Nirmal Badi, a lifelong advocate for the Badi, with Pinky Dangi from BASE

This blog covers two recent meetings with Nirmal Badi, a prominent Badi activist in Tulsipor. While the main focus was on the Badi, our discussion also ranged over many of the questions we have covered in meeting other sub-castes – coercion, identity, discrimination, poverty, and social change.

Nirmal’s personal story mirrors that of Dilli Chaudhary. Dilli’s parents were born into bonded labor. Nirmal’s family was born into prostitution. The experience turned both men into outspoken advocates. Both started their own organizations and both view education as a powerful catalyst for social change. Nirmal was the first-ever Badi to teach at a government school. His four children all graduated from college and have excellent jobs in Dubai, Nepal and the UK.

The biggest difference between the two is that Dilli’s target – bonded labor – is now a thing of the past. As Nirmal explains, the Badi still struggle against stigma and poverty.

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Nirmal Badi’s views about his sub-caste are shaped by the fact that his two older sisters practiced prostitution. He remembers staying with his grandmother while his sisters went off in search of clients, sometimes for months at a time. They would also visit the forest to meet men and Nirmal recalls waiting for them on river banks, around the age of 8.

Nirmal describes Tulsipor as one of the prostitution centers of Nepal and like the Badi women we met in the town of Ghorahi he makes it sound lawless and terrifying. His own sisters were repeatedly burned with cigarettes. The police rarely intervened but when they did it was to arrest the prostitutes.

Nirmal also has a lot to say about coercion, which I touched on in an earlier blog. His sisters practiced prostitution as adults but it was the way they started as girls that mattered – plus the fact that they knew no other way of life. This was the coercive power of the social norm. Even when they reached the age of consent they were driven by the need for money. Nirmal’s sisters earned around 12,000 rupees a year ($85 at current rates) which supported the family and paid for his own school fees through grade 6.

And yet – some families resisted the norm and refused to allow their daughters to prostitute themselves. Nirmal also concedes that prostitution gave Badi women agency within their families and marriages. Still, he insists, the system put so much pressure on women to conform that only those with resources were in a position to resist the social norm. Almost none of the prostitution families owned land. He compares it to colonialism.

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As he grew older Nirmal became increasingly incensed at the exploitation of women and eventually demanded that his sisters stop prostitution, which they did. One even married into a Brahmin family.

Nirmal’s public advocacy began in 1992 when he protested a police raid in Tulsipor that led to the arrest of over 30 Badi prostitutes. Two years later he founded the Dalit Rights and Communications Campaign, which has received funding from a number of donors.

Nirmal’s early goal was to secure citizenship for the children of prostitution, and he vocally supported the 2007 campaign by Badi mothers that led to passage of the new law. Nirmal was also active in a decade of Dalit activism that followed. In 2017 the Supreme Court approved a package of support for the Badi but Badi advocates split over the follow-up and Nirmal found himself on the opposite side from Uma Badi, hero of the 2007 protest. Impatient for progress, he met with politicians and pressed the government to set up a committee to study the issue. The committee issued a report in 2021 just as the pandemic struck and the report was buried.

Nirmal wants the report dusted off and acted on. He is reminded of the need by the plight of around 25 ageing former prostitutes who live on the margins in Tulsipor, selling fruit in markets or begging. Most never married and have been abandoned by their families and children. Some changed their names and then regretted the decision, presumably because it robbed them of the group protection.

This lingering tragedy gives urgency to Nirmal’s advocacy. He continues to lobby for the rehabilitation of the former prostitutes, vocational training for the children, income-generation and – most important – land. A 2008 task force found that two thirds of all Badi were living on public or government land. “So why not give them the land?” he asks.

Land is also one reason why many Badi men have migrated in search of work, leaving their families to face stigma and exclusion in Badi settlements like Ghorahi as described in this earlier blog.

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Before we part company I ask Nirmal whether he is proud to be Badi.

“Of course!” he says. I press him further and he talks of the Badi women who sang and danced at the Royal Court, of the madal drums, and of the fishing. “My identity is linked to this culture,” he says. Nirmal also maintains that the stigma has ended. “People have stopped thinking I earn a living from prostituting my daughter. They no longer think that way!”

Perhaps, but a culture that trapped women in prostitution is not very appealing. Nirmal’s views are also probably colored by the fact that he is a man who fought the good fight and won. Badi, to him, is a label to be worn with pride because it denotes success and achievement. Also, he does not have to exorcise the kind of personal demons that still haunt some of the Badi women we have met on this trip.

Of course, this does not make Nirmal’s advocacy any less impressive, and he would be a powerful ally in any new project by BASE.

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Footnote: It transpires that Nirmal kept a journal and has a treasure trove of information about the Badi.  When Pinky hears this she remembers that her own grandfather – a teacher – also kept extensive records about the Badi a quarter century ago. Both original sources are waiting to be tapped by a keen researcher.

Next – It’s a wrap!