| Biswo |
Posted
on 01-Jul-01 02:07 PM
[ This is published here without permission of the writer or the
website. However, credit goes to them:
www.nepalnews.com/nepalitimes, and CK Lal]
SERA, Sindhupalchok-This is a picture postcard hamlet. Its lone
tourist lodge is straight out of trekking brochures that promise
instant nirvana. The tiny rooms with low-ceiling tin roofs are
shaded by banana leaves, and are immaculately clean. The bed has
wrought iron legs and is fitted with a comfortable mattress.
Between the bare floor,naked ceiling, and freshly whitewashed
stone walls the clean and colourful cotton sheets appear like a
artwork spread for display. A tiny window offers the view of rice
paddies and the mountains of the Jugal Himal to the north.
There is an compact toilet into which they have managed to fit a
mini washbasin, a functional commode, and a mixer shower with
running hot water from the solar collectors on the roof. In a
place like this, when evening falls there is nothing but the music
of the river, the piercing call of strange birds and the sigh of
monsoon rains on the leaves. There is no electricity, and the
phone is blissfully out of order.
After the rains, the night sky is so clear you can walk around in
the starlight. I sit down at the chautari on the riverbank and try
to identify some new stars in the sky. I choose a few particularly
bright ones towards the north above Lantang National Park and name
them after the souls of the dead. The most luminous one could be
King Birendra.Not even immortality is entirely free of time and
space.
Then there are the white stars on the red sky of the Maoist flag.
Just after the regicide, Maoists claimed that they had an
?undeclared working relationship? with King Birendra. High in the
sky to the north, King Birendra is silent.Were you talking to the
Maoists as Dr Babu Ram Bhattarai and Comrade Prachanda claim? How
could you sympathise-let alone have a working relationship-with an
ideology that has brought the country to the very brink? I ask for
forgiveness for my irreverent question, my momentary lapse of
faith. King Birendra smiles.
The Sera lodge itself is an example of the havoc that the Maoists
have wrought on Nepal?s tourism trade. They may not be targetting
tourists, but their very presence is scaring trekkers away and
depriving rural Nepal of one of its sole sources of income and
employment. We were the first guests here in last six months.
Tourism is an image-conscious business where perceptions matter
more than reality. Even though not one tourist has been harmed in
six years of insurgency in the country, just the reports of the
spread of Maoism is enough to create a scare. One terse public
statement of Comrade Prachanda causes a flurry of travel
advisories by western embassies in Kathmandu, and cancellations of
reservations.
The struggle for survival of the lodge at Sera is filled with
poignancy because it is a non-commercial resort and one of
several across Nepal that doesn?t repatriate profits to Kathmandu
or abroad. It is a sustainable philanthropic enterprise that
ploughs tourism earnings directly into running a local school and
a health centre. But because there hasn?t been a single tourist
for the past six months, the school has been closed and the health
centre is barely running.
Asked why tourists don?t come anymore to Sera, the lodge attendant
gives a fearful ?I know but I dare not tell you? shrug that says
it all. The shopkeeper in Talamarang is more forthcoming, even
though elliptical in his answers. Hiding behind an impersonal
pronoun ?they? for the Maoists, he tells me: ?They haven?t caused
any problem for us. Why do you (meaning people of Kathmandu) say
that this area is in ?their? control?? I ask him who are ?they??
He starts dusting his wares with a meaningful silence.
On our way we stop for tea at Melamchi Bazaar. Connected by
regular bus service to Kathmandu, Melamchi has the look of a wild
west town. Shacks with tin roofs, roadside drains overflowing with
filth, street corners reeking of urine, iron bars dumped
haphazardly in front of matchbox structures struggling to keep
straight, and black plastic bags fluttering like flags on bushes
along river bank. The cinema theatre had a poster of Nepali
movie, but it was blaring an Indi-pop number to draw customers.
A vegetable vendor looked familiar. He turned out to be from my
village. Pointing towards a slogan painted on a shop-front along
the road, I asked him, ?Who did that?? He answered me with the
finality of ending the conversation there and then: ?Them.?
Its is terror out here-naked and palpable. The dread is no more of
the vagaries of nature (floods or famine),atrocities of the
administration (these days, policemen themselves wear hunted
looks) or the fear of an uncertain future. It is the most basic of
all fears: fear of life. It has become so pronounced that the
object of dread is a collective pronoun, a malevolent word full of
dread and foreboding.
continue..
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| Biswo |
Posted
on 01-Jul-01 02:13 PM
Sorry, the source is:
http://www.nepalnews.com.np/ntimes/june29-5-2001/nepalitimes.htm
cont..
It is in the context of this harsh reality that the recently
implemented Public Security Regulations need to be seen.There are
laws to check the tyranny of the government, but how else do you
deal with those who have so terrorised the masses that no one
even dare take their name?
The idle intelligentsia of Kathmandu is leading the chorus of
protest against the regulation. For them, there is nothing wrong
with kangaroo courts of insurgents dispensing Taliban-like quick
justice. But administrative actions under the due process of law
is tantamount to ?resurrection of ghost of Panchayat?. George
Orwell was right, there are some ideas so absurd that only an
intellectual could believe them.
Democracy needs practitioners capable of faith without illusions,
not fanatics in search of purity of intent, form and content in
every government regulation. As long as the rule of law with right
to reject the lawmakers through the ballot box exists, freedom is
not in danger. It is the terror of unfreedom in the unquiet hills
and plains of Nepal that should engage the empty minds in their
safe perches in Kathmandu.
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