plural citizenship in Nepal A modern political category, not an ancient homogeneous people Madhesh is indispensable to the modern political history of Nepal, but it must be handled as a historically changing category. The word has older geographical usages, yet the broad political macro-category 'Madheshi' acquired greatly increased institutional and electoral salience after the restoration of multiparty politics in 1990. David Gellner has accordingly emphasized that the post-1990 period produced new large-scale categories of political classification, even where the words themselves were not wholly new. This distinction prevents a contemporary political identity from being projected unchanged into medieval or ancient Mithila. The category is also internally disputed. Some plains-origin caste groups identify strongly as Madheshi; some Tharu organizations have resisted incorporation into a Madheshi umbrella; Muslim identities may be articulated as Madheshi, Muslim, regional, linguistic, or several of these at once. The chapter therefore treats Madhesh as a field of political identification rather than a single ethnos. Madhesh, Tarai, and Mithila overlap without becoming synonyms Tarai or Terai is primarily a lowland geographical and ecological term, though its administrative meanings have varied. Madhesh is at once geographical, cultural, and political. Mithila is a historical-cultural region whose literary, ritual, and linguistic networks span north Bihar and parts of Nepal. Their maps intersect, but none can simply replace the others. Modern Madhesh Province illustrates the difference. It contains the eight districts from Saptari to Parsa, while the broader Nepal Tarai continues both east and west of the province. Mithila, in turn, has major historical and cultural centres inside Madhesh Province but is not exhausted by its present provincial boundary. The borderland existed before modern citizenship documents For centuries, the plains north and south of the later India- Nepal boundary were connected by pilgrimage, marriage, agrarian tenancy, markets, scholarly circulation, seasonal work, and commercial routes. The emergence of modern territorial sovereignty did not erase these connections, but it changed their legal meaning. A marriage route could remain culturally ordinary while becoming relevant to nationality law; a market journey could remain economically routine while crossing an international frontier. Historical method must therefore hold two propositions together: borderland society is genuinely transnational, and the international border is legally real. Cultural continuity is not evidence for a single sovereignty, while sovereign difference does not make cross-border social networks fictitious. From Rana rule to statutory citizenship Before the mid-twentieth century, membership in the Nepalese polity was regulated through a mixture of subjecthood, status, residence, land, administrative recognition, and customary hierarchies rather than through the contemporary universal expectation of an individual citizenship certificate. Nepal's first modern citizenship legislation dates to 1952, during the political transition after the end of Rana oligarchic monopoly. The emergence of statutory citizenship should not be described as a simple administrative modernization. In a borderland, documentary criteria determine access to voting, education, employment, property transactions, passports, and public office. They also create opportunities for officials to classify long-settled residents through assumptions about language, surname, origin, or cross-border kinship. 1952: the first national citizenship law The 1952 citizenship law was an early attempt to convert political membership into statutory categories at the dawn of Nepal's first experiments with electoral government. Later citizenship acts and constitutions substantially revised its rules, but the date is important because it marks the beginning of a documentary legal regime whose effects became especially visible in the southern plains. The legal history should be read alongside regional history. Frederick Gaige's study of the Tarai showed that citizenship, language, migration, land, and political representation were mutually reinforcing fields of state integration. His analysis is now historical evidence in its own right: it records how questions of belonging were already inseparable from centre- periphery relations before the post-1990 Madhesh movements. 1962-64: Panchayat nationalism and the citizenship regime King Mahendra's 1960 royal intervention ended the first multiparty experiment, and the 1962 Constitution institutionalized the partyless Panchayat system. The 1964 Citizenship Act operated within this political order. State integration was closely associated with the monarchy, the Nepali language, centralized administration, and a national culture whose official form was more homogeneous than Nepal's actual social and linguistic landscape. For plains residents, the issue was not simply whether the law contained the word Madhesh. Citizenship administration interacted with documentary proof, migration narratives, language, and official suspicions concerning proximity to India. These experiences later became part of the political memory from which claims for recognition and inclusion were articulated. Language policy and the making of unequal public access A state's official language is not merely a cultural emblem. It is the language in which forms are printed, examinations are held, orders are written, police statements are recorded, courts operate, and public employment is mediated. Where a citizen's first language is Maithili, Bhojpuri, Bajjika, Tharu, Urdu, Magahi, or another language, monolingual administration can convert linguistic difference into unequal transaction costs. This does not imply that Nepali lacks a legitimate national role. The problem is institutional asymmetry: a language of wider communication can facilitate common administration while still disadvantaging citizens if multilingual access is absent. The contemporary constitutional framework attempts to hold these functions together by retaining Nepali as the federal official language while recognizing all mother tongues as languages of the nation. 