/ARTS WEEKLY/BOOK-NEPAL: Mourning for Democracy

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Sonny Inbaraj

BANGKOK, Apr 25 2005 (IPS) - ”The last thing the world needs is another failed state in South Asia, but that is what threatens to emerge in Nepal, where a spiralling conflict between the army and insurgents has taken a turn for the worse,” said a ‘New York Times’ editorial recently.

Without doubt, Nepal is probably the deadliest conflict in Asia with an estimated 10 killings a day.

The London-based rights group Amnesty International accuses the 10,000-strong Maoists of kidnapping, torture and murder. Amnesty also states Nepal’s security forces have detained more than 3,000 political prisoners since King Gyanendra seized power on Feb. 1.

The Brussels-based International Crisis Group in a recent report made it known unequivocally that Gyanendra runs ”a no-party state that has decimated democracy and kills people at will.”

So what went wrong with Nepal? Why did the ‘Spring Awakening’ of 1990, that began a year earlier with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the unravelling of the once mighty Soviet Union, just dissipate into thin air 15 years later?

Was democracy actually won in May that year, when the late King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah abandoned his absolute powers without any real struggle – keeping at bay the fierce Royal Nepal Army whose loyalty to the monarch was unquestioned?

Not so, says Nepali journalist-writer Manjushree Thapa in her latest book ‘An Elegy for Democracy – Forget Kathmandu’.

”What resulted was a democracy that looked like a democracy, but that functioned as an elite class and caste cartel, a democracy lacking democracy, a post-modern democracy. All ethical issues were conceded to power struggles and realpolitik,” she writes.

Scathingly, Thapa adds: ”Corruption, meanwhile, was continuing briskly. With each new government, a new set of politicians got their turn at building houses, buying cars, opening businesses, staring up NGOs, junketeering, hobnobbing, schmoozing and carousing, and generally indulging their newfound wealth.”

So was the royal coup inevitable? Can one concur that political party leaders had squandered their chance; the Maoists were getting stronger; and the king had no choice but to step in and ”save us”?

Before proceeding any further, Thapa takes the reader to events on Jun. 1, 2001 when King Birendra and his immediate family were slain in a tragedy beyond the most morbid imagination of any Jacobean playwright. It was the bloodiest and most complete massacre of any royal family in history.

Questions still remain unanswered as to what actually happened on the night of Jun. 1. Thapa hints at the existence of underground royal gang, led by Birendra’s brother Gyanendra Bir Bikram Shah and Queen Aishwarya Rajyalaksmi Shah, which refused to abandon the culture of absolutism in a multi-party democracy.

”They were checking on King Birendra’s liberal inclinations,” she writes.

But Thapa lets it lie there after making hints that King Gyanendra coveted the throne while reminiscing of the days when an absolute monarch could behave like a medieval despot.

In the second half of the book, the author goes on a six-day trek, with a foreign human rights activist, to Maoist-held areas in Western Nepal to seek answers to serious questions affecting the future of the Himalayan kingdom.

”We in Kathmandu could not grasp the sheer appeal of Maoist ideology in the poverty- stricken countryside. Those joining the Maoist insurgency were often young men – and many women – of little or no education, enjoying power for the first time through firearms,” she writes.

It goes without saying that Nepal has to address the root causes and real contradictions underlying the war with the Maoists. Nearly 11,000 people have been killed in the nine years since the Maoists began their fight to replace the country’s constitutional monarchy with a kingless communist republic.

The Kathmandu-based rights monitoring group, Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), revealed in its just released ‘Human Rights Year Book 2004’ that more than 2,600 people died in the insurgency last year, with 1,077 killed by the Maoists and 1,604 by government forces.

The United Nations estimates that the conflict has displaced between 100,000 to 200,000 Nepalis. Other outside groups estimate that as many as two million Nepalis may have crossed the border into neighbouring India.

In the final chapter of the book Thapa enters into a poignant conversation with a Maoist girl fighter she meets towards the end of her trek.

”I asked the first girl – the girl in the military – what she was doing before she joined the party.”

”Nothing,” she tells Thapa. ”I was at home, spending my days cutting grass.”

Then with a blithe tone that belied the grimness of her message, the Maoist girl fighter said: ”You see before there were only sickles in the hands of girls like me. Sickles and grass. And now there are automatic rifles.”

Thapa is jolted and then makes a reality check.

”All my irritation at the Maoists fell away with this. If I had grown up in one of these villages and were young, uneducated, unqualified for employment of any kind, and as a female denied basic equality – hell, I would have joined the Maoists, too,” she writes.

‘An Elegy for Democracy – Forget Kathmandu’ is a disturbing read.

It concludes with a grim prediction that there will be more massacres to come, ”with more political activists, students, teachers, journalists and ordinary people dying in a war they did not support but could not avoid.”