27 September 2025
On 9 September 2025, much like the rest of Nepal, the city of Janakpurdham, too, was swept up in an inferno. Sparked by the Gen Z protest, and later aided and abetted by ‘infiltrators’ of all hues and stripes, the Janakpurdham municipal office alongside other government buildings, including that of the provincial ministries, were set on fire. Much like across Nepal, these government buildings in Janakpur were targeted because they were viewed as the hotbed of corruption.
Even as it rebuilds in the wake of the Gen Z movement, amidst fears about a constitutional crisis and the perceived threat of revanchist right-wing monarchists vying to reclaim a ‘Hindu Nation’, Janakpur could be a testing ground to see if and how the religious right may or may not triumph in the long run in Nepal. It is so because while the simmering undertones of Hindutva in Janakpur does not openly champion the return of the king in Nepal, there are clear overlaps in its political ambitions and aspirations for the ‘Hindu Rastra’. And considering the manner in which Hindutva is embedding itself in the city’s body politic and in the very fabric of everyday life, the emergent undercurrents of Hindutva in Janakpur may have more profound consequences for Nepal than the occasional rallies and purported behind-the-curtain politics centred in and around Kathmandu.
Martyrs’ Gate
Those travelling by road from Kathmandu to Janakpurdham, the birthplace of the Hindu goddess, Sita, will witness a large structure on the highway welcoming visitors into the city. That is the Shahid Gate, or the Martyrs’ Gate. Designed by a firm based in Kathmandu, the archway is an architectural monument that may look out of place given the built form surrounding it. It, however, does not escape attention. Shaped like a bow standing over the highway, atop it stands a statue of Lord Ram, Sita’s husband, from Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh, India, clasping a bow pointed towards the sky. At the base of the three pillars supporting the gate are memorial plaques of the martyrs of the historic Madhes movements of 2007, 2008, and 2015. Roshan Janakpuri, a literary figure and a writer based in Janakpur, who led the regional cultural wing of the Maoist party during the People’s War, had something very apposite to say about the gate: ‘The gate does justice neither to Ram nor to the martyrs.’
Going by Valmiki’s Ramayana, Ram was from Ayodhya, India. Janakpur is the birthplace of Sita, who later married Ram. What writer Janakpuri was alluding to was—Ram was geographically out of place. The gate also misplaced the martyrs. He continued, ‘Religion promises us heaven albeit only in the afterlife—something like heaven is not accessible during one’s lifetime. Whereas martyrs make no afterlife promises. Heaven is to be created on earth. That’s the promise of a revolution.’
The first Madhesh movement, also called the Maghey Uprising, was the first critical episode in the contemporary history of modern Nepal that foregrounded Madheshi identity vis-à-vis citizenship into the national limelight. On the back of the political and socio-cultural conditions of possibility that the People’s War had created, the 19-day Maghey Uprising was successful in carving out a political niche for the Madheshi population of Nepal. Over the years, the movement was critical in gradually ‘mainstreaming’ the Madheshi question, which was essentially one of identity that rejected the feudal and oppressive content of Nepali citizenship that had pushed Madhesh to the margins as its ‘constitutive other’—materially oppressed and culturally marginalised but nonetheless part of the Nepali nation-state as its ‘internal colony’.
The Maghey Uprising was able to change the discourse of Madheshi identity by adding new elements into the content of citizenship while stretching its contours in new directions. The movement happened at a time when the mainstream notion of ‘to be a Nepali’ was—and still is—feudal in its content, and racialised. The predominant optic of ‘knowing’ a Madheshi was through the optic of the ‘Nepali Other’. In this ‘othering’, the Madheshi was racialised as the ‘non-Nepali’, which was essentially shorthand for someone who was not ‘Pahadey’ enough to count as Nepali. ‘They’ were the cultural ‘other’, the ‘Indian’.
Thirty-two individuals were killed during the first and second Madhesh movements of 2007 and 2008. During the third Madhesh movement in 2015, over 50 individuals lost their lives protesting against the Nepali constitution, calling out its discriminatory citizenship provision along gender lines, including the lack of proportional representation of the Madheshi population in the state organs as well as in the number of electoral constituencies in the Tarai.
From ‘Madhisey’ to ‘Madheshi’
There are many ways to speak of the legacy of the Madhesh movements. But in broader terms, it is fair to say that the people of the Tarai of Nepal for long derogatorily referred to as ‘Madhisey’ by ‘mainstream’ Nepal are now referred to as ‘Madheshi’—those from the Madhes region. ‘Madheshi’ has thus become a discursive category that increasingly exudes a political agency demanding recognition on the grounds of equal and substantive citizenship. Therefore, in 2017, when national, provincial, and local elections were held after more than a decade and a half of democratic deficit the newly elected representatives at both the provincial and local scales of governance in Madhesh had a historic mandate. It was a mandate to take ownership of the changes the martyrs had sought—re-writing the state-society contract in which the ‘Madheshi’, including Dalits, Muslims, and Madheshi women, saw themselves as endowed with more equal citizenship in terms of accessing rights and government services in pursuit of the good life.
