From sickles and grass to automatic rifles

Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy by Manjushree Thapa; Viking- Penguin Books India; 2005; 260 pp; Rs. 350.

It is this state of affairs, a situation where there is 'no elected government, and no prospect of getting one back', with 'a king, a royal cabinet, an army and a bureaucracy all operating in what amounts to a constitutional neverneverland,' that the author explores from the viewpoint of a Nepalese writer/journalist and Kathmandu resident. The book, therefore, is far more a personal account than an academic study (for that one might instead profitably opt for Deepak Thapa and Bandita Sijapati's 2004 A Kingdom Under Siege: Nepal's Maoist Insurgency, 1996 to 2003), an account that is, by the author's own admission, a 'mongrel of historiography, reportage, travel writing and journal writing.' This approach has made for an engaging, light style, one that makes the book eminently readable as the reader treks alongside Thapa in the Maoist-controlled areas, reads the newspapers she reads, sits in on conversations with her friends, shares her disillusionment, wakes up on Kathmandu mornings to coffee and the latest rounds of conspiracy theories.

The book, appropriately enough, begins with the most shocking event in the political history of modern Nepal: the royal massacre at Kathmandu's Narayanhiti Palace. On the night of June 1, 2001 Crown Prince Dipendra, outfitted in jungle fatigues, high on whiskey and hashish, opened up with assault rifles and pistols and killed his parents, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, a brother and sister, plus five other relatives before being shooting himself. Crowned king as he lay in a coma in the hospital, he died a couple of days later. An official investigation took place, and a report was written, but its net result has only been to deepen Kathmandu's perennial atmosphere of intrigue and secrecy.

From this beginning the books then works backwards historically, to the unification of Nepal from scattered hill states in the 18th century, to British imperial meddling and the perpetual political tug-of-war between Shahs and the Ranas for control of the throne, to the Panchayat system that was finally overthrown by the 'People's Movement' of 1990. The picture of Nepal that emerges is that of a semi-feudal, caste-ridden monarchial society, where in 1990 the democracy supposedly ushered in can be viewed today as less a revolution than a re-alignment of forces between the royalist oligarchy and an emergent urban middle class, the latter a by-product of the state's terribly skewed development strategies from the '70s onwards. And it is here that the stereotypical Western construction of Nepal as trekking Shangri-La (the backpacker's bible, The Lonely Planet, for example, begins its book on the country with 'Draped along the greatest heights of the Himalaya, Nepal is a land of sublime scenery, time-worn temples, and some of the best walking trails on earth'....) crumbles in the chronicling of the 12-year period of Nepalese multiparty 'democracy' as a time of endless political cabals, cliques, feuds, graft, profiteering, intrigue and theft of public money among the upper-caste men who controlled politics in Nepal. As Thapa writes, 'Corruption...(continued) briskly. With each new government, a new set of politicians got their turn at building houses, buying cars, opening businesses, starting up NGOs, junketeering, hobnobbing, schmoozing and carousing, and generally indulging their newfound wealth. And while the intellectuals allied to the parties could explain that democracy was difficult, and that the only solution to democracy was more democracy, they could not explain why people who had once given up all for democracy were now bent on quick, mindless profiteering.'

Sound familiar to you all Bangladeshi readers?

Meanwhile, rural squalor and poverty deepened, where half of Nepal's inhabitants had no access to electricity, running water or sanitation, and there developed an abysmally systemic dependence on foreign aid. And it was in this scenario that on February 16, 1996 the Maoists, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal (known popularly as Prachanda), launched their 'People's War.' They have never looked back since. And which has led to the present situation, with King Gyanendra posing a choice (a choice that has signaled the demise of democracy in Nepal) to his countrymen: who will you have, me or the Maoists?

And this leads us to the last section of the book, a trek by Thapa and a friend through the Maoist-held countryside of western Nepal, through the 'war-torn districts of Dailekh, Kalikot and Jumla.' It is an engrossing, deftly written field report, a record of brutalities, mainly by the Nepalese army, inflicted on a rural, civilian population, where nobody has been left untouched by terror and violence. The Maoists she meets on her passage come off as what one would expect rural, overwhelmingly young, undereducated revolutionaries to be: grimly humourless, zealous, rote-ridden and puritan. Maoism here seems less a liberation from the chains of exploitation and tradition than the last option of a people endlessly cheated and lied to, endlessly ground down. Till, that is, the very last pages, where Thapa meets a 16-year-old Maoist girl and asks her what she did before she joined the party.

'"Nothing," she said. "I was at home, spending my days cutting grass...You see, before, there were only sickles in the hands of girls like me. Sickles and grass. And now there are automatic rifles."

'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 with men--hell, I would have joined the Maoists, too. The other political parties had not offered better options, and neither had the government. Join the Maoists is what any spirited girl would do.'

How the Nepalese story will end, how it'll wind before ending, is anybody's guess. But there is no doubt that whatever the outcome, it has deep implications for the countries and peoples in the rest of the region. This book is a must read for us all.

Khademul Islam is literary editor, The Daily Star.