1990: multiparty democracy and a new language of difference The 1990 People's Movement restored multiparty politics and opened a much wider arena for ethnic, regional, caste, linguistic, gender, and indigenous mobilization. The 1990 Constitution recognized Nepal as multiethnic and multilingual, but it also retained the Hindu kingdom and Nepali as the official language. The contradiction between recognition of diversity and continued institutional hierarchy became one of the central themes of the following decades. After 1990, Madheshi organizations, Janajati movements, Dalit activism, women's organizations, and regional parties increasingly quantified exclusion. Representation in the civil service, security institutions, universities, political parties, and development administration became measurable political questions rather than only complaints about cultural disrespect. Madheshi as a post-1990 political macro-category The growing use of Madheshi as a broad political category created solidarity across differences while never eliminating them. It could unite people around experiences of stigmatization, underrepresentation, and suspicion of cross- border loyalty, yet it also risked flattening caste, class, language, religion, and indigenous identity within the plains. This duality is historically important. Successful political categories often work precisely because they simplify. A research history must record their mobilizing power without adopting their simplification as an analytical fact. Thus 'Madheshi representation' and 'representation of all communities in Madhesh' are related but not identical questions. The civil war, the 2006 movement, and the end of the old constitutional order The Maoist conflict from 1996 to 2006 and the 2006 People's Movement transformed the constitutional agenda. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement, abolition of the king's direct political authority, the Interim Constitution, and the Constituent Assembly process placed restructuring of the state at the centre of national politics. Inclusion was no longer framed only as recruitment into an unchanged unitary system; the architecture of the state itself became negotiable. For Madhesh-based actors this opened an opportunity and a dispute. The peace settlement challenged old centralized institutions, yet many plains activists argued that the first post- conflict arrangements still reproduced hill-centred assumptions and inadequate representation. The 2006 Citizenship Act and the documentary question The Nepal Citizenship Act, 2063 (2006) became the principal statutory framework for citizenship in the post-People's- Movement order. It must be distinguished from later constitutional and amending provisions. Citizenship law is cumulative: a person may have a constitutional entitlement, but the usable certificate depends on statutory categories, regulations, documentary evidence, and district-level administration. This distinction matters because political arguments often collapse entitlement and implementation. A constitutional promise can remain difficult to use if birth registration is missing, a parent cannot be documented, names are inconsistent across records, or an office demands proof that the statute does not clearly anticipate. January 2007: protest changes the constitutional agenda The Madhesh movement of 2007 followed the promulgation of the Interim Constitution and rapidly transformed the post- conflict political field. Demonstrations, strikes, confrontation, and deaths brought federalism, electoral representation, inclusion, and regional recognition into the core of constitution- making. The movement was not the beginning of every Madheshi grievance, but it was a decisive moment in converting them into a national constitutional crisis. Violence by state forces and by protesters must both remain visible in the record. A movement can have legitimate constitutional demands without every act committed in its name being lawful, while state maintenance of order does not justify disproportionate or unlawful force. The twenty-two-point agreement and negotiated inclusion The 2007 agreement between the government and Madhesh- based representatives translated street mobilization into negotiated commitments. Its importance lies less in treating each clause as permanently settled than in showing that representation, federal restructuring, and inclusion became subjects of explicit state bargaining. Agreements of this kind are evidence of political commitment, not self-executing constitutional law. Later disputes repeatedly turned on whether earlier promises had been fully incorporated, partially translated, or abandoned during constitution drafting. 2008: the eight-point agreement and federal commitment Further mobilization in 2008 produced another agreement before the first Constituent Assembly election. Federalism was now embedded in the restructuring agenda, and Madhesh-based parties entered the Constituent Assembly with substantial electoral strength. The election changed who sat at the constitutional table even though it did not settle what federalism would mean. The episode demonstrates a recurring distinction in this chapter: recognition can be procedural, electoral, territorial, linguistic, or legal. Winning seats is not the same as securing preferred provincial boundaries; a promise of federalism is not the same as agreement on its map. The first Constituent Assembly and competing federal maps The Constituent Assembly elected in 2008 contained a much broader range of parties and social constituencies than earlier legislatures. Debates considered identity, economic viability, administrative capacity, linguistic geography, historical regions, and minority protection. Proposals for the number and boundaries of provinces varied widely. No federal map could mechanically reproduce a single social geography because caste, language, religion, ethnicity, migration, and historical region overlap differently. The political question was therefore distributive: which groups would gain the practical capacity to form governments, use languages, allocate budgets, and influence institutions under each proposed map? Why the first Constituent Assembly failed to finish the constitution The first Constituent Assembly expired in 2012 without promulgating a constitution. Federal design was one of the central unresolved questions, alongside the form of government and other institutional disputes. The failure should not be reduced to a single Madhesh-versus-hills confrontation; party strategy, intra-party conflict, changing coalitions, and disagreement among identity-based movements all mattered. Its collapse nevertheless narrowed later possibilities. When the second Constituent Assembly was elected in 2013, the balance of party power had shifted away from some of the forces that had performed strongly in 2008. 2013: electoral change and fragmentation of Madhesh-based parties Madhesh-based parties entered the second Constituent Assembly after multiple organizational splits and a weaker combined electoral performance. This mattered during final constitution drafting because constitutional outcomes depend not only on social claims but on seat arithmetic, coalition discipline, procedural rules, and the threshold required for adoption. Fragmentation also reveals that Madheshi politics was never a single-party project. Competing leaders differed over federal boundaries, alliances with national parties, participation in government, sequencing of elections, and how far to prioritize regional identity over wider ideological programmes. 