*
And then it was March. The weather got balmy, the sky seemed to lift, and all of Kathmandu was swept by winds and breezes. In between my writing hours, I remembered to take time to appreciate the small beauties of the world. How pretty, the gentians, pinks, roadflax, daisies and asters in the garden of my family home. I met friends more often, and I even, now and then, had fun. I scoured bookstores and tried to find international magazines to read so that I could gain a larger picture of the world. But the newspapers were hard to put down.
The parliamentary session of 1 March lasted for less than five minutes. There was a two-minute session four days later.
There were more sinister signs. In a single day, 34 Nepalis, mostly children, died of measles in Kalikot District. On the same day, the army was posted to the major custom points along the Indian and Chinese borders to check cross-border smuggling. According to the Federation of Nepalese Chambers of Commerce and Industry, goods worth 10 billion rupees were smuggled through the Indian border every year, and one billion rupees worth of goods through the Chinese border. The police and the government’s revenue administration had been unable to check smuggling, and so the army had been called in to take over civilian duties.
Hotel employees were threatening another strike, again demanding a 10 per cent service charge. Unable to negotiate a deal with them, the government declared the hotel industry an essential service, banning its employees from going on strike.
As the days progressed the news got more and more disheartening. On 11 March, cadres of the UML and the CPN (Maoist) held joint mass rallies in Liwang, the capital of Rolpa District and the heartland of the Maoist insurgency. Had the mainstream left lost its cadres to the Maoists? Or were they two faces of the same coin? Twenty-four children died of an epidemic in Humla District on the same day. A report came out saying that there were 77,000 child labourers in Nepal. The editor of the Maoist affiliated newspaper Janaadesh was released from jail after a two-year incarceration, only to be arrested again. The lease of the Lauda Air jet was still under investigation by the Public Accounts Committee.
If things got bad enough, a strongman would step up, asking us to trade in our freedom for his efficiency. That was how democracy usually ended. King Birendra would effect a royal coup. Suddenly, everyone was saying he would take over. Many were saying he should.
Some people, of course, were able to see what they wanted to see and ignore what they didn’t want to see, the way tourists who come to Nepal look at terraced fields and see their beauty but remain blind to the hard labour they extract from tillers. Some of my friends felt confident that democracy could not be defeated. The king just couldn’t take over: democracy was too deeply rooted by now. Others just didn’t care one way or the other. Some laughed as they heard that the Maoist leader of area no. 2, cell no. 10 of Kalikot District had ordered villagers to support the insurgency by killing dogs, because their barking alerted security forces to the Maoists’ movement. “Anyone who defies this appeal will be severely punished by the people’s government according to the people’s decision,” the Maoist newspaper reported.
*
April was a harrowing month, crowded with vague, unfocused anxieties. I slept heavily, and my dreaming was dense.
On 2 April, more than 500 Maoists armed with rifles, bombs and grenades attacked two police outposts in Rukum and Dolakha Districts, killing 35 policemen and abducting 24 more. Seven Maoists were also killed in battle. This was the single bloodiest incident since the insurgency started. In Kathmandu, bombs went off at the houses of a Congress member of Parliament and a former inspector general of police. The next day, Maoists looted arms and cash in several places.
The day after, Congress leaders ended Parliament’s winter session. Not a single bill had been tabled; not a single full discussion had taken place. The final meeting of the session lasted two minutes. Though they had done nothing during the session, the members of Parliament were paid 6.2 million rupees, plus allowance and transport fares. This was the last session of Parliament the country was to have.
At about this time, a conspiracy theory that the palace was working in tandem with the Maoists gained ground. The 4 April newspaper reports had it that Maoist leaders Prachanda and Baburam Bhattarai had met a royalist member of the Upper House, Ramesh Nath Pandey. Why was the palace meeting the Maoists? Was the palace’s shadowy “underground gang” supporting the insurgency to eventually justify a royal coup in the name of counter-insurgency?
