the leading Maoist strategists—the bandh was intended to promote a range of

3
For more details on this history see Chapter 1.

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revolutionary goals, ranging from the specific to the general. These included: the

“establish[ment] of a republican Nepal,” the “dissol[ution] of the mercenary Royal Nepal

Army” and the “guarantee [of] education, health & employment as fundamental rights to

all” (CPN(Maoist) 2003a).

As was generally the case when the Maoists called for closure, the bandh was

extremely successful in shutting down public life throughout the country, not just on

September 18 but for the additional two days designated as bandh. Schools, both public

and private, suspended classes for the duration of the bandh. Shops in Kathmandu and in

other cities also shut down. Even domestic air travel, usually unaffected by bandhs, was

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suspended for the three days of closure. Only international flights continued to arrive and
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take off as scheduled from the international airport in Kathmandu, and even these were not

unaffected by the protest. Although tourists were conventionally exempt from the
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constraints of closure, passengers on these flights were nonetheless forced to travel to the

airport on rickshaws laden with suitcases or in specially commissioned government buses

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because there were few, if any, taxi drivers who were willing to risk the wrath of the Maoist

organizers by continuing to operate during the bandh. The big red “Only Tourist” banners

plastered on the government buses meanwhile attempted to protect these vehicles from

Maoist retribution by making clear the limited scope of their operations during the bandh.

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Figure 1: Tourist Bus
Source: Himalayan Times, September 19, 2003
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The Maoist guerrillas hailed the success of the bandh as a “spontaneous show of

popular support” for the Maoist cause and proclaimed it to be “a turning point in the
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revolutionary movement of the country” (CPN(Maoist) 2003a). But in fact participation in

the bandh was not spontaneous; nor did it in any simple or transparent fashion signal

support for the Maoist cause. Instead, it was fear of Maoist retribution that led many, if not

most, people in Kathmandu and elsewhere throughout the country to take part in the bandh

by refraining from shopping, publicly working, going to school, or using mechanized

transportation.

In the days and weeks prior to the bandh, the Maoists had tacitly encouraged such

fear by engaging in a series of well-publicized “people’s actions” (jana karbahi) in

anticipation of the upcoming bandh. These included, among other things, the shooting of

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two commanders of the Royal Nepal Army in downtown Kathmandu, the looting of two

government owned banks, and raids on police posts throughout the country (CPN(Maoist)

2003a). The week before the bandh, Maoist guerrillas killed two activists associated with

the right-wing Rastriya Prajatantra Parishad, or National Democratic Party.4 News of this

last incident prompted even the smallest shops in the narrow lanes of the city to shut their

doors. In an interview held days before in the shopping district of New Road, a shopkeeper

told me, when I asked him if he would close: “Of course I will close. I close my shop for

every Maoist bandh. They come back the next day [if you don’t shut down]. How can I

risk it?”

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The threat associated with bandhs had become so pervasive that by 2003, most
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people closed down their shops and refrained from public activity even in the absence of

any visible signs of coercion—even sometimes on the basis of no more than a rumor that
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there would be bandh—despite the government’s promises of protection and compensation

for all property damaged and for all injuries sustained during the course of closures of this
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kind. It has become our habit (bani), our compulsion (bhadyata), people would tell me

when I asked why so many were willing to close down for causes they did not support.

Underlying this talk of habit and compulsion, however, was the fear and insecurity that

saturated public life in Nepal during this period.

