ABSTRACT
Fluttering high on a bamboo pole, the red and blue party flag of the Mongol National Organization marked the location of the Mongol National Organization’s Village Assembly office in Sukrabare’s ramshackle bazaar. On the front of the two-story wooden building hung a faded MNO signboard, announcing the party’s main slogan, ‘We Mongols are not Hindus’. Below it was a larger sign, painted in bright blue letters, for the farm supply store on the ground floor of the building: ‘Pigs, goats and bulls castrated here.’ Kiran Akten, the MNO’s general secretary, brought me to see this office on my first visit to his home in Sukrabare, yet during my numerous visits to this village, no MNO meetings were held there. Instead, the MNO usually held informal gatherings at Kiran’s breezy bamboo frame house, which sat high on pillars at the edge of the jungle. In my travels through Ilam district, I encountered many such ‘offices’, shops or homes in high-visibility locations that boasted MNO signboards and flags, yet contained no staff or phones, no pamphlets or files, and were rarely used as meeting spaces. By inquiring inside a building displaying an office sign, people could meet individuals who could offer them some information about the party. Beyond serving as visible contact points for people interested in learning about the MNO, the existence and placement of these offices indicates the efforts of party activists to give the small, unregistered party a presence in the public domain. While it was impossible for the MNO to achieve its goals of gaining control of the state and instituting major state-level structural and policy changes that would benefit Mongols, its actions were effective in other ways. The MNO built support for ethnic politics in rural Nepal by disseminating a discourse about ethnic inequality. In considering the MNO’s activities, it is important to recognize that political action that does not accomplish its stated goals may still have other meanings and unintended effects (Melucci 1988). These party offices also encapsulate the contrast between the ideal of how a political party should operate as a bureaucratic organization and the MNO’s informal operations in practice. In this chapter, I show that in its own way, the MNO communicated a set of ideas to people and constructed a political community along new lines. I focus here on the operations of the party in Ilam district and at the regional (eastern Nepal) level, and examine the challenges of
communication and coordination between the levels of the party. I aim here to describe what it meant to try to organize, operate and participate in a small scale, low budget, political party in rural Nepal in the 1990s. The first part of the chapter describes how Gopal Gurung founded the MNO, his present role in the party and the basic structure of the MNO. I then examine the main roles that people play in the party, including the role of women and debates about the place of gender politics within the MNO. Next, I examine how party activities expanded support for the MNO and created a political community. Through participating in party activities, people in the party gained a sense of being Mongol, as being part of a lived political community.
