Nepal's Holidays And The Disciplining Of Politics

When everybody else is on Republic Day holiday in Nepal, the politician goes to work. In the holidays, the politician produces a holiday-related document, such as a policy paper on improving work condition for laborers, released aptly on and for the occasion of Labor Day holiday. The politician also engages in other activities like visiting the site of significance given a certain holiday, or engaging in healthy debate with his peers about the holiday.

“Holiday politics” is the result of the disciplining of the political system. One is effectively told that one can only say and do certain things during a particular holiday, like discussing the plight of women strictly on the occasion of Women's Day, when it is allowed and indeed given a lot of exposure. But there is yet the space for rebellion against such a disciplining of politics: one can write something on the plight of women even when it is not Women's Day, or write about an important event long after it has elapsed so that the “holidays” around it is already over, when it is as if a normalization after the event has led to the origin of conditions for the event to re-emerge. It is problematic that we celebrate Women's Day again next year precisely because we have already forgotten or erased the significance of this year's Women's Day and its achievements; what we need to do is originate and re-originate Women's Day and not just celebrate it and forget it.

Problematically, we have written history to create more holidays. We have become historians to unearth events in any given day which could transform that ordinary day into a holiday, and we have come up with techniques of studying history in order to produce more holidays. This is how history writing is so close to the politician, because the historian provides the politician with holidays. Thus, even if a small group of women rebelled against the significance of “Women's Day” and wrote a paper on women on an ordinary day, the historians are able to magnify and glorify this event to transform that day into a new broad holiday related to all women, and make it distinct from other more ordinary days.

The ordinary people must try and enlist historians to downplay the official holidays rather than transform ordinary days into holidays. Or, ordinary people must show that they are always thinking of their causes, and indeed, that every day should be a holiday. The creation of holidays must be taken up by the stakeholders of a certain cause and not left to the historian-politician team.