Such insecurity was not without cause. Notwithstanding what they described as the

overall “peacefulness” of the event, the daily newspapers—which continued to circulate,

albeit in a somewhat limited fashion, in Kathmandu—reported multiple incidents of Maoist

violence targeted at businesses or vehicles that continued to operate despite the bandh.5 On

4
Kathmandu Post, Sept. 13, 2003.
5
Kathmandu Post, Sept. 19, 2003

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the second day of the bandh, for example, the Kathmandu Post reported that Maoist

guerrillas set fire to an ambulance that continued to operate despite the call to close.6 The

Nepali-language newspaper Rajdhani reported that in another part of the country, Maoist

supporters bombed part of a school (although only after evacuating the students) that

continued to hold classes during the bandh.7 In Lahan district, the Kathmandu Post reported

that even rickshaws were attacked for operating during the bandh, despite the longstanding

convention excluding bicycles and bicycle transport from the constraints of bandh.8 In

Bardiya district, a woman died in childbirth because the local ambulance service was

unwilling to transport her to the hospital in the midst of the closure, for fear of attracting

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the wrath of the Maoist forces.9
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Similar kinds of violence accompanied other Maoist bandhs as well, and in

somewhat different form, the various bandhs that the parliamentary parties, and other
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groups in Nepal, organized over the course of the democratic period. Indeed, although only

the guerrillas used bombs to enforce their bandhs, party bandhs could at times result in
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significant violence to person or property. During a bandh organized the previous April by

the student unions affiliated with the two largest parliamentary parties in Nepal, for

example, activists smashed the windshields of a bus in the Eastern town of Biratnagar, set

fire to a branch office of the government newspaper, the Gorkhapatra, and vandalized two

taxis and a motorcycle in Kathmandu. A student leader explained that the attack on the

Gorkhapatra offices was in retaliation against the failure of government media to give

wider coverage to the ongoing student movement of which the bandh was a part. “But this

6
Kathmandu Post, Sept. 19, 2003.
7
Rajdhani, Ashwin 3, 2060 v.s. (Sept. 20, 2003).
8
Kathmandu Post, Sept. 20, 2003.
9
Himalayan Times, Sept. 20, 2003.

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is only a small warning” he told the reporter.10 As this quote suggests, like the guerrillas,

the parliamentary parties, their affiliated student unions and (as we shall see) other non-

party groups in Nepal used violence and its threat to ensure widespread participation in

their protests, and to punish those who did not comply with their call to bandh, or close.

Acts of violence or symbolic violence—such as the placement of burning tires in the

middle of roads declared bandh—also attracted media attention, forcing news of the protest

onto the front pages of the national newspapers, and guaranteeing coverage on radio and

television. As a result, both parliamentary and extra-parliamentary groups in Nepal used

violence to ensure the success and visibility of their protest performances.

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Nevertheless, if an important mechanism of bandh enforcement, violence also
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undermined organizers’ claims that what the success of their protest demonstrated was

widespread popular support for their party or their cause. Claims of this kind were standard
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accompaniments of even the revolutionary Maoist bandhs, as were efforts by bandh

organizers to minimize, or in some cases entirely deny, the role that violence played in the
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enforcement of their bandhs and other protests. With respect to the September 18-20 bandh,

for example, not only did the guerrillas claim that the bandh represented a “massive public

endorsement of the immediate political agenda put forth by the Party” (CPN (Maoist)

2003a). They also defended against the newspaper reports of widespread violence during

the bandh by casting them as mere propaganda by supporters of the status quo. “Even

though the royal spin doctors have tended to minimize [the success of the bandh],…as

mere[ly the] result of coercion and fear,” a Maoist party bulletin proclaimed after the fact,

“that is just a lame excuse for their defeatist mentality. Certainly a minor section of the

10
Kathmandu Post, April 29, 2003

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reactionary classes would have been cowed down, which is natural in a class-divided

society, but that is beside the point” (CPN (Maoist) 2003a).

Few in Kathmandu, however, perceived the anxiety that pervaded much of the

capital during the bandh to be merely a result of the manipulation of “royal spin doctors.”

Nor, for that matter, was it only—or even primarily—a minor section of the reactionary

classes who were “cowed down” by the Maoist call for closure. In fact the bandh hit hardest

those who were most dependent upon daily wages to survive. On the first day of the bandh,

for example, porters gathered on the empty sidewalks in the Kathmandu neighborhood of

Gyaneshwor, awaiting, anxiously, any work that might appear. Meanwhile, in the Old Bus

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Park in the center of the city, an impromptu street fair of sidewalk vendors sprang up in the
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spaces usually reserved for buses. The scene was bustling, but many of the vendors at the

fair expressed bitterness about the circumstances that forced them to sell their goods in this
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dusty corner of the city. Vendors repeatedly told me they did not like defying the closure

but were forced to do so out of necessity. “What else am I going to do? I have to eat, don’t
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I?” a vendor called Tek Bahadur told me on the first morning of the closure.