Yet if the royalists and the Maoists were succeeding in squeezing out democracy, it was because the party leaders were doing their bit to discredit themselves. On 4 April, again, the student wing of the splintered-off communist party, ML, called for a chakka jam, a shutdown of traffic. Two days later the same student group effected a nationwide general strike, and all schools, industries and businesses were forced shut. Meanwhile, a wave of panic was sweeping over the bourgeoisie. The Maoists were winning! On 8 April newspapers reported 80 people dead in the past six days of the insurgency and counter-insurgency. The police had started deserting their remote posts. On 9, 10 and 11 April, the Maoists held elections for the representatives of each of Rolpa District’s 51 Village Development Committees, which they had renamed “Village People’s Committees”. They planned to form republican governments in their strongholds.
G.P. Koirala was bent on suppressing the Maoists by force. On 12 April, the king re-promulgated the Armed Police Force Ordinance. Three days later, the Maoists looted nine million rupees from a Jhapa District bank. The UML and the other left parties, meanwhile, continued trying to unseat the prime minister. At 9 a.m. on 16 April, leftist activists formed a human roadblock along Putali Sadak, the main road to Singha Durbar, to prevent the prime minister from reaching his office. It turned out he had entered Singha Durbar an hour earlier. Enraged, the leftist activists burned 12 government vehicles in a rampage.
Three days later, they held a mass rally demanding that G.P. Koirala step down.
*
G.P. Koirala had decided, by then, that even the Armed Police Force were not up to quelling the Maoist insurgency; the army had to be mobilized. On 18 April, he ordered the deployment of both the Armed Police Force and the Royal Nepal Army for the first phase of the Integrated Security and Development Programme, a newly developed “hearts and minds” operation targeted at Maoist strongholds. In so doing, G.P. Koirala came smack up against the army’s resistance to civilian command. Two days later, the Chief of the Army Staff General Prajwalla Sumshere Jung Bahadur Rana publicly asked all the major political parties to reach a national consensus on the deployment of the army. This was unheard of. Was he questioning the Defence Council’s orders?
This unleashed a storm. Or yet another storm. Kathmandu was once again shaken by rumours of a royal coup. Even G.P. Koirala got skittish. He skipped Kathmandu without informing anyone, and went to his hometown Biratnagar, near the Indian border. Word had it that he wanted to be able to evade arrest should the army come for him, as they had decades earlier for his brother B.P. The UML and other left parties should have helped the prime minister to stare down the army; instead they announced another round of public protests against him. The UML General Secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal vowed to disrupt the next session of Parliament if G.P. Koirala had not resigned by then.
ln the middle of all this, King Birendra received, from the Supreme Court, a bill that he had sent them for an opinion. The bench had unanimously found it in violation of the constitution. The bill had been passed on 26 July 2000 as the 6th amendment to the 1964 citizenship act. It allowed less xenophobic standards for establishing citizenship, and granted citizenship to men married to Nepali women (previously, only women married to Nepali men were allowed citizenship). It was the first bill that the king had not ratified immediately, as he was supposed to, but sent to the Supreme Court for an opinion. Now he ratified it, but with the Supreme Court’s opinion attached. The king, too, was playing politics.
Meanwhile,
100 policemen had deserted their stations in remote outposts, and armed Maoists had staged an attack in Sunsari District in the east. There was always one thing or another, if it wasn’t one thing it was another. On 26 April, the Centre for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority ordered the arrests of a former executive chairman and a former board chairman of the Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation. A Congress party member, a former minister of tourism and civil aviation, was asked to hand in his passport. The Congress party immediately deemed the investigation to be politically biased.
The UML crowed. The same day, left parties carried out a chakka jam, in the evening rush hour, demanding G.P. Koirala’s resignation. This was followed by a blackout. Over the weekend of the 28th and 29th, leftist activists patrolled the streets and stopped government vehicles, including the car being used by the Speaker of the House.