2015: earthquake, sixteen-point agreement, and accelerated constitution making After the devastating April and May 2015 earthquakes, four major parties reached a sixteen-point agreement intended to break the constitutional deadlock. Drafting then moved rapidly. Supporters argued that Nepal urgently needed a constitution and functioning federal institutions; critics argued that the accelerated process reduced meaningful negotiation with dissatisfied Madheshi, Tharu, Janajati, and other constituencies. The historical point is not that speed alone invalidates a constitution. It is that the procedure became part of the substantive conflict: groups that disputed the proposed boundaries and representation rules also disputed whether they had an effective opportunity to alter them. The 2015 Madhesh and Tharu protests Protests intensified across the southern plains before and after promulgation of the Constitution. Human Rights Watch and other observers documented dozens of deaths, including protesters, bystanders, and police personnel, and raised serious concerns about excessive force as well as violence by protesters. The conflict also disrupted transport and everyday life for months. The protests were not geographically or socially uniform. Madheshi mobilization was strongest in parts of the eastern and central Tarai, while Tharu mobilization had its own organizations and territorial demands, particularly in the west. Treating them as one movement erases the very plurality that constitutional restructuring was supposed to address. 20 September 2015: a federal constitution amid dissent The Constitution of Nepal was promulgated on 20 September 2015. It created a federal democratic republican state, constitutionalized a wide range of fundamental rights, established seven provinces, provided mixed electoral systems with inclusion requirements, and created institutions specifically concerned with historically marginalized communities. It was adopted by a very large majority of the Constituent Assembly. At the same time, major Madhesh-based parties and other groups rejected important parts of the settlement. Both facts belong in the history. A high adoption vote establishes legal enactment and broad assembly support; it does not by itself resolve the political legitimacy of disputed boundaries, citizenship rules, or representation formulas. Article 4: inclusion is written into the definition of the state Article 4 defines Nepal as an independent, indivisible, sovereign, secular, inclusive, democratic, socialism-oriented, federal democratic republican state. The preamble likewise commits the constitutional order to proportional, inclusive, and participatory principles. These are not merely descriptive adjectives: they provide the normative vocabulary through which later claims against exclusion are framed. Yet constitutional adjectives require institutions. Whether a state is inclusive cannot be assessed solely from the presence of the word. Recruitment, electoral outcomes, language access, fiscal allocation, policing, documentation, and the treatment of minorities within provinces are necessary implementation tests. Articles 6 and 7: nation languages and official languages Article 6 declares all languages spoken as mother tongues in Nepal to be languages of the nation. Article 7 retains Nepali in Devanagari as the official language of Nepal while authorizing a province, by provincial law, to designate one or more languages of the nation spoken by a majority of people within that province as additional official languages. The Language Commission has a constitutional advisory role. This arrangement separates recognition from administration. A language can be a language of the nation without being an official working language in every office. Conversely, a province's power to add official languages is constrained by law- making, demographic interpretation, staffing, translation capacity, and minority protection. Articles 10-15: one federal citizenship with provincial identity Article 10 provides for single federal citizenship with provincial identity. Articles 11 to 15 define and authorize rules concerning citizenship by descent, naturalization, gender identity in citizenship certificates, non-resident Nepali citizenship, and related statutory matters. The system is therefore federal in political structure without creating separate provincial nationalities. For Madhesh this matters because provincial recognition does not replace national citizenship. A person may identify culturally with Mithila, politically with Madhesh, linguistically with Maithili or Bhojpuri, and administratively with a province and municipality, while citizenship remains citizenship of Nepal. Citizenship by descent and the importance of parental status The Constitution allows citizenship by descent in several circumstances but attaches particular conditions to some categories. A person whose father or mother was a citizen at the time of birth falls within the constitutional descent framework, while children of persons who had acquired citizenship by birth before the Constitution face an additional requirement concerning the citizenship of both parents. Children born to Nepali mothers where the father is not traced are separately addressed. These distinctions are legally technical but socially consequential. Borderland families experience law not as an abstract theory of nationality but as the presence or absence of a certificate needed for education, employment, banking, travel, voting, and public services. Gender asymmetry is not a marginal issue Citizenship debate in Nepal has repeatedly centred on unequal consequences for Nepali women and men in cross- national families. Article 11 distinguishes the route available to a foreign woman married to a Nepali citizen from the route available to a child born to a Nepali woman married to a foreign citizen. Women's-rights advocates have argued that these distinctions make maternal transmission more conditional. The issue has special visibility in Madhesh because cross- border marriages are common in some communities, but it is a national gender-equality issue rather than an exclusively Madheshi custom. Similar legal questions affect Nepali women throughout the country and abroad. Citizenship certificates, birth registration, and administrative discretion A constitutional entitlement becomes usable through administration. District Administration Offices issue citizenship certificates; local authorities are central to birth registration and recommendations; regulations specify forms and evidence. Missing civil registration, inconsistent spellings, absent parents, migration, or disputed paternity can therefore produce long delays even when the legal category appears clear. Administrative history is essential because apparent 'statelessness' statistics can refer to different populations: persons legally entitled but undocumented, persons whose eligibility is disputed, children awaiting age or procedure, migrants, or persons who may hold another nationality. Precise categories should replace dramatic but unverified totals. Cross-border marriage does not equal doubtful nationality The