A demonstration in Kathmandu to demand rights. Credit: Sudeshna Sarkar/IPS.

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, Nov 22 2013 (IPS)

In Nepal, where a quarter of the population is steeped in poverty, a man who once led a 10-year Maoist insurgency before joining the political mainstream has been splurging on helicopters for his election campaign.

The extravagance by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, a former school teacher and guerrilla leader who went on to become prime minister after the monarchy was abolished in the Himalayan nation, has come under scathing criticism.

Prominent Nepali citizens, rival parties and even former Maoist comrades say it has brought into sharp focus the socio-economic inequalities in this country of 27 million people.

Bhagirath Basnet, a former foreign secretary of Nepal, makes a wry observation.“The Maoists came to power promising to end inequality and poverty. But they have betrayed the war that saw over 15,000 people die.”

“It is difficult to fathom how a proletariat leader and self-touted messiah of the poor could find the resources and moral justification to do so, day in, day out,” Basnet tells IPS.

“This, in a country where 25 percent of people languish in poverty and millions of children are deprived of minimum nutrition and primary education.”

Ironically, the Maoists’ main opponent, the Nepali Congress, had a far more low-key campaign for the Nov. 19 elections.

Its veteran leaders, including a septuagenarian cancer survivor, rode on cycle and horseback to woo voters.

The election results coming in are being disputed by the Maoist leader.

As Nepalis berate the Maoist extravagance on social media, they are joined by former comrades who accuse the party of selling out.

“The Maoists came to power promising to end inequality and poverty,” says Matrika Prasad Yadav, once the most senior Maoist leader in the southern Terai plains. “But they have betrayed the war that saw over 15,000 people die.”

The Maoist insurrection started in 1996 with the avowed aim of ending monarchy, the feudal rule of a nearly 250-year-old dynasty that appropriated national resources for the royal family and nobles.

Though the Maoist war ended in 2006 and Dahal’s Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) came to power through elections, the social and economic inequalities that had triggered their movement remain. Nepal, which lies between the two Asian giants, India and China, has an annual per capita income of 742 dollars.

“I feel embarrassed when I go abroad,” says Binod Chaudhary, head of a Nepali business group and the first billionaire from Nepal to make it to Forbes magazine’s list of the world’s richest.

“Every day, a thousand Nepalis go abroad in search of jobs because there are no jobs here. We have 16-hour power cuts daily though Nepal has tremendous hydropower potential,” he tells IPS. “We don’t even have enough drinking water in Kathmandu [the capital], let alone in villages.

“People ask me, you are a billionaire, yet Nepal is so poor. What is the reason?”

Emboldened by the Maoists’ success, new groups are mushrooming, seizing their unfulfilled promise of equality and opportunity.

Matrika Yadav, a former Maoist minister, is now an adversary. His grievance is an old one. “The Maoists have exploited Madhes [the Terai region],” he says.

Terai, the food bowl of Nepal, suffered from neglect by a succession of governments because its residents were regarded as immigrants from India and inferior to the hill people.

“Terai people still don’t have citizenship,” Yadav says. “They are still not represented in the army, bureaucracy and judiciary in the numbers the government promised. They lack education, healthcare and opportunities.”

Yadav’s Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) boycotted the election, and he warns the party could go underground.

Another former comrade, Mohan Vaidya, is not just opposing the election but called a 10-day transport strike to prevent people from casting their votes.

Vaidya, once among the top three Maoist leaders, is a hardliner who feels it was a mistake to agree to peace. The reedy, bespectacled Vaidya has his own separate Maoist party now – the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist) – and together with splinter groups was adamant about the strike despite the hardship it caused people.

Buses have been set on fire, including one carrying passengers. Improvised explosive devices – the main weapon of the Maoists during their People’s War – were left in public places, creating an atmosphere of fear.

The international community believed the election was a necessity in Nepal. Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter was present to monitor it, along with European and Indian observers.

Shoko Noda, the United Nations Development Programme country director in Nepal, says it was crucial that elections took place and the political process was normalised so that the focus could return to the economy and jobs.

“Since the 1990s, Nepal has made significant progress in the human development index,” she says.

“Still, historically and spatially, marginalised groups such as Dalits, women, indigenous nationalities and those living in geographically remote places continue to be at the bottom of the pyramid,” Noda tells IPS.

“As a result Nepal has high income and consumption inequality.”

She hopes once politics stabilises, the development process will accelerate, leading to more opportunities for even the poorest of the poor.

“Better infrastructure coupled with an improved business environment can boost the entrepreneurship that can create jobs to accommodate them,” Noda says.

Five former prime ministers from across party lines, including Dahal, have vowed to push the development agenda and collaborate for the common good. But Nepalis themselves remain sceptical.