The prospect of a coup was looming large, but the political parties were too shortsighted to see it. April ended with the deployment of the army to Rukum, Rolpa, Jajarkor Salyan, Gorkha, Pyuthan and Kalikot Districts as the beginning of the Integrated Security and Development Programme. Army troops would reach the districts in two weeks to get the security situation under control. In the second phase of the programme, the army would be deployed to Kavrepalanchowk, Ramechhap, Lamjung, Dhading, Dolpa, Jumla, Sindhupalchowk, Sindhuli, Nuwakot, Dailekh Baglung, Myagdi, Tanahun and Achham Districts, where it would build infrastructure like roads and bridges. In the third phase, there would be long-term work to alleviate rural poverty. The Integrated Security and Development Programme seemed to be handing the development responsibility of the civilian government to the army. But the political parties were not concerned. They only wanted G.P. Koirala’s resignation.
*
Despite all this, sometimes for brief periods I thought everything would be all right. I would attend a lecture by an articulate intellectual, and suddenly see some light. A journalist would report bravely on what was happening in rural Nepal. A civil rights activist would say something pithy. One or another Nepali would achieve international success, or someone very young would climb Mt Everest. One day I went to Kathmandu’s zoo and saw that the animals were kept in conditions that were more or less humane. I watched a particularly effusive chimpanzee and felt my sense of normality restored.
But then my view would grow cloudy again. On 2 May, the Centre for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority asked G.P. Koirala for clarification of his role in the Lauda Air jet deal. By this time, even his own party members wanted him to resign. But G.P. sent back a three-page letter challenging the Centre’s jurisdiction to question what had been a cabinet decision. The head of the rebel faction within the Congress, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, publicly demanded G.P.’s resignation. G.P. shot back: “Bhattarai’s job is to ask for my resignation; mine is to refuse the same.” Even the deputy prime minister and the foreign minister suggested that he resign, but at 78, G.P. wanted to keep holding on to power.
And I saw that terrible things would happen any day now, as the Congress leaders bickered among themselves – something nobody was prepared for – and everyone’s lives would be given up to naked survival.
On 8 May, scores of members of a Maoist-affiliated student body, the All-Nepal National Federation of Student Unions (Revolutionary) – ANNFSU (Revolutionary) – attacked two “bourgeois” private schools in Kathmandu, destroying their computers and photocopy machines and setting the furniture on fire. Brandishing khukuris and iron rods, the assailants demanded that the schools lower their fees, and – because the schools’ principals were of Indian origin – they chanted slogans against India. One million children all over the country stayed at home as the Public and Boarding Schools Organization decided to shut down all 8,000 of its member schools for three days in protest.
The news was, meanwhile, filled with the deployment of the army in the Maoist-affected districts. Gorkha District, home to the Shah kings, was also home to Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai. It was, we now learned, to be a model district for the Integrated Security and Development Programme. The army would carry out 40 development projects here, constructing bridges and irrigation canals, implementing drinking water and electricity schemes, and supporting the collection, processing and distribution of herbs.
The Maoists carried on unhindered, skirting the army. On 13 May, three Maoists were killed in Surkhet District, two of them women. Five days later, the Maoists looted weapons in Kaski and Parbat Districts. On 19 May, the Maoists killed three policemen and injured 11 civilians in an attack in Okhaldhunga District, in the east. On the same day, their cadres held a mass rally in Bhawang village in Rolpa District, and announced the formation of their “People’s Local Government” throughout the district. This took place just weeks before army troops were due to arrive there. The People’s Local Government consisted of a 10-member committee, including members of the ethnic rights group Magarat Mukti Morcha, members of the Dalit rights group Dallit Mukri Morcha, local intelligentsia, women and Maoists area commanders. The Maoists vowed to form similar governments in Rukum, Salyan, Jajarkot Kalikot and Gorkha Districts, establishing a parallel government.
*
In Kathmandu, G.P. Koirala resigned as the general secretary of the Congress, only to appoint a relative. He also appointed two other relatives to the party’s Central Working Committee.