India-Nepal border sustains long-standing marriage networks, especially across adjoining regions of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Such marriages can activate naturalization and descent rules, but they do not by themselves make a Nepali citizen less Nepali. Historical suspicions toward Madheshis have often conflated cultural affinity with foreign political loyalty. A borderland approach rejects that inference. Kinship can cross borders while citizenship remains state-specific. The relevant legal questions are nationality, residence, and statutory eligibility, not accent, dress, surname, or the location of relatives. Representation: population, geography, and the design of constituencies Madhesh movements repeatedly challenged electoral arrangements they considered insufficiently responsive to the dense population of the plains. Representation, however, is not determined by population alone. Constitutions and delimitation laws also consider geography, administrative boundaries, and practical convenience. The distributive conflict concerns how heavily each consideration should weigh. The 2015 Constitution and its first amendment altered the wording governing House constituencies and delimitation. The resulting framework gives population central importance while retaining geographical convenience and specificity. That compromise should be described as a rule, not as proof that either side's theory of fair representation was fully accepted. Article 84: a mixed House of Representatives Article 84 establishes a 275-member House of Representatives: 165 members elected from single-member constituencies by first-past-the-post and 110 through nationwide proportional representation. Political parties' proportional lists must include women, Dalit, indigenous nationalities, Khas Arya, Madhesi, Tharu, Muslims, and backward regions on a population basis, with regard also to geography and regional balance. The mixed system combines territorial representation with social inclusion. It does not guarantee that every subgroup within a large category, or every language area, will receive representation proportionate to its local population. Candidate selection inside parties therefore remains a major gatekeeping institution. One-third women: representation through party-level correction The Constitution requires at least one-third of the total federal representatives elected from each political party to be women. Where first-past-the-post results do not produce enough women, proportional representation lists are used to reach the threshold. Provincial assemblies operate with a parallel one- third requirement. This mechanism substantially increases numerical representation but also reveals a structural tension: women may be concentrated in proportional seats while constituency nominations remain male-dominated. Gender inclusion should therefore be assessed by route of election, committee leadership, ministerial office, and influence within parties, not by one aggregate percentage alone. Article 42 and proportional inclusion in state bodies Article 42 recognizes a right to participation in state bodies on the principle of proportional inclusion for specified economically, socially, or educationally backward groups, including women, Dalit, indigenous nationalities, Madhesi, Tharu, Muslims, backward classes, minorities, marginalized communities, persons with disabilities, gender and sexual minorities, farmers, labourers, oppressed citizens of backward regions, and indigent Khas Arya. The provision is constitutionally significant but analytically complex. Which communities fall within a category, how backwardness is measured, which appointments count as 'state bodies', and how quotas interact with merit rules are questions for legislation, judicial interpretation, and administrative practice. 28 February 2016: the first constitutional amendment The first constitutional amendment, published on 28 February 2016, changed Articles 42, 84, and 286. It was presented as an attempt to respond to demands concerning proportional inclusion and electoral constituency delimitation after months of Madhesh agitation. Madhesh-based parties did not treat it as a complete settlement, particularly because provincial boundaries remained unresolved. The amendment is an important example of constitutional politics after promulgation. The 2015 text was not immutable; protest, negotiation, and parliamentary supermajorities could alter it. Yet amendment power also has a high threshold, which became decisive in 2017. The border blockade dispute: protest, pressure, and competing narratives The 2015-16 disruption of major India-Nepal border crossings became one of the most polarizing episodes in recent Nepalese politics. Madhesh-based protesters maintained blockades at key points; the Nepal government and many Nepali commentators accused India of imposing or enabling an undeclared blockade; India denied imposing one and pointed to insecurity and protest on the Nepal side. A responsible history should not convert this contested causation into a slogan. What is firmly established is the severe shortage of fuel and other goods, the strategic importance of border corridors such as Birgunj-Raxaul, and the way the crisis intensified nationalism and suspicion toward Madhesh-based demands. 2017: a further amendment bill fails On 21 August 2017, a proposed second constitutional amendment failed to obtain the required two-thirds majority in the Legislature-Parliament. The bill addressed issues including language, citizenship, representation, and provincial boundaries and had been advanced in part to respond to Madhesh-based parties. It received 347 votes in favour and 206 against among 553 members present, short of the required threshold. The failure did not end constitutional politics. Madhesh-based parties nevertheless participated in subsequent elections, moving contestation from street mobilization back into electoral and provincial institutions while continuing to demand changes in the settlement. 