The social fabric of the jelbang killings

In this chapter we analyse the story of Jelbang, a village in Rolpa District of western Nepal, which suffered an unusually high number of deaths during the decade-long “People’s War” launched by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). ¹ Sixty-eight people from this village are documented to have died in the course of the decade-long conflict, making it perhaps the village that suffered the highest number of casualties in all of Nepal. Of these, thirty were killed in Jelbang itself, and that, too, within the first three years of the start of the conflict which had till then been confined mainly to two districts, Rolpa and adjoining Rukum. Most of these killings were at the hands of the police. We ask why, in relation to the other communities in the area, there were such a high number of deaths in Jelbang. What particular circumstances made 310Jelbang different from the other villages in the area? To answer these questions we examine what was particularly significant about the history of Jelbang.