Beyond national-level debates and deliberations, if federalism is to be conceived of in terms of the everyday lives of ordinary citizens, one has to focus on the local. In other words, the onus is on local governments to ‘bring’ federalism to the people in the form of distribution of rights and resources. Thus, when in 2017 Lal Kishor Sah, a long-time Nepali Congress member, was elected the mayor of Janakpurdham as an independent candidate, citizens across all castes/ethnicities, religions, and genders, would have hoped to experience a ‘New Nepal’ through the workings of the city office. Over the course of time though what one began to see under the mayoral regime was a city gradually dividing along religious lines; fissures evident in a manner never seen before. The Martyrs’ Gate discussed above was only one of the projects introduced in Janakpur under the watch of the mayor with heavy religious symbolism that, one may argue, provided impetus to the gradual rise of Hindutva in Janakpurdham—and in Nepal at large.
No longer an innocent text
Valmiki’s epic, Ramayana, composed more than 2500 years ago is no longer an innocent text. From Tulsidas’ Hindi interpretation as Ramcharitmanas towards the end of the late 16th century to its late-1980s adaptation in the form of the popular TV series by the same name, the text has gone through myriad mutations. The rise of Narendra Modi as India’s prime minister, however, has witnessed the most blatant use of the text in service of the Hindutva project. The state apparatus in India, including the Supreme Court, in complicity with the mainstream media, have legitimised the Ramayana as a historical document, enabling its use as a reference in designing multimillion-dollar regional infrastructural projects, such as the Ramayana Circuit, including the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.
When asked about the incongruous juxtaposition of Ram and the Madheshi martyrs in the Martyrs’ Gate, Sah, the ex-mayor of Janakpurdham stressed for the need to take a closer look at the statue of Ram on top of the gate, which would reveal that the bow is without an arrow—not a depiction of a militant Ram. On the contrary, the statue, for the mayor, celebrates the union of Ram and Sita, and as such, also commemorates the connection between Janakpur and Ayodhya.’
The mayor was alluding to a particular episode in the Ramayana epic when Ram participates in a ceremony held in Janakpur by Sita’s father, King Janak. Held to pick a groom for his daughter, it concludes with Janak declaring Ram a candidate worthy of wedding Sita once he effortlessly lifts the bow that ordinary humans were deemed not to have the divine strength to even move it. ‘People don’t want truths and they certainly don’t look for details. The statue is a messenger of love, not war,’ the mayor concluded.
In 2020, the same mayor initiated a beautification and Mithila heritage preservation drive to paint every house in the core parts of Janakpur in saffron, with various incentives offered to the households. According to the mayor, it was an opportune time to propose the beautification and preservation project to the public because houses lay dilapidated and in need of repair and reconstruction. The locals needed municipal support, he said.
He was referring to a road widening initiative that the municipality undertook in 2018/19 as part of the Integrated Urban Development Project carried out with funding from the Asian Development Bank. According to reports, the project demolished some 2,000 houses, accruing a total loss in millions of rupees to the locals.
In addition to ‘saffronising’ the town, the mayor made it mandatory for municipal workers to wear saffron-coloured outfits as their official dress. ‘This [the paining of the houses] is to promote religious tourism not Hinduisation,’ argued a Janakpur resident, a scholar of history and culture.
To the others in the city, it represented the undertones of Hindutva.
A faction of civil society belonging to the Hindu community publicly protested against the mayor’s move to paint the town saffron for its obvious political undertones. In his defence, the mayor said, ‘The particular colour has different shades of saffron. If you notice carefully, it is not the same as the one that carries a political meaning now in India. The saffron that I used was the one that Goddess Sita wore on her forehead as a ritual praying for Ram’s good health when the two were separated.’
The mayor took refuge, once again, in the epic Ramayana. To him, this simply was not saffronisation as we know it in the Indian case, and as many locals in Janakpur know it to be.
In conclusion
Janakpur, or Janakpurdham, has always been a religious town for as far back as its documented history, in oral or written form, can be traced. In fact, the role of bards and ascetics in the making of the city has been well documented through the works of historians based in Janakpur such as Shivendra Lal Karna as well as scholars such as Richard Burghart, both of whom worked together in the late 1960s to early 1970s in putting together the city’s history. However, in ways that may be both intended and unintended, the new religious identity that Janakpur is gradually taking on, many under the guise of urban development, heritage preservation, and religious tourism, signals a latent drift toward Hindutva, gradually stripping Janakpur off its secular identity.
To take note of the words of Roshan Janakpuri, the literary figure: when it comes to the realisation of the good life, the legacies of revolution should always stand head and shoulders above the promises of religion. In the wake of the Gen Z movement that brought Janakpur to a halt, particularly on Day 2, the city office is gradually rebuilding itself. However, rebuilding the city requires more than restoring the physical structures. Rebuilding also demands reviving the secular soul of the city, free from the majoritarian attempt to impose a new kind of Madheshi citizenship, one that is fractured along religious lines.
