[From my column Obviously Opaque in the UTS Voice 16-31 May, 2013. Read the first one in this Nepal series here]
The SUV whizzing past our vehicle had caught my imagination. Painted
bright sky blue, the one seemingly copyrighted by the United Nations, this one,
I later noticed, did actually belong to the comity of nations. But then, what
exactly was a vehicle carrying a UN flag in the front and a blue, again UN,
number plate on the back doing on the dilapidated and dusty roads of
Nepalgunj? And why did it have a huge jammer along with the UN insignia?
‘The war is over, is not it?’ I asked the friend accompanying me. ‘No,
wars never end in Nepal,’ she replied looking out of the window. Her gaze was
fixed in vacuum. The abandon in her voice had disconcerted me enough not to
probe any further. The only sound that remained was that of the vehicle. The
monotony of the sound had doomed it to fade and an eerie silence was slowly
settling inside. Even Dhrub, our driver, who had pleasantly surprised me with
his strange, but melodious, habit of humming something all the time he drove,
had gone silent.
‘Nepalis do not believe in a closure,’ said my friend breaking the gloom.
‘We are a country where dynasties have been trying to claim and reclaim the
throne for more than 200 years now, and no victory is ever complete till it’s
finally upstaged by a rival. And I so wish that your country had not always had
played a role into those power games.’ Her eyes, this time, were fixed at me,
unsettling me even more. I could not decide what exactly that stare meant. From
a probing gaze to a sweeping statement that did not carry any emotions, it
could be anything.
‘Don’t you worry’, sensing my unease she told me. ‘Nepalis have yet not
lost the capacity of differentiating between friendly citizens and the big
brotherly rulers that inhabit the lands on the other side of Rupaidiha border.’
She had broken into a giggle. Dhrub looked back and started humming again.
‘What about the war though, the janyuddh (people’s war),’ I had gathered
myself back to be able to give words to what was bothering me ever since I had
seen the UN vehicle with the jammer. The war, in any case, was centered in the
western and mid-western Himalaya I had just returned from. It was, like any
other war, fierce and brutal but had not affected the Terai in the same way it
had devastated the mountains.
The Maoists, of course, have launched some daring attacks in the
districts that formed the plains that gave Nepal almost all its homegrown food
and had won some glorious victories. The royalist army, on its part, has been
as ruthless in its efforts of suppressing them as it was in mountains. No, I am
not suggesting that it was a war between the good and the bad and Maoists were
the ‘good’ in the same. The war, like any other one, had seen both sides
indulging in grave violations of human rights and dignity. Yet, all the
evidences suggest that the army has much more to account for than the Maoists.
And then, it was fighting for a despotic and hated king unlike the Maoists, who
as I was told again and again in Mugu, had placed themselves as the only hope
of the most vulnerable sections of Nepalese population.
‘The people’s war has turned into many people’s war now’, she quipped in
her signature style of delayed response. Even the Maoist party led by Matrika
Yadav, the biggest Madheshi leader the united Maoists who led the civil war
culminating into the decisive defeat of monarchy, has split recently,’ she
continued while consciously warding off my quizzical look. ‘Throwing away the
yoke of slavery was never going to be an easy task but none of us expected it
to reach until here and then getting stranded into an almost impossible to
break deadlock.’ The disappointment writ large on her face did not require any
expertise to be read correctly. It was intelligible even to most untrained
eyes.
The conversation was broken by the vehicle coming to a screeching halt.
We had reached Balapur a village some 45 kilometers away from Nepalgunj. It was
a sight to die for, one I had never seen before and believe me that I have seen
quite a lot. The village, surrounded by lush green foresty hills from three
sides was organized in a neat circle of houses forming the outer periphery with
all the agricultural lands inside. The feat, achieved a few years ago, had
marked a victory of communitarian interests trumping the individual greed in
ways remarkable in more than one.
It had, at the very outset, saved both the livestock and humans residing
here from the attacks of wild animals, something that was way too common a few
years back. Second, it had brought all the lands belonging to one family
together and thereby obliterating the losses incurred by small patches of land.
Why was I, a human rights activist, brought in this relatively prosperous oasis
in the midst of abject poverty was the question ringing in my head.
‘Because none of this will survive,’ my friend answered as if reading my
mind. ‘The village comes in the buffer zone of the Banke National Park, Nikunj
as they call them here, and will lose all communitarian rights to minor forest
produce’ she went on explaining. ‘As if that was not enough, the authorities
are hell bent on inundating this village into oblivion’. The tone of
disappointment that has been defining this part of my Nepal visit was back.
“You see that canal coming up on the south face of the village’ she
asked. I could see the upcoming ugly structure fairly clearly. ‘That canal
under the Sikta irrigation project would seal the fate of the village by
blocking only possible way of drainage. Come rains, and we would be issuing
national and international alerts to save the villagers, believe me.’
‘Why did they not construct it on the north face, that would had save
the villagers from attacks of wild animals by cutting them off from the
village,’ I asked. ‘You think that we did not do that?’ the reply had come from
Khanal, the disarmingly young leader of the struggle to save the village. ‘We
have fought against it right from the local village development committee level
to Kathmandu, won many assurances as well. But then, this is Nepal, governments
change here much before they can deliver on their promise. The country is in
transition you see.’
The comment had brought a smile on every single face present there.
Sarcasm, as it is, is any day better than gloom. ‘We are asking for
relocation’, Khanal had snatched the thread of conversation back, and we would
not let anyone inundate us before that. No one wants to leave his motherland
but even if we are forced to, we would not go before getting lands for land. The
resolve was screaming through the sentences. ‘And you better help our struggle
through raising the issue at various international forums,’ he asserted. ‘Our
struggle and not mine, I made a mental note while promising him that we would.
‘We will fight, the days of the king are over’ was the parting shot. They are
over and happily so, said the spark that illuminated our eyes.
‘Khanal talked about international forums and so on with such remarkable
self-assurance’ did not he, I asked my friend. ‘So you basically are asking
about the language of development discourse he used, don’t you,’ she asked back
mischievously. ‘You know, NGOs fill the space emptied by a retreating
government and Nepal has been oscillating between phases of no government and
retreating government since long. The vacuum has been filled by NGOs who bring
in their language together with their depoliticisation drive. No wonders that
now almost everyone speaks their language here, Nepal is one of the most
NGOised place on the face of mother earth after all.’ You must have met quite
many of them in Mugu, didn’t you? The question was back on me. ‘I did’ was the
feeble reply.
‘Don’t worry though, even the NGOs here are highly politicized. Many of
them are actually aligned with parties, she added reassuringly. The UN vehicle
was making sense now, the jammer was not.
We were back in Nepalgunj, our base for the travels in Terai when I saw
that empty pedestal on a busy roundabout. Despite looking quite old, it,
surprisingly, had no statue adorning it. ‘Oh, that. That one used to have a
statue of King Gyanendra. People broke it during the janyuddh, he informed me.
‘Why did they not replace it with another statue, then, I asked? ‘Because they
wanted to keep it as a reminder of what we may face if we let this opportunity
slip’ he replied in a mock-worried tone. ‘The days of the king are over and it
should remain the same way,’ added my friend.
It’s not all that gloomy you know, we have a lot to cheer about this
‘nawan mulk’ (new nation) we are yet to make’. What else could I do other than
concurring with glee? ‘And ya, be ready very early in the morning. We got to go
to Bardia,’ she almost ordered while wishing me a goodnight.
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