2017 elections and the institutionalization of federalism Local, provincial, and federal elections in 2017 transformed federalism from constitutional design into operating government. Province No. 2 became the only province composed entirely of Tarai districts. It acquired a provincial assembly, chief minister, ministries, budget, and a new arena in which Madhesh-based parties could exercise governmental authority rather than only demand recognition from Kathmandu. Federalization did not remove the centre. Citizenship, defence, much fiscal policy, national elections, and major legal frameworks remain federal responsibilities. The new order redistributed authority rather than creating autonomous states. Article 176: provincial representation and inclusion Article 176 provides that sixty percent of provincial assembly members are elected by first-past-the-post and forty percent by proportional representation. Provincial proportional lists must address women, Dalit, indigenous nationalities, Khas Arya, Madhesi, Tharu, Muslims, backward regions, and minority communities on a population basis, while considering the province's geographical balance. The design is especially important in Madhesh Province because the broad category 'Madhesi' cannot substitute for the province's internal diversity. Dalits, Muslims, Tharus, women, linguistic minorities, hill-origin residents, and smaller caste groups may be numerically underrepresented even in a province symbolically associated with Madheshi identity. Madhesh Province: eight districts and 136 local levels The present Madhesh Province consists of Saptari, Siraha, Dhanusha, Mahottari, Sarlahi, Rautahat, Bara, and Parsa. The provincial government's current profile records 136 local levels. This makes the province a dense network of municipalities and rural municipalities rather than a single political community governed only from Janakpurdham. Local government is therefore central to plural citizenship. Birth registration, local recommendations, school administration, roads, sanitation, local taxation, and service delivery shape the daily experience of the state more directly than many constitutional debates in Kathmandu. 17 January 2022: Province No. 2 becomes Madhesh Province On 17 January 2022 the provincial assembly adopted 'Madhesh' as the province's name by the constitutionally required two-thirds majority and designated Janakpurdham as the permanent capital. The vote converted a movement vocabulary into an official territorial name. Competing proposals had included Janaki and Mithila-Bhojpura, demonstrating that provincial identity was itself contested within the region. The naming should neither be minimized nor overread. It is a major act of recognition, but it does not establish that all residents identify primarily as Madheshi or that Madhesh Province is coterminous with every historical definition of Madhesh. Janakpurdham: provincial capital and Mithila centre Janakpurdham carries several layers of significance at once: it is a major Sita-Rama pilgrimage centre, an important Maithili cultural city, a historic centre of Nepal's Mithila region, and the capital of Madhesh Province. These roles reinforce one another but are not identical. The capital's location also highlights an internal provincial geography. Birgunj is a major industrial and border-trade city in the west; Janakpurdham is more centrally associated with Mithila cultural symbolism. The 2022 capital vote resolved an institutional question without eliminating regional competition over investment and administrative concentration. The 2021 census: Madhesh is linguistically plural The 2021 National Population and Housing Census recorded 6,114,600 people in Madhesh Province. The provincial data portal reports Maithili as the largest mother tongue, followed by Bhojpuri and Bajjika, with substantial Nepali, Tharu, Urdu, Tamang, and other language populations. Nationally, the census recorded Maithili as the second-largest mother tongue after Nepali. Census categories are administrative classifications, not immutable linguistic boundaries. Bajjika, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Magahi, Hindi, Urdu, and Nepali may be used differently across home, market, school, media, and public office. A census response records a declared category within a particular questionnaire; it should not be used to erase multilingual practice. Maithili is large, but provincial equality cannot be monolingual Maithili's demographic weight and literary history give it a strong claim to provincial institutional support. Yet a province that replaced Nepali-only administration with Maithili-only administration would reproduce the same structural problem for Bhojpuri, Bajjika, Tharu, Urdu, Magahi, Nepali, and smaller- language speakers. Plural citizenship therefore requires layered language policy: translation, multilingual forms, school options, interpreter capacity, media access, and legal clarity about which languages may be used for which administrative functions. Symbolic recognition is valuable, but service access is the stronger test. January 2025: the official-language bill and its withdrawal In January 2025 the Madhesh Province government introduced a bill proposing Nepali together with Maithili, Bhojpuri, Bajjika, Hindi, and English for official working use. The proposal met immediate opposition from lawmakers and organizations objecting to the exclusion of languages including Tharu and Magahi. The government withdrew the bill on 24 January after protests and assembly resistance. The episode is a rare practical demonstration of why language recognition cannot be reduced to majority arithmetic. Article 7 authorizes provincial language legislation, but selecting a list creates new boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. The withdrawal left the underlying constitutional power intact while showing that consensus on its exercise had not been reached. Language recognition has at least five institutional levels Language status in Nepal must be separated into at least five fields: mother-tongue census classification, constitutional status as a language of the nation, federal official-language status, provincial official-language status, and practical use in schools and administration. A language can be recognized in one field and weakly implemented in another. This framework also clarifies debates over Maithili. Its national census size, literature, university use, media presence, and provincial demographic importance are distinct kinds of evidence. None should be used as a substitute for an enacted provincial official-language law that does not yet exist in Madhesh Province after the 2025 withdrawal. The Madhesi Commission: constitutional recognition beyond territory Article 262 establishes a Madhesi Commission consisting of a chairperson and up to four other members, with detailed functions provided by federal law. The institution is significant because it recognizes Madheshi marginalization at the national constitutional level rather than treating Madhesh solely as a province. The Commission has undertaken studies of community status, access to state mechanisms, surname and group classification, and related social questions. Its reports are sources for contemporary policy history, but they should be read as institutional documents with defined mandates rather than as final ethnographic authorities over who must identify as Madheshi. Other commissions prevent Madhesh from becoming a single- axis category The Constitution separately provides National Women, National Dalit, National Inclusion, Indigenous Nationalities, Madhesi, Tharu, and Muslim commissions. This institutional plurality matters in the southern plains, where one person may be simultaneously Madheshi, Dalit, Muslim, Tharu, a woman, a linguistic minority, or a member of another protected group. Separate commissions can illuminate distinct structures of disadvantage, but they can also fragment responsibility. A complaint involving caste discrimination, gender, citizenship documentation, and regional exclusion may cross several mandates. Effective plural citizenship therefore depends on coordination as well as category recognition. 