I often think about this. What could bring to an end this political paralysis?
Could it be Girija? But then the guy is so one dimensional. He does not seem to feel the importance of back channel communications. He has already said the Maoists need to cease violence if they want to talk to him, so his part with the Maoists is done! That is how he thinks.
Could it be other political leaders? Girija dominates.
Could it be the Maoists? They are more secretive than even they need to be. They put out statements. Their capacity for dialogue is limited.
Could it be the king? The guy is in no hurry. He is more in a mood to wait out the stalemate than to speed things up.
I think if the Supreme Court justices got proactive, they could end up playing a decisive role. All they have to do is make the royal government members feel like they are not above the law. They could start out by declaring all attempts to take away civil liberties are unconsitutional. Bureaucrats may not take away people's rights. That could slowly snowball into their reviving the parliament, unilaterally.
When the legislative has been washed away and the executive hijacked, the judiciary should step forward and save the day.
- Nepal apex court issues notice to royal government Outlook (subscription), India
- Present Subedi before the court: SC Kantipur Online, Nepal
- Produce re-arrested Subedi: Apex court
Kathmandu Post - Shahi faces contempt of court again
Kathmandu Post SC to home minister: Furnish written reply Kathmandu Post Challenge against FM radio news ban filed in Nepal's Supreme Court Monsters and Critics.com, UK - People's Front Nepal leader rearrested after freed by Supreme ... Monsters and Critics.com, UK
- Contempt of court hearing Gorkhapatra, Nepal
- Nepal Porters, in Labors of Hercules, Carry Double Their Weight
Bloomberg Porters in Nepal routinely carry double their body weight in loads balanced with a head strap ..... White Europeans carry about 25 percent of their weight on average .... trips of 62 miles (100 kilometers) or more ..... the male porters generally weighed about 114 pounds (52 kilograms) and the women about 93 pounds. The men carried 220 pounds or more and the women about 66 pounds to 77 pounds on average ...... We can carry something like 25 percent of our body weight and an African, 60 percent and a Nepalese on average 100 percent of body weight ...... - Nepalese Porters May Be World's Most Efficient Haulers
National Geographic A typical Nepalese porter carries a load nearly as heavy as he is. When he does, the porter burns less energy per pound than a backpacker would need to shoulder about half the same weight.... More than 500 men and about 100 women carried about 30 tons of material to the market that day .... "they're [generally] not very well equipped [and] have very bad shoes." ..... "On a steep incline," Heglund said, "they'll walk for as little as 15 seconds and rest for 45." ..... their "enormous loads" set the Nepalese apart, Kram added. "It's a good scientific puzzle, how they [conserve] energy when walking." ..... - Nepalese parties developing forum in Delhi, trying for dialogue ...
Monsters and Critics.com The seven agitating political parties have decided to develop Nepal Democracy and Human Rights Advocacy Centre, which is based in New Delhi, as an international forum of the Nepalese...... The political parties are busy raising funds from Nepalese and the international community. Leaders of the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), the Nepali Congress (Democratic), Nepal Sadbhavana Party (Anandi Devi), Professor of Jawahar Lal Nehru University S.D. Muni et al are involved in the development of the forum..... the forum is trying to start dialogue with the Maoists. - Pankaj Mishra: The People's War INSN In a few frenzied minutes, he killed his parents, King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya, a brother, a sister and five other relatives before putting a pistol to his head. Anointed king as he lay unconscious in hospital, he died two days later, passing his title to his uncle Gyanendra....... the bookshops, trekking agencies, cybercafés, bakeries, malls and restaurants were empty..... the vendors of carpets, Gurkha knives, pirate DVDs and Tibetan prayer flags ..... He said that Maoists had bombed the private school he sent his children to; he worried that his servants might join the guerrillas, who controlled 80 per cent of the countryside and were growing strong in the Kathmandu Valley....... What the country needed now, he declared, was a strong and principled ruler, someone who could crush the Maoists. He said that he missed Dipendra: he was the man Nepal needed at this hour of crisis...... Dipendra’s three years as a schoolboy in Britain had radicalised him. Just as Pandit Nehru had discovered the poverty of India after his stints at Harrow and Cambridge, so Dipendra had developed a new political awareness in England. He had begun to look, with mounting horror and concern, at his homeland. Returning to Nepal, he had realised that it would take more than tourism to create a strong middle class, accelerate economic growth, build democratic institutions and lift the ninth poorest country in