Word had it that the Centre for the Investigation of the Abuse of Authority was going to announce any day now its findings on the Lauda Air jet deal. Before that could happen, though, the Public Accounts Committee of Parliament announced that it was charging both the Congress’s and the UML’s former ministers of tourism and civil aviation with corruption in another deal involving Royal Nepal Airlines Corporation’s lease of a China Southwest Airlines jet. The UML suddenly lost steam; its leaders denounced this decision, though feebly. Days later, the Centre for the Investigatien of the Abuse of Authority announced that it was prosecuting 10 people in connection with the Lauda Air jet lease, including two foreign Lauda Air executives based in Italy and Austria. No mention was made of G.P. Koirala’s culpability. I found myself wondering whether these prosecutions were politically motivated.
The UML rallied back and announced a three-day-long nationwide bandh from 27 to 29 May, demanding – what else – G.P. Koirala’s resignation. No taxis or tempos or buses or cars ran for these three days, no shops or offices or businesses opened. So zealous were party activists in enforcing the shutdown that even the few vegetable vendors who defied other bandhs decided not to risk it this time.
During one-day bandhs, people generally cleaned their houses or caught up with chores. This time, though, they lost all will. They sat and watched Hindi movies and tele-serials. I did the same. On the first night I watched a ghost movie, though I didn’t usually like those. I watched religious programmes the next morning, and a gleaming guru told me to keep Krishna in my heart. That day, two patients died in hospital because leftist activists had obstructed ambulances. On the third day, there was unrest throughout the country as people tried to defy the bandh. More than 600 people – and a line of cars – took out a rally in Kathmandu in protest. Most people, though, just sat home and watched soap operas, police shows, sitcoms, docu-dramas – anything that was on.
*
One day sometime after that, I got into a conversation with the manager of my gym about Upstairs, a jazz bar that the man frequented. I had been meaning to go there for years, I said. I’m there every night after nine, he told me as he did his abs. He also talked about a resort not far from Kathmandu where he had done some bungee jumping: “It used to be the second highest jump in the world, but the highest closed down, so now this is the highest.” Moving on to bench presses he said he had attended a fancy dress party at which two men had shown up in drag. “One really looked like a woman,” he grinned.
So surprised was I by all the fun he was having that all I could say was, “Wow. That’s great. That’s cool.” I did not begrudge him his fun; I knew, afte
r all, that I would not feel any more lighthearted dressing up for parties, or jumping off bridges with my life on a rope, or even dropping by a bar to hear jazz. But the man’s appetite for fun got me thinking.
Later, at Himalayan Java, a hip new cafe in Thamel, I looked at the young people of Kathmandu – a blithe, carefree generation – and found that I did resent them. The cafe was filled with people of my economic class – the Kathmandu bourgeoisie, who were unaffected, in any real sense, by the failure of democratic politics. They got on with their lives despite it all. Close to me sat a young woman in a halter top, bell bottoms and platform heels, a navel ring showing on her sleek stomach. Her face was frozen in a come-hither expression as she listened to the young man across her. He had gelled, spiked hair, and earrings, and sleek clothes offset by a big-buckled belt and bulky Doc Martens.
Why were these young people being so relentlessly hip? No, this was good. I sipped my iced mocha, thinking, here is a whole country writhing with youthful energy. There is an age, isn’t there, at which one wants to smash all that is traditional, at which one wants to destroy the old and usher in the new? The youth were following the paths open to them. Those in Kathmandu were mimicking MTV VJs, and those in the villages were joining the Maoists. They were both, in their own ways, trying to force change.
Meanwhile, Amnesty International had begun to criticize the country’s police for execution, torture and disappearances, and the Maoists for passing death sentences in their “People’s Courts” and recruiting children into their ranks. Nepal could soon have one of the highest rates of human rights atrocities. Panicked, more and more of the bourgeoisie began hoping that the king would do something, anything, to restore order. Most of the royal family was unpopular, but about King Birendra Bir Bikram Shah the bourgeoisie had always been addle-headed. He was such a pleasant fellow. Because he now did so little as a constitutional monarch, he committed few mistakes. Because he controlled so few public funds, he was not tainted by money. Because he spoke so little, what he said sounded sage. He shone in comparison to the coarse, bungling party leaders of the day.
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