In contrast, it was the upper and middle classes who were relatively protected by

their private resources from the disruptions caused by the general closure of public life.

Because many of the NGOs that powered Kathmandu’s development economy functioned

out of self-enclosed buildings—many of these located in the quieter, greener and more

secluded neighborhoods of the city—they could continue to operate during bandhs without

attracting public attention. Many in fact did so—at least when their employees were able

to get to work without the aid of public transportation. And although all the major retail

shops in Kathmandu closed for business during bandhs of this kind, behind locked gates,

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work frequently continued. On the first day of the bandh in Kathmandu, I spied employees

in one of the new supermarkets that catered to the new middle classes restocking shelves.

In a sweets shop nearby, workmen undertook minor construction and repairs inside the

shop, where they could not be easily seen from the street.

Rather than demonstrating the opposition between the “reactionary classes” and the

revolutionary masses, the Maoist bandh instead appeared to demonstrate the much greater

freedom those “reactionaries” who possessed the luxury of private space possessed to defy

the bandh in private, where no one could see—or retaliate. It demonstrated, in other words,

the gap between public behavior and private belief. The obvious disjuncture between what

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happened in public and what happened in private meant that few in Kathmandu were
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persuaded by the Maoist claim that the bandh represented a massive public endorsement

of the revolutionary agenda. Instead, they were well aware of the violence that saturated
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the performance and that enforced their own participation—at least when in the public

sphere, or in a space where their disobedience could be visible.

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The patent falseness of claims like the Maoist claim that the three-day bandh was a

“spontaneous show of support” for the People’s War made bandhs potent symbols of the

duplicity, not to mention the violence, of public life in Nepal during the democratic period.

Much ink was spilled in the local newspapers, excoriating the parties for organizing these

“useless” “meaningless” and duplicitous events. But castigating the parties for their

duplicity does not explain why political actors continued to call, and coercively enforce,

these demonstrations even long after they no longer persuaded very many that what they

actually demonstrated was genuine popular support. The continued popularity of the tactic

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suggests that these kinds of coercive, dramatic protests achieve other ends than merely

communicating a message of popular support that no one in Nepal really believes anymore.

This dissertation examines what these other ends may be, and the role that coercive

protests such as bandh play in democratic politics in Nepal more generally. It argues that

rather than unpersuasive demonstrations of popular support, what bandhs and protests like

them function to symbolically demonstrate is the power (rather than the popularity) of their

organizers. They do so by demonstrating their organizers’ ability to disrupt the ordinary

working of the public sphere, and their power to enforce widespread participation in the

protest even in the absence of widespread popular support. In this respect, bandhs operate

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much like the “transparently phony” state spectacles that the Syrian regime, under the
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leadership of Hafez al-Assad, used to shore up its political power (Wedeen 1999). As the

political scientist Lisa Wedeen has argued, by forcing its citizens to take part—either by
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performing in or by watching—its grandiose political spectacles, the Assad regime shored

up its political authority by demonstrating its ability, if not to make Syrians believe in the
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inflated rhetoric of the regime, at least to make them act in public “as if” they believed in

its rhetoric (Wedeen 1999:6). By engaging in what Wedeen calls a “politics of public

dissimulation,” the regime demonstrated in both a dramatic and a quotidian fashion its

control over its citizens’ public actions. It reminded them of the fact of their own

domination and made ordinary Syrians accomplices with the regime in the reproduction of

its power. It accustomed its citizens in other words to the practice of obedience (Wedeen

1999:19).

In a similar fashion, bandhs promote, I argue, a “politics of public dissimulation.”