the world to the ranks of modern democratic nations. As it turned out, he had been thwarted at every step by conservative elements in the royal palace....... Frustration in politics rather than love, the businessman claimed, had driven Dipendra to alcohol, drugs, guns and, finally, to regicide...... conspiracy and rumour have long fuelled a particularly secretive kind of court politics...... the press has little influence over a largely illiterate population easily swayed by rumour..... King Gyanendra appeared on national television to blame the palace massacre on a ‘sudden discharge by an automatic weapon’......the new king himself, who was allegedly involved in smuggling artefacts out of Nepal, and on his son, Paras, much disliked in Nepal for his habit of brandishing guns in public and dangerous driving – he has run over at least three people in recent years, killing one. More confusingly, the Maoists claimed that they had an ‘undeclared working unity’ with King Birendra, and accused Gyanendra, and Indian and American imperialists, of his murder....... atmosphere of secrecy and intrigue ..... February, when Gyanendra adopted the Bush administration’s rhetoric about ‘terrorism’ and assumed supreme power..... When I arrived in Kathmandu, fear hung heavy over the street crossings, where soldiers peeped out from behind machine-gun emplacements. Men in ill-fitting Western suits, with the furtive manner of inept spies, lurked in the lobby of my hotel. Journalists spoke of threatening phone calls from senior army officers who tended to finger as Maoists anyone who didn’t support the king. Many of the people I wanted to meet turned out to be in prison or in exile. Appointments with underground activists, arduously made, were cancelled at the last minute, or people simply didn’t turn up...... 20,000 M-16 rifles from the US, 20,000 rifles from India, helicopters from the UK..... the high mountains, ravines and rivers – almost perfect terrain for guerrillas..... the emblems of Western philanthropy – new computers, armed guards, shiny four-wheel drives in the parking lot – that I had seen in December in Afghanistan..... a bizarre feeling of normality prevailed, best symbolised by the vibrant billboards advertising mobile phones (banned since 1 February) .... in a local newspaper, a Dutch investor described the Nepalese as an ‘extremely corrupt, greedy, triple-faced, myopic, slow, inexperienced and uneducated people’, and declared that he was taking his hair-replacement business to Latvia....... Western diplomats and United Nations officials – darting in their SUVs from one walled compound to another – speculated about a possible assault on the capital by guerrillas..... the middle-class Nepalese, denounced by the Maoists as ‘comprador capitalists’ ..... a country where almost half of the 26 million people earned less than $100 a year and had no access to electricity, running water or sanitation; a country whose small economy, parasitic on foreign aid and tourism, had to be boosted by the remittances of Nepalese workers abroad, and where political forces seen as anachronisms elsewhere – monarchy and Communism – fought for supremacy...... a recipient of religions and ideologies – Buddhism, Hinduism, Communism – from India; even today, the country’s 60 ethnic and caste communities are regarded as little more than a picturesque backdrop to some of the world’s highest mountains....... As in the so-called princely states of India, the British were keen to support despotic regimes in Nepal, and even reward them with territory; it was one way of staving off potentially destabilising change in a strategically important buffer state to Tibet and China..... a source of cheap mercenaries. Tens of thousands of soldiers recruited by the British from the western hills of Nepal fought during the Indian Mutiny, the Boxer Rebellion in China, and in the two world wars. The Gurkhas also helped the British suppress political dissenters in India, and then, more violently, Communist anti-colonialists in Malaya in the 1950s...... The end of the British Empire in Asia didn’t lead to rapid change in Nepal, or end its status as a client state...... In the 1950s and 1960s, as the Cold War intensified, Nepal was the forward base of the CIA’s operations against China.... Few among the so-called international community protested when, after a brief experiment with parliamentary democracy in the 1950s, King Mahendra, Dipendra’s grandfather, banned all political parties...... The representatives of the Panchayat, largely from the upper castes, helped themselves to the foreign aid that made up most of the state budget, and did little to alleviate poverty in rural areas. The king also declared Nepal a Hindu state and sought to impose on its ethnic and linguistic communities a new national identity by promoting the Nepali language...... What leads the sensitive prince to drugs and alcohol often forces the pauper to migrate. Millions of Nepalese have swelled the armies of cheap mobile labour that drive the global economy, serving in Indian brothels, Thai and Malaysian sweatshops, the mansions of oil sheikhs in the Gulf and, most recently, the war zones of Iraq. Many more have migrated