2025-26: the ten-year review question Article 265 requires the Federal Parliament to review the Part 27 commissions after ten years from commencement of the Constitution. That constitutional milestone arrived in 2025. Public debate in 2025 and 2026 has focused on whether the commissions have been adequately resourced, whether their recommendations are implemented, how appointments are made, and whether their mandates should be strengthened, reorganized, or merged. The existence of a review clause should not be misread as an instruction to abolish the commissions after ten years. It creates an obligation to evaluate them. The historical issue is therefore institutional performance: what problems were documented, what recommendations were acted on, and what capacities were withheld. The 2023 Citizenship First Amendment President Ramchandra Paudel authenticated the first amendment to the Nepal Citizenship Act on 31 May 2023. The amendment implemented constitutional routes that had remained blocked or uncertain for years, including citizenship for children of persons who had earlier acquired citizenship by birth where the statutory conditions are satisfied, and provisions concerning children of Nepali mothers whose fathers are not identified. The amendment generated intense political and legal debate over presidential authentication because the bill had passed the previous Parliament and had not been authenticated by the former president. For this chapter, the key distinction is between the procedural controversy over enactment and the substantive citizenship categories that the amended Act made operable. The 2025 Citizenship Second Amendment A further bill amending the Citizenship Act was authenticated on 21 September 2025. Parliamentary and government explanations emphasized access to citizenship through the mother's name and additional routes intended to reduce documentation gaps affecting children of Nepali women, including specified cases involving birth abroad and an unidentified father. Regulations were subsequently updated to administer the revised law. These reforms are historically important because citizenship law is still evolving after the 2015 Constitution. They also counsel against freezing analysis at the 2015 text: criticism of gender asymmetry remains relevant, but the statutory position in 2026 is not identical to the law that existed at promulgation. No single amendment resolves the gender question The 2023 and 2025 amendments expand routes to documentation, but they do not make every citizenship pathway gender-symmetrical. The Constitution itself continues to distinguish some situations involving a Nepali mother and foreign father from those involving a Nepali father and foreign mother. Naturalized and descent citizenship also remain legally distinct categories with consequences for eligibility for certain constitutional offices. A precise account should therefore avoid both extremes: claiming that no reform occurred, or claiming that reform has eliminated all gendered differences. The legal trajectory is incremental and contested. Citizenship and the highest constitutional offices The Constitution reserves specified senior constitutional offices for citizens by descent. This distinction has particular political resonance in a country where naturalized citizenship may arise through cross-national marriage or parentage. Madhesh-based critics have argued that the rule can have disproportionate effects in border regions with long-standing cross-border family ties. Whether a rule is formally uniform and whether its social effects are evenly distributed are separate questions. Equality analysis must therefore examine both text and demographic context without assuming that every naturalized citizen is Madheshi or every Madheshi family has transnational parentage. Dalit citizenship within Madhesh Madheshi Dalits face the intersection of regional exclusion and caste hierarchy. Formal political recognition of Madhesh does not automatically dismantle untouchability, occupational stigma, landlessness, or unequal access to documentation. Research on Madheshi Dalit women further shows how caste, gender, poverty, and citizenship procedure can compound one another. This is a methodological warning against vertical analysis alone. Representation of Madhesh in Kathmandu can improve while internal inequality within Madhesh remains severe. The two scales must be measured separately. Muslim citizenship within Madhesh Madhesh Province contains Nepal's largest concentration of Muslims and Urdu-speaking communities, but Muslim identity cannot be reduced to language or Madheshi identity. The Constitution names Muslims separately in equality, inclusion, and electoral provisions and establishes a Muslim Commission. This produces both recognition and overlapping institutional classifications. Questions of schooling, personal identity, poverty, political representation, and security can therefore follow patterns different from those of neighbouring Hindu caste groups even within the same district. A plural history must preserve that difference. Tharu identity and resistance to compulsory Madheshi classification Tharu political movements have repeatedly insisted on their own indigenous identity, history, and territorial claims. Some Tharus accept forms of Madheshi solidarity in particular contexts, while others reject being subsumed under Madheshi identity. The Constitution's separate references to Madhesi and Tharu, and separate constitutional commissions, reflect this political distinction. The analytical consequence is clear: 'plains-origin' is not a sufficient ethnic category. Ecological location, language, indigeneity, caste history, and political organization produce different identities within the Tarai. Hill-origin residents of Madhesh Province Madhesh Province also includes residents whose family histories are associated with Nepal's hill regions and whose first language may be Nepali or another language. Federalism cannot make such citizens guests in their own province. Provincial identity is territorial and constitutional as well as cultural. Minority protection therefore runs in more than one direction. A settlement designed to correct historic central exclusion of Madhesh must also protect internal provincial minorities. This is one reason the language dispute of 2025 is more than a technical drafting failure. Class, land, and the limits of identity arithmetic Caste and regional identity do not eliminate class. Land ownership, tenancy, migration income, education, urban property, business networks, and access to credit create deep differences among people placed in the same constitutional category. Political elites can gain representation without corresponding improvements for landless labourers or informal workers. The cultural