Kishor Kumar Bishwas, one of the founder leaders of the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (MJF), a party formed with the help of Indian political parties and leaders, has quit his party, stating that the MJF was serving Indian interests by raising the demand of “One Madhesh, One Province”.
The MJF was initially set up as a vigilante party assigned with the job of annihilating Maoists from the Terai region of Nepal. The group calls the Terai region ‘Madhesh’ (a Hindu word). The word means ‘inner land’. The chief demand of the MJF is to divide Nepal between the Hilly region and the Madhesh.
The MJF workers massacred 29 civilians in Rautahat in March 2007. While carrying out the massacre, they took the help of Indian criminal gangs, according to local eyewitnesses as well as field reports of human rights groups.
In 2007, the MJF was one of the chief participants that attended a secret meeting in India in collaboration with other pro-India armed groups active in the plains of Nepal. Media reports, quoting a senior republican leader Ram Raja Prasad Singh, said that the MJF and other armed groups had organized the meeting with a clear purpose of separating the Terai from Nepal with the help of Indian forces.
For about a week , three parties, viz., the MJF, the Sadbhawana Party and TMLP have been capturing the rostrum of the recently elected 601-member constituent assembly meant for drafting a new constitution geared toward restructuring the country. They are forcefully demanding for a constitutional provision of the division of Nepal into the Hilly region and the Madhesh where they want to control all other ethnicities.
But the major political parties, with the majority on their part, have rejected this separatist demand. Only about 10 percent people have voted for the separatist parties.
Meanwhile, the Tharus, Nepal’s indigenous community with a population of almost three million, have declared to launch an anti-separatist movement from 4 July.
Dhimal Liberation Front has demanded for a campaign to expose the conspiracy behind the demand of ‘One Madhesh, One Province”.