ON THE NIGHT of 26 July, a dispute between Hindus and Muslims over religious flags and loud music in Dewanganj, a municipality in Sunsari district of Nepal’s Tarai, ended with the police opening fire. Nepal Police first fired warning shots to disperse the crowd; when that failed, the Armed Police Force opened fire with live rounds. Around 25 rounds were fired in total, leaving ten people injured and three men dead: 30-year-old Om Prakash Mehta, killed on the spot; 25-year-old Jay Prakash Mehta, who died of his injuries three days later; and 21-year-old Rabindra Mehta, shot in the left thigh, who died in Kathmandu on 4 August after the wound turned septic and led to organ failure following an amputation. As anger over the shootings mixed with rising communal tensions, unrest spread across parts of the Tarai. Authorities imposed curfews and prohibitory orders in Sunsari before extending restrictions to other towns in Madhesh as fresh clashes erupted.
On 30 July, in Golbazar municipality in Siraha district, security forces fired again as demonstrators torched motorcycles, killing 15-year-old Ganesh Yadav at the scene.
Much of the public discussion around these clashes has centred on the communal nature of the violence, with commentators warning that the sectarian polarisation visible across the Indian border is now spilling into Nepal. Four days into the unrest, the prime minister Balendra Shah, who has rarely appeared in public since taking office in March, broke his silence with a televised address appealing for calm, urging citizens to “maintain peace, harmony, brotherhood and national unity,” and promising a “completely fair and transparent” investigation into the violence.
The call for calm is necessary at a moment when communal tensions in Nepal appear sharper than they have been in years. But it risks reducing the violence to a story of communal polarisation alone. Long before these riots, and under governments of every political stripe, unrest in the Tarai has repeatedly been met with live ammunition before less lethal means are exhausted. Where a baton charge or a water cannon might come first elsewhere in Nepal, in the Tarai, the state too often shoots to kill.