economy of Janakpur, Birgunj's trade economy, agrarian districts, and migration-dependent households therefore produce different experiences of citizenship. Representation should be linked to distributive outcomes rather than assumed from office-holding alone. Local government and the everyday state Federal debates often focus on Kathmandu and provincial capitals, but Nepal's local governments are where many citizens encounter the state. Registration, local taxation, school governance, health services, roads, social-security enrolment, recommendations for citizenship documents, and disaster response all depend on municipal or rural-municipal capacity. The quality of plural citizenship can therefore vary within the same constitutional regime. A multilingual ward office with reliable civil registration may make citizenship materially easier to exercise than a formally inclusive province whose local records remain inaccessible. Education: mother tongue, mobility, and public opportunity Education policy sits at the intersection of language rights and social mobility. Mother-tongue instruction can improve early comprehension and cultural continuity, while proficiency in Nepali and other wider-use languages can expand access to higher education and national employment. The policy problem is not choosing one language forever but sequencing and supporting multilingual learning. In Madhesh, Maithili, Bhojpuri, Bajjika, Tharu, Urdu, Nepali, and other languages may require different local solutions. A uniform province-wide formula would not match the actual distribution of speech communities. Security institutions and the historical meaning of underrepresentation Madhesh movements have repeatedly linked citizenship to representation in the army, police, civil service, and other state bodies. Underrepresentation matters because these institutions do more than provide jobs: they exercise coercive power, produce records, administer borders, and symbolize who belongs to the state. Measuring change requires comparable recruitment and staffing data over time. Anecdotal claims, whether celebratory or accusatory, should not substitute for disaggregated institutional statistics by gender, caste/ethnicity, region, and rank. Public service inclusion and the problem of categories Affirmative-action systems require categories, but categories themselves become political. Who counts as Madhesi, backward class, minority, Dalit, Tharu, or Muslim can affect access to reserved opportunities. State classification can therefore recognize inequality while also creating incentives to contest boundaries and documentation. The Madhesi Commission's work on community and surname lists should be read in this context. Such lists are administrative instruments; they are not timeless ethnological maps and should not be projected into earlier historical periods. Diagram 52: selected citizenship, movement, and federalism anchors Diagram 52. From legal citizenship to plural federal citizenship: selected Nepal- Madhesh constitutional and political anchors, 1952-2026. The sequence separates statutory citizenship, movement politics, federal design, provincial naming, later amendments, and implementation review. The 2026 House result as a representation snapshot The Election Commission's report on the 2026 House of Representatives election classified 16.73 percent of elected members within its Madhesi inclusive category, alongside separate categories for Dalit, Tharu, Muslim, indigenous nationalities, and Khas Arya. The figure is useful as a current institutional snapshot, not as a complete measure of Madhesh representation. It does not tell us how many representatives reside in Madhesh Province, speak Maithili, belong to particular castes, or advocate Madhesh-based constitutional reform. Electoral categories and regional political positions are different variables. Representation must be disaggregated by route and office A serious inclusion audit should separate first-past-the-post from proportional-list seats; national from provincial and local office; legislators from ministers; senior civil servants from entry-level employees; and symbolic appointments from decision-making power. Aggregate percentages can conceal concentration in less influential positions. The same principle applies to women and Dalits within Madhesh. Numerical presence is a necessary measure of inclusion, but not a complete measure of agenda-setting capacity, budget control, or protection from discrimination. Political parties remain the principal gatekeepers Constitutional inclusion rules are implemented through party nominations and closed proportional lists. Parties therefore decide which individuals represent a category, which districts receive winnable constituency candidates, and who moves from electoral representation into executive office. Internal party democracy is consequently a central part of the citizenship story. Madhesh-based parties themselves are not exempt from this scrutiny. A party can demand proportional inclusion nationally while reproducing caste, family, gender, or leadership concentration inside its own organization. Federal finance: recognition without resources is thin citizenship A province's ability to make recognition meaningful depends on money, staff, and legal competence. Education, health, roads, agricultural extension, language services, and cultural institutions require predictable fiscal transfers and own-source revenue. Federalism measured only by names, flags, and assemblies can overstate practical autonomy. The financial relationship among federal, provincial, and local governments is therefore part of representation. Budget formulas decide which territorial populations receive roads, hospitals, schools, and administrative capacity. Birgunj and Janakpurdham: two centres, different political economies Birgunj is one of Nepal's most important trade and customs gateways, while Janakpurdham combines provincial administration with religious and cultural centrality. Their functions show that Madhesh has no single urban centre. Provincial policy must balance border logistics, industrial corridors, pilgrimage, education, public administration, and rural service networks. This internal geography also affects political representation. Western and eastern districts may experience the provincial capital differently, and border cities may orient daily commerce toward Indian markets while remaining firmly inside Nepal's fiscal and political system. Open border does not mean open citizenship The India-Nepal relationship permits unusually extensive movement and reciprocal privileges, but movement rights and citizenship are distinct. People may cross for work, pilgrimage, trade, or family visits without acquiring the political rights of citizens in the other state. Voting, passports, constitutional office, and nationality remain governed by domestic law. Confusing mobility with citizenship fuels two opposite errors: treating ordinary cross-border movement as evidence of foreignness, or assuming that cultural openness makes documentary nationality unnecessary. Neither follows from the legal regime. Media, stereotype, and the production of suspect belonging Madhesh politics has repeatedly been shaped by stereotypes that portray plains citizens as insufficiently Nepali because of accent, clothing, skin colour, language, or family ties across the border. Such representations turn cultural difference into a loyalty test. Conversely, some movement rhetoric has portrayed hill-origin citizens as a single colonizing bloc, obscuring class and political difference among them. A plural history rejects reciprocal essentialism. Political discrimination can be documented without assigning collective guilt to an entire population category. Memory of protest and the politics of martyrdom The deaths associated with the Madhesh movements are commemorated in political speeches, monuments, anniversaries, and party narratives. Such practices are important sources for the history of collective memory. They show how constitutional claims are linked to sacrifice and moral legitimacy. Commemoration should nevertheless be distinguished from forensic history. Exact casualty counts, responsibility for individual deaths, and legal accountability require case-specific evidence. Memorial categories should not substitute for investigation. Constitutional nationalism and Madhesh constitutionalism Nepalese constitutional nationalism emphasizes sovereignty, territorial integrity, republicanism, and the authority of a constitution adopted by an elected assembly. Madhesh constitutionalism emphasizes equal membership, federal self- government, fair representation, and freedom from treatment as a suspect border population. These positions are not inherently incompatible, though political rhetoric has often presented them as opposites. A stable federal order requires both: the state's sovereignty must be accepted, and citizenship within that state must not depend on cultural conformity to a single regional model of Nepali identity. Diagram 53: plural citizenship across institutions Diagram 53. Plural citizenship operates through several institutions at once. The schematic separates legal status, electoral voice, language access, federal power, social justice, and institutional redress; cross-border mobility does not erase state-specific citizenship. Plural citizenship is more than possession of a certificate A citizenship certificate establishes a crucial legal status, but effective citizenship also includes the ability to vote, stand for office, understand public procedures, obtain documents, use courts, receive education and health services, compete for employment, and participate without discrimination. These capacities are distributed through several institutions rather than one law. The diagram therefore treats citizenship as layered: legal status, electoral voice, language access, federal and local power, social justice, and institutional redress. Failure in one layer can weaken the practical value of success in another. Recognition can create new exclusions Every act of recognition draws a boundary. Naming Madhesh Province recognizes one political history while leaving some residents attached to other regional names. Selecting official languages helps their speakers while excluding languages not selected. Reservation categories create access for listed groups while raising disputes over subgroups and internal elites. The answer is not to reject recognition but to design it reflexively: categories should be reviewable, minority rights should operate within recognized regions, and data should be disaggregated enough to detect unequal distribution inside protected groups. Mithila inside Nepal: cultural continuity without territorial conflation Mithila's literature, ritual traditions, Maithili language, pilgrimage networks, and artistic practices are central to the history of eastern Madhesh. Janakpurdham is one of their most important centres. Yet Mithila is not the constitutional name of Madhesh Province, and Madhesh Province includes important Bhojpuri, Bajjika, Tharu, Urdu, Nepali, and other cultural worlds. The book's borderland method therefore allows Mithila to be transnational and historically deep without turning it into a claim that modern political boundaries are illegitimate or that every plains citizen shares one cultural identity. What changed between 2007 and 2026 Between the first Madhesh movement and 2026, Nepal moved from an interim post-conflict order to an operating federal republic with elected provincial and local governments, a province officially named Madhesh, constitutionally mandated inclusion, a Madhesi Commission, a mixed electoral system, and repeated amendments to citizenship law. These are substantial institutional changes. At the same time, disputes remain over citizenship equality, the implementation of proportional inclusion, provincial powers, official languages, internal minority protection, public- service representation, and the effectiveness of constitutional commissions. The historical conclusion is neither 'nothing changed' nor 'the Madhesh question was solved.' Research method: separate law, claim, implementation, and outcome Four levels must be kept distinct. First is law: what the Constitution, Acts, and regulations actually say. Second is political claim: what parties, movements, and critics demand. Third is implementation: what offices, commissions, and governments do. Fourth is outcome: who receives documents, offices, services, and influence. Many controversies become confused when evidence from one level is used to prove another. A movement manifesto does not establish the law; a constitutional right does not prove implementation; an election result does not prove equal access to administration. Chapter conclusion: citizenship as equal membership in a plural federation The modern history of Madhesh is a history of belonging negotiated through territory, documents, language, elections, social hierarchy, and memory. Its central achievement has been to make the question 'who is represented as Nepali?' impossible to answer solely from the viewpoint of Kathmandu-centred institutions or a single national culture. Plural citizenship does not require a weak state or blurred sovereignty. It requires the opposite: a state confident enough to recognize that equal citizens may speak different languages, inhabit different historical regions, maintain cross-border kinship, and organize politically around distinct identities without having their nationality placed under permanent suspicion. Chapter-specific bibliography Constitution of Nepal. 2015, as amended in 2016 and 2020. Nepal Law Commission, official English text. Nepal Citizenship Act, 2063 (2006), as amended through the First Amendment authenticated 31 May 2023 and Second Amendment authenticated 21 September 2025. Nepal Law Commission / Government of Nepal. Office of the President of Nepal. 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