By forcing ordinary citizens to simulate support for a cause in which they do not necessarily

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believe, the Maoist guerrillas, and the various other groups that orchestrated bandhs in

Nepal during this period demonstrated their ability to control what their fellow citizens did

in public. They force individual Nepalis to become accomplices in the protest—and in so

doing, to thereby signal to everyone else their recognition of the power of the bandh call

over them. Bandhs also highlight the government’s inability to protect its citizens from

their threat and to preserve the everyday economic and social order. In so doing, as Wedeen

suggests, they functioned to “substantiate power” even if they did not manage to

“legitimate” it, by making it “palpable, material and publicly visible” (Wedeen 1999:21)—

by inscribing it in bodies and in space, and in the spectacle of the public world shut down.

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Bandhs of course differ from the spectacles that Wedeen examines in Syria in that
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those who organize them seek to oppose, or make demand things of the state, rather than

to support and shore it up. Their political and cultural significance is, as a result, markedly
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different from the state spectacles that Wedeen explores. Nonetheless Wedeen’s analysis

of the politics of public dissimulation in Syria provides a useful vocabulary for exploring
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how bandhs and other, similarly coercive protest that populated the democratic public

sphere in Nepal operate not merely to represent but to constitute power by demonstrating

their ability to coerce participation and in so doing establish a kind of quasi-sovereign,

albeit temporary, control over the public sphere.

In what follows, I thus examine how groups in Nepal used tactics of coercive protest

like the bandh to establish their political power and agency and to challenge their position

in the existing social and political hierarchy. I also explore the political and cultural

landscape in which tactics of this kind came to play such an important, if also deeply

problematic, role in the negotiation and contestation of power in Nepal in the period

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following the People’s Movement (what I call generally, though not always entirely

accurately, the “democratic period”).11 I examine, in other words, what coercive protests

like the bandh reveal about—and would mean for—the practice of democracy in Nepal.

On the one hand, bandhs and other coercive protests like them posed a serious

problem to the legitimacy of the democratic system in Nepal. In the liberal model of

democracy that inspired the People’s Movement of 1990, violence is conceived as an

entirely illegitimate tactic of political contestation. For Jürgen Habermas and other liberal

theorists one of the preconditions of democracy is a public sphere in which “domination

itself is dissolved” before the critical force of reason (Habermas 1991:82). Liberal theories

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of democracy thus tend to presuppose an absolute distinction between violence—which
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has no role in the democratic public sphere, even if it continues to play an important role

in enforcing state power—and the speech which makes democracy itself possible. As
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Hannah Arendt put it in On Revolution: “Violence is a marginal phenomenon in the

political realm; for man, to the extent that he is a political being, is endowed with the power
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of speech . . . The point here is that violence itself is incapable of speech (Arendt 1963:19).”

Certainly in Nepal the tendency of even the mainstream political parties to use

violence to enforce bandhs and other political performances led to widespread concern

11
Although the new constitution implemented in the wake of the People’s Movement remained in effect in
Nepal from 1990 until 2006, the system of parliamentary democracy it established was interrupted on two
occasions: first, in October 2002, when King Gyanendra, invoking a little-known provision of the 1991
constitution which gave the king the power to “remove difficulties” that arose in connection with the
implementation of the constitution, dismissed the democratically-elected Prime Minister and appointed his
own Prime Minister to rule in his stead (Krämer 2003). Although ultimately forced in 2004 to reinstate the
dismissed-Prime Minister (Hutt 2005), in 2005, King Gyanendra once again invoked his emergency powers
to dismiss the elected parliament. He retained control of the state machinery until April, 2006, when the mass
democratic uprising known as the People’s Movement II forced the king to reinstate parliament (Gellner
2003). Hence, it is not strictly accurate to describe the entire period as a democratic one. Nevertheless,
because in local speech, the post 1990 period was known as the democratic period or the period of multiparty
democracy, to distinguish it from the period of “Panchayat democracy,” for simplicity sake, I therefore refer
to the post 1990s as the democratic period or democratic era in Nepal.