internally, often from the hills to the subtropical Tarai region on the long border with India..... Mukti Raj Dahal, the father of the underground Maoist leader, Prachanda ..... Though he is tormented by stomach and spinal ailments, he exuded calm as he sat on the verandah of his two-roomed brick house, wearing a blue T-shirt and shorts under a black cap, a Brahminical caste mark on his forehead....... selling food fried in peanut oil and tea in sticky clouded glasses ..... the army marching men out of overcrowded prisons and executing them. My companion, a Nepalese journalist, was nervous. He knew that the soldiers in the countryside attacked anyone they suspected of being a Maoist, and journalists were no exception. Many of the soldiers barely knew what a journalist was...... few places in Nepal untouched by violence – murder, torture, arbitrary arrest – and most people live perpetually in fear of both the army and the Maoists, without expectation of justice or recompense...... He appeared both bemused by, and admiring of, his famous son, whom he had last seen at the funeral of his wife in 1996....... how his son had got interested in Mao or Marx in such a place as Chitwan, which had no bookshop or library...... Prachanda had got involved with Communists when he couldn’t find a good job with the government and had to teach at a primary school in his native hills of Pokhara....... Prachanda comes across as an ideologue of another era: he’s an embarrassment to the Chinese regime, which is engaged in the un-Maoist task of enriching Chinese coastal cities at the expense of the hinterland, and feels compelled to accuse Nepalese Maoists of besmirching the Chairman’s good name...... the haphazard schooling, the useless degree, the ill-paid teaching job in a village school, all of which seem to lead inexorably to a conflict with, and resentment of, unjust authority....... Educated, but with no prospects, many young men like Prachanda must have been more than ready to embrace radical ideas about the ways that an entrenched urban elite could be challenged and even overthrown if peasants in the countryside were organised....... in the 1950s, a famous Communist leader called M.B. Singh travelled in the midwestern hills and acquired followers among the Magars, one of Nepal’s more prominent ethnic groups now supporting the Maoists...... ‘class enemies’ – big landlords, policemen, bureaucrats –...... The Indian government responded brutally, killing and torturing thousands....... successive Indian governments have steadily reduced subsidies for agriculture, public health, education and poverty-eradication, exposing large sections of the population to disease, debt, hunger and starvation. Almost three thousand farmers committed suicide in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh after the government, advised by McKinsey, cut agricultural subsidies in an attempt to initiate farmers into the world of unregulated markets..... In recent years, Naxalite movements, which have long organised landless, low-caste peasants in Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, have grown quickly in parts of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh – where an enfeebled Indian state is increasingly absent – to the extent that police and intelligence officials in India now speak anxiously of an unbroken belt of Communist-dominated territory from Nepal to South India....... As fractious as their Indian counterparts, the Nepalese Communist parties split and split again over petty doctrinal or personality issues...... In the early 1990s, however, few people in Nepal could have predicted the swift rise of Prachanda and the obscure faction he led...... hardly anyone noticed when on 4 February 1996 the Maoists presented the government with a list of 40 demands, which included abrogating existing treaties with India, stripping the monarchy of all power and privileges, drafting a new constitution by means of a constituent assembly, nationalising private property, declaring Nepal a secular nation and ending all foreign aid...... the Maoists began their ‘people’s war’ by attacking police stations in six districts four days before the deadline...... much of the new power and charisma of the Maoists came from their ability to launch audacious attacks on the police and the army...... The military wing of the Maoists initially consisted of a few ill-trained men armed with antique rifles and homemade weapons.......also attacked roads, bridges, dams, administrative offices, bridges, power plants – anything they felt might aid the counter-insurgency efforts of the government...... looting police stations and buying from the arms bazaars of India ..... In November 2001, the Maoists launched 48 attacks on the army and the police in a single day, forcing the Nepalese government to impose a state of emergency. More than 5000 people died in the next 15 months, the bloodiest period in Nepal’s modern history...... Their cadres – estimated to number as many as 100,000 – travel to deprived areas ..... It’s clear now that what happened in 1990 was less a revolution than a reconfiguration of power, sanctified by elections, among the old royalist oligarchy and