A skirmish at the parade: Lamabagar
Following the announcement of the election results, we encountered celebratory marches held by winning parties in many towns we passed through. Brandishing party flags and doused in red tikka, party members filled roadways and paraded their victory. In Lamabagar, the Maoist party had won, one of the few rural development councils in which they had managed to edge out the powerful UML. Shortly after we arrived in town, a huge parade came marching down the road from the hydro-dam, the only road in town,. The parade seemed out of place in Lamabagar, which—aside from the large temporary residences constructed for labourers on the hydro project—is quite small in size. The parade of 60 or so people, seemed to have more members than the town itself.
We had a small glimpse of the intensity and complexity of party politics at the village scale in Lamabagar when a skirmish broke out. As the parade passed, a small but vocal older woman, standing at the front dooor, began verbally abusing the parade participants and shooing them away. She escalated her attack by throwing water, then storming out into the road to lift her skirt, to angrily flash passers by and pushing several members of the crowd. Several police officers, who had been following the crowd warily at arms distace, stepped in at this point to intervene. She remained vocal as the crowd went on, and she and remained vigilent outside, waiting for its return. We learned later that this heated exchange was the most recent incident in a standing conflict between neighboring households in the small community and now defined by party line divisions.