Nanda Prasad Adhikari and his wife Ganga Maya on their fast in front of the prime minister's residence in Kathmandu. Credit: Bimal Chandra Sharma/IPS

By Sudeshna Sarkar
KOLKATA, Sep 19 2013 (IPS)

When the police finally arrested a man this month in the Nepali capital for the murder of a teenager nine years ago, it became a matter of life and death for Nanda Prasad Adhikari and his wife Ganga Maya.

The 18-year-old victim, abducted and killed brutally by Maoist guerrillas in 2004 when the communist insurgency was at its peak, was their son.

Driven by anger and frustration that the killers had not been punished even seven years after the insurrection ended, the couple had been on a fast unto death in Kathmandu, and had to be admitted to hospital.“The era of royal regimes has not ended..."

The arrest, along with an assurance by the interim government that the killing would be investigated and the victim’s family paid compensation, led the Adhikaris to end their fast after 47 days.

But Subodh Pyakurel, head of Nepal’s largest human rights organisation Informal Sector Service Centre (INSEC), has misgivings about the state’s promise.

“The era of royal regimes has not ended,” Pyakurel told IPS, referring to the two years from 2005 when Nepal’s ambitious king Gyanendra discarded his figurehead role to grab power in an army-backed putsch.

The following two years saw some of the worst human right violations by both the army and the guerrillas and an escalation in killings, abductions and disappearances. Despite the subsequent abolition of monarchy, there is a general feeling that the succeeding elected governments were as dictatorial as the royal regime.

“The Maoists [who came to power after signing a peace pact and winning the 2008 elections] have shown as much disregard for the law as the [ousted] king. They have not only failed to punish cadres responsible for the atrocities during their ‘people’s war’, but also promoted the army and security personnel guilty of similar crimes.”

INSEC’s Human Rights Yearbook 2013 recorded 13,276 deaths in the decade-old civil war that erupted in 1996 when the Maoists walked out of parliament and went underground to wage war against the state demanding equality and the abolition of monarchy.

Over 1,000 people disappeared. None have been found yet.

But not one extrajudicial killing, abduction, rape or torture has been punished though the Maoists and other major political parties signed a peace agreement in 2006 pledging to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission to punish war crimes, and a commission to investigate the fate of the disappeared.

Seven years later, the two commissions are yet to materialise.

“As a victim and activist, I am frustrated that not a single perpetrator has been brought to justice so far,” says Jitman Basnet, a lawyer and former editor whose articles earned him the wrath of both the army and the Maoists.

In 2002, the Maoists abducted Basnet for criticising their excesses and their destruction of public property, and threatened him with dire consequences.

The following year, the army came after him for writing about a mass killing that was a deliberate ploy to provoke the Maoists into breaking off peace negotiations with the government.

Basnet remained imprisoned for over eight months in a notorious underground prison run by the army, constantly blindfolded and handcuffed. Along with the other illegally detained prisoners, he was regularly assaulted, given electric shocks and tortured in other ways.

Many of the camp inmates disappeared and have not been heard of since.

After his release, Basnet wrote a book, ‘258 Dark Days’, chronicling the information he had gathered on illegal detention, enforced disappearances and torture.

“I disclosed the names of the army officials involved in human rights abuses at the barracks, hoping it would help investigations into the army’s atrocities and human rights violations,” he told IPS.

The book created a furore and brought him threats, but not one officer was punished.

Basnet then filed three cases in the Supreme Court. One of them was against top army officials as well as King Gyanendra himself. Basnet contended that since the king was the supreme commander of the army, the ultimate culpability for the illegal arrests, torture, disappearances and killings was his.

He also took the cases to U.N. and other international forums. And still, nothing happened.

“No commission has been formed to investigate past crimes,” he said. “The political parties and the government are willing to give amnesty to the perpetrators.”

The army has steadfastly refused to punish its tainted officers. It has only promoted them and given them plum postings. One of them, Col Kumar Lama, served with U.N. peacekeeping forces.

This year, when Lama was arrested for war crimes by British officials while visiting his family in Sussex, Nepal’s government protested, calling it a violation of Nepal’s sovereignty.

The Maoists too have ignored public outrage, appointing at least two leaders as ministers though both were named in torture and murder cases and a court ordered the arrest of one of them.

“We need a relentless campaign for justice,” said Janak Raut, president of the Conflict Victims’ Society for Justice, a platform of about 100 people who suffered either at the hands of the army, Maoists or armed groups and vigilantes that have sprung up in southern Nepal emboldened by the culture of impunity.

After staging public protests and filing lawsuits, society has now turned to social media to widen its campaign with a recently opened Facebook page.

Raut said fresh elections, announced in November to complete the drafting of the new constitution, will not help the victims.

“The election will be won by the same leaders who will keep on shielding the guilty because all of them are involved,” he told IPS. “But justice will be delivered eventually, by the people united against their oppressors.

“It may take time but as history has shown, it will come.”