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about their commitment—or lack thereof—to the civil norms that were supposed to guide

participation in the democratic public sphere. Violence also posed a serious problem to the

efforts by the parties and others to claim to speak on behalf of, and represent, the best

interests of the Nepali people as a whole. Nevertheless, if one of the reasons why bandhs

had become, at least by the end of the 1990s if not before, deeply unpopular tactics of

popular protest in Nepal, their violence was also what made bandhs singularly effective

techniques of political assertion. Indeed, activists frequently told me that, although they

personally disliked the tactic, they were compelled to call bandhs because there was no

better way to ensure visibility for their party or their cause.

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Bandhs thus point to the important, albeit ambivalent, role that violence and its
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threat played in enabling and negotiating representation in Nepal’s democratic public

sphere. In so doing, they illuminate, as I explore in what follows, the tension between the
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two distinct models of representation that informs political rhetoric and practice in Nepal.

On the one hand, there is what we might call the dialogic model of representation promoted
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by liberal theorists of the democratic public such as Habermas and Arendt. It was this

dialogic model of the public, with its focus on speech and voice, that activists in 1990

invoked, albeit implicitly, when they implored Nepalese citizens to come to the streets to

raise their voices in opposition to the repressive Panchayat regime (Adams 1998:85). It is

this model that presupposes an absolute distinction between violence and speech, insofar

as by imagining democratic representation to occur through the raising of one’s voice, it

imagines purely volitional subjects: subjects who participate in the democratic public

sphere because they wish to express themselves, that is, give voice to their desires and

beliefs.

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 Throughout the dissertation, I explore how the metaphor of voice, and this

dialogical model of the democratic public sphere, was invoked to explain and justisfy

protest politics in Nepal in the years after the People’s Movement—during a period in

which many Nepalis understood the central advantage of the democratic system to be that,

“finally, we can speak” (balla balla hami bolna sakchaun) (Hangen 2000:37-38). I also

explore however the other model of representation that butted up against the liberal model

and interacted with it in complicated ways: namely, the spectacular model of representation

implicit in practices of bandh. Although activists frequently invoked the idea of voice to

explain and describe the purpose of their bandhs, these demonstrations did not primarily

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work to express the voices—that is, the desires—of those who participated in them.
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Instead, they worked by producing a powerful or compelling image, or spectacle, of the

world shut down. In order to create this image, organizers frequently used violence or its
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threat to effectively shut up the voices of those who did not wish to participate: that is, to

force them to comply even when they did not wish to do so.
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In what follows, I explore why it is that organizers felt compelled to use the tactics

of coercive protest to represent themselves in the democratic public sphere. I examine the

cultural and political histories which would make coercive protest of this kind such a

common feature of public life in Nepal in the democratic era. I do so as a means not only

of examining the changing political terrain of the democratic public sphere in Nepal, over

a decade and a half of turbulent but often ambivalent democratization, but also of

understanding the extent and the limits of the power that spectacular performances of this

kind possess to constitute, and reshape, political hierarchies in Nepal.

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The Problem of Spectacle

The dissertation thus contributes to a growing body of scholarship exploring the

role that political spectacle plays in representing, constituting and, as I argue, contesting

political power in a postcolonial state like Nepal—and the limits of its ability to do so.

Anthropologists have long been interested in how political rituals operate to symbolically

perform, and in so doing reaffirm or contest, political identities, relationships and

hierarchies. Historians of revolution have for example traced out the important role that

festivals and other kinds of “secular rituals” play in legitimating revolutionary

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mobilization—and in generating new kinds of political solidarities and desires in the

aftermath of revolution (Furet 1981; Hunt 1984). Analysts of postcolonial societies have
IE
explores the role that political ritual plays in shoring up the power of otherwise weak

postcolonial regimes (Mbembe 1992; Worby 1998; Wedeen 1999) and more generally, in
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integrating and unifying diverse postcolonial societies (Lomnitz 1995). In Nepal,

anthropologists have examined with great depth and subtlety how the religious rituals of
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the Newar Valley have functioned, both historically and in the present day, to affirm caste

as well as political hierarchy (Levy 1990; Gellner & Quigley 1995).

In recent decades, another body of scholarship has emerged, however, exploring

the importance of spectacle and spectacular performance to the articulation of power both

historically and in the contemporary period (Mbembe 1992; Wedeen 1999; Goldstein 2004;

Apter 2005). This scholarship tends to distinguish spectacle from ritual by its emphasis on

the production of a particularly compelling or dramatic visual image and by spectacle’s

relative disregard for the experience of the participant. While the line between the two

kinds of performance is blurry at best—indeed, Max and Mary Gluckman argued in an

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early essay that “most ceremonies and rituals are spectacles” (Gluckman & Gluckman

1977:227) insofar as most rituals tend to be organized around, and to depend upon, the

presence of an audience—the analytic distinction between ritual and spectacle has

nevertheless provided scholars a useful vocabulary to describe the different kinds of

relationships reflected in, and produced by, different kinds of symbolic performances.

Hence John Macaloon notes that “[s]pectacles,” unlike rituals “institutionalize the

bicameral roles of actors and audiences, performers and spectators. Both role sets are

normative, organically linked, and necessary to the performance. If one or the other set is

missing, there is no spectacle.” This is in contrast to rituals, which, as Macaloon points out,

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in some cases “require no audience, and though . . . often visually impressive” do not leave
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even those observe their performance “free simply to watch and to admire.” (Macaloon

1984:380). “Ritual is a duty, he concludes, whereas “spectacle is a choice. Consequently,

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we speak of ritual “degenerating”(“de-genre’ating”) into spectacle: Easter into the Easter

Parade.”
PR

It is by participating in the performance—even if only as members of the

congregation—that, theorists of ritual argue, individuals experience what Victor Turner

described as communitas and the reaffirmation of social meaning produced by its

materialization in a highly dense symbolic form (Turner 1969; Bell 1989). In contrast,

theorists of spectacle tend to emphasize the passivity of the spectator before the beautiful

image the spectacle creates (Debord 1995; Wedeen 1996; Falasca-Zamponi 2000). By

presenting the audience with an immaculate image (the Easter Parade) which they merely

watch, rather than a ritual process (the Easter ceremony), in which they participate, if only

as a member of the congregation, spectacles obscure from view the audience’s role in the

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creation and performance of the social order being depicted. This grants the audience of a

spectacle like the Easter Parade, as Macaloon notes, greater freedom to watch or not watch

the performance if they so desire, whereas members of the congregation during Easter mass

must stay quiet, dress nicely, and occasionally participate. “Ritual is a duty,” as Macaloon

notes, whereas “spectacle is a choice” (Macaloon 1984:380). But it also means that viewers

of a spectacle like the Easter Parade have less opportunity to negotiate the terms of its

performance. It is for this reason that theorists of spectacle frequently associate the

phenomenon with practices of domination—be it the domination of commodity capitalism

(Debord 1995) or the domination of political elites (Foucault 1975; Wedeen 1999; Mbembe

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1992; Apter 2005). It is also why spectacles are said to be devices of alienation: devices
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which disguise real social relations by cloaking them as things, and as particular kinds of

things: namely, images (Debord 1995).

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The language of spectacle therefore provides a useful analytic with which to

explore the alienating and repressive aspects of the tactics of bandh, and coercive
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demonstration more generally. It also helps make sense of the symbolic logic of these

performances. Although in this dissertation I do not make a sharp distinction between ritual

and spectacle—instead, I conceive of coercive protests like the bandh as highly ritualized

spectacles (though one could always think of them also as particularly spectacular

rituals)—thinking about bandhs as spectacles helps explain why they remained popular and

at times powerful techniques of democratic, even revolutionary, politics in Nepal even

when those who participated in them no longer believed in the symbolism of the ritual

performance.

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