an emerging urban middle class. Many courtiers and sycophants of the king managed to reinvent themselves as parliamentary politicians, often joining the Nepali Congress, the political party that ruled Nepal for all but one of the next 13 years....... both of which continued to be led by upper-caste men motivated largely by a desire for money and power ...... Elections were held frequently, and a procession of governments – 13 in as many years – made Nepalese democracy appear vibrant...... In 2002, Dalits, low-caste Hindus, had an annual per capita income of only $40, compared to a national average of $210; fewer than 10 per cent of Dalits were literate...... absolute poverty continued to increase in the late 1990s, even as Kathmandu Valley benefited from the growth in the tourist, garment and carpet industries, and filled up with new hotels, resorts and villas..... The Maoists in Nepal had their first ready constituency among rural youths, more than 100,000 of whom fail their high school examination every year. Unemployed and adrift, many of these young men worked for other political parties in the countryside before becoming disillusioned and joining the Maoists...... he seemed to be ‘passing his days’ ..... he still used them despite having left the Maoists because he had no other vocabulary with which to describe his experience of deprivation and disappointment....... he had joined the Nepali Congress in 1992, when still in his late teens, and become a personal aide to a prominent local politician..... They received no money for their services, but slept in the politician’s house, ate the food prepared for his family, and travelled with him to Kathmandu. Mohan said that it was a good time, the early years of democracy. He liked being in Kathmandu, especially with someone who had a bit of power. But he couldn’t fail to notice that the politician returned less and less often to his constituency in the hills and often refused to meet people who came to his door asking for jobs, money and medical help. He was surprised to hear that the politician was building a new house for himself in Kathmandu. Soon, he felt he was not needed, and one day the politician’s wife told him to eat elsewhere........in 1995, one of his friends introduced him to the Maoist ‘squad commander’ in the region ..... Operation Romeo .... an instance of ‘state terror’ ..... The police, according to the report, invaded villages in the Rolpa and Rukum districts, killing and torturing young men and raping women...... He said the Maoists were simply another opportunistic political group; this was why he had left them. They were interested in mobilising ethnic communities only to the extent that this would help them capture ‘state power’; they weren’t really interested in giving them autonomy...... Using rocks and hammers, they often broke all the bones in their victims’ bodies before skinning them alive and cutting off their tongues, ears, lips and noses....... Criminals had infiltrated their movement, and some Maoists now made a living from extortion and kidnapping..... constrained in their political thinking by revolutionary methods and rhetoric created in another time and place. Prachanda, for instance, is convinced that ‘a new wave of revolution, world revolution is beginning, because imperialism is facing a great crisis.’ ....... When the subject is not world revolution but the specific situation of Nepal, he can be shrewdly perceptive....... Few journalists venture out of their urban bases .... the nervous soldiers at checkpoints ...... a few men quietly informed us that Maoist guerrillas were hiding in the nearby forest, where no security forces ever ventured and from where the Maoists often escaped to India ....... The scene in the square appeared normal at first – women scrubbing children at a municipal tap, young men drinking tea, an old tailor hunched over an antique sewing-machine, his walking stick leaning against his chair – but the presence of the Maoists, if unacknowledged, was unmistakable...... He didn’t know who had built the bamboo gate; it had simply appeared one morning..... The parents of the victims had exhumed their corpses from the shallow graves in which the army had quickly buried them and discovered that two of them had been wearing their school uniforms. Like much else in Nepal, this would not appear in the newspapers....... The Maoists have shown themselves willing to negotiate and even to compromise: in July 2001 they dropped their demand that Nepal cease to be a monarchy....... any Maoist concessions to bourgeois democracy are unlikely to please Gyanendra, who clearly wants to use the current chaos to help him hold on to his power...... the Maoists are far from achieving a military victory; and the Communists in India are unlikely to extend their influence beyond the poverty-stricken districts they presently control....... the nature of a democracy that is protected by an autocrat...... the turnout of voters does nothing but empower and legitimise a native elite willing to push the priorities of its Western patrons.......
- Republicanism: How About A Real Public Debate? INSN In the aftermath of King Gyanendra’s February 1 takeover of full