Madhesh Andolan & Terai Armed Groups (Post-2006): A History

The Terai (also called Madhesh) is Nepal's southern plains belt bordering India, home to a large share of the country's population and to Madhesi, Tharu, Muslim and other communities. After the decade-long Maoist insurgency (1996-2006) ended with the Comprehensive Peace Accord of November 2006 (Mangsir 2063 BS), Madhesi activists argued that the peace settlement and the coming Interim Constitution ignored their long-standing demands for federalism, an inclusive state and fair representation in the army, bureaucracy and legislature.

The Interim Constitution promulgated on 15 January 2007 (Magh 2063 BS) became the immediate trigger. It did not clearly commit to a federal structure or to a proportional, population-based electoral system, which Madhesi groups saw as continuing the historic marginalisation of the plains within a hill-centric state. Grievances also included citizenship rules that many plains residents felt excluded them, and under-representation in state institutions relative to population.

These accumulated grievances produced two overlapping phenomena documented on this page: mass, largely non-violent street movements (the Madhesh andolans of 2007, 2008 and 2015-16) that negotiated with the state, and separately, armed underground outfits such as the Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha (JTMM) that pursued violence and, in some factions, a separatist agenda. This article treats both strictly as documented political-conflict history.

The first Madhesh andolan erupted in January 2007. On 16 January 2007, the Upendra Yadav-led Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (Madhesi People's Rights Forum, MJF) — then still largely a socio-political organisation — publicly burned copies of the Interim Constitution at Maitighar Mandala in Kathmandu and called for agitation in the Terai. The movement escalated after a protester, Ramesh Kumar Mahato, was shot dead in Lahan (Siraha district) on 19 January 2007, an incident widely commemorated as a founding martyrdom of the movement.

Weeks of strikes (bandhs), curfews and clashes with security forces followed across the plains. Contemporary accounts and later summaries put the toll of the wider Madhesi mobilisation of this period in the dozens; some tallies cite roughly 40-50 deaths connected to the 2007 agitation, and one commonly cited figure counts around 117 people killed across the 2007, 2008 and 2015 movements combined. Because sources differ, exact death tolls should be treated as indicative rather than definitive.

The agitation ended when the government of Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala reached a 22-point agreement with the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum on 30 August 2007 (Bhadra 2064 BS). The state committed, among other things, to a federal structure, a more proportional/mixed electoral system for the Constituent Assembly, greater inclusion of Madhesis in state bodies, recognition of the martyrs and compensation to affected families. This accord marked the first time federalism was firmly placed on Nepal's constitutional agenda.

The 22-point deal did not settle all disputes, and Madhesi parties returned to the streets in early 2008. By this time the movement had produced organised political forces, including the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, the Terai Madhes Loktantrik Party (TMLP) led by Mahantha Thakur, and the Sadbhavana Party led by Rajendra Mahato, which coordinated under a United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF) banner.

A roughly two-week shutdown of the southern plains in February 2008 pressed the government further. On 28 February 2008 (Falgun 2064 BS), an eight-point agreement was signed between the government and the Madhesi Front. Its provisions included a commitment to a federal democratic republic with autonomous Madhesh provinces, group entry and proportional inclusion of Madhesis in the Nepal Army and other state organs, recognition of movement casualties as martyrs, and free treatment for the injured.

These 2007-2008 accords reshaped the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections of April 2008, in which Madhes-based parties won a substantial bloc of seats and became decisive players in coalition politics. The commitments on federalism and inclusion carried into the constitution-drafting process and were reaffirmed in the Interim Constitution's later amendments, even though the shape of federal provinces remained bitterly contested for years afterward.

Alongside the peaceful movements, the Terai saw the rise of underground armed outfits. The most prominent was the Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha (Democratic Terai Liberation Front, JTMM), formed in July 2004 when Jai Krishna Goit, a former Maoist leader who had coordinated the Madhesi National Liberation Front within the CPN (Maoist), broke away accusing the Maoists of betraying Madhesi autonomy. The JTMM's stated goal, in its more radical framing, was an independent or highly autonomous Terai state governed by Madhesis.

The outfit soon splintered. In August 2006, Nagendra Kumar Paswan, known as Jwala Singh, broke from the Goit-led group to form his own faction (commonly JTMM-J), while the original became JTMM-G; further splinters such as a Rajan Mukti faction later appeared. These factions built quasi-military structures, and in the post-2006 security vacuum the Terai experienced a wave of killings, abductions, extortion and bombings attributed to armed groups. Rival factions also fought and assassinated each other's cadres.

The armed-group landscape was broader than the JTMM alone, including outfits linked to the Goit and Jwala Singh networks and other Terai-based groups. Security and human-rights monitors documented dozens of killings and scores of abductions across these outfits during the late 2000s, making parts of the Terai among the least secure regions in the country at the time.

The government responded to the armed groups with a mix of security operations and negotiation. Starting in 2007, the state opened talks with several Terai outfits, and over multiple rounds of dialogue some agreed to ceasefires or to enter the peace process. The 2008 political settlement with mainstream Madhesi parties reduced the pool of grievances that armed groups had exploited, though violence and criminality continued to trouble the plains for years.

After at least six rounds of talks with the government since 2007, the main JTMM factions announced in April 2011 that they would lay down arms and end their violent campaigns. Enforcement was uneven — sporadic bombings and factional violence were reported afterward, for example in the Janakpur area in 2012 — but the coordinated armed insurgency of the mid-to-late 2000s had largely subsided by the early 2010s as leaders were arrested, killed, or brought into negotiations.

By the mid-2010s the centre of Madhesi political conflict had shifted decisively back to the parliamentary and street-movement arena, culminating in the disputes over the 2015 constitution rather than in armed insurgency.

Nepal's new Constitution was promulgated on 20 September 2015 (Ashwin 2072 BS). Madhesi and Tharu groups protested that its provincial boundaries, and provisions on representation and citizenship, marginalised the plains. Protests, strikes and clashes with security forces spread across the Terai from August 2015 onward. More than 50 people were killed over the course of the unrest, including both protesters and police, and hundreds were injured; Human Rights Watch documented a heavy police crackdown and dozens of deaths in the Terai.

From 23 September 2015, protesters blocked key Nepal-India border crossings, and cross-border trade — including fuel and medicines — largely halted for months, until roughly February 2016. Nepal, which imported effectively all of its petroleum through India, faced acute shortages: normal daily fuel-truck traffic collapsed to a small fraction of usual volumes, cooking-gas and petrol rationing began, and the disruption compounded the humanitarian strain from the April 2015 earthquakes. Kathmandu accused India of imposing an 'unofficial blockade' to pressure constitutional changes; New Delhi denied a blockade, attributing stoppages to protests and insecurity on the Nepali side.

The immediate constitutional outcome came with the first amendment to the 2015 Constitution, endorsed by parliament in January 2016. It changed the principle of 'inclusion' to 'proportional inclusion' (Article 42), and made population the first criterion — with geography second — in delimiting electoral constituencies (affecting Articles 84 and 286), which increased the plains' weight in the House of Representatives. Madhesi parties regarded this as only a partial win, since their central demand — redrawing provincial boundaries — was left to a separate commission and remained unresolved, keeping the Madhesh question alive in federal-era politics.

The post-2006 Madhesh movements durably reshaped the Nepali state: they were the decisive push that made federalism, proportional inclusion and a mixed electoral system part of the constitutional order, and they turned Madhes-based parties into permanent, coalition-defining actors in national politics. The 22-point (2007) and eight-point (2008) accords, and the first constitutional amendment (2016), are the main documented milestones of this bargaining.

Yet key grievances the movements raised were only partly met. Disputes over provincial boundaries, the citizenship regime, the exact scope of proportional representation, and recognition of Madhesi 'martyrs' recurred in later politics, and Madhesi parties continued to mark 19 January (the Lahan killing) and other dates as commemorations of the andolan. The armed-group era, by contrast, largely ended through a combination of security pressure and peace deals by around 2011.

For students of Nepali politics, the Terai conflicts of 2007-2016 illustrate two contrasting responses to the same set of exclusion grievances — negotiated mass movements that changed the constitution, and violent armed outfits that were ultimately contained — and remain central to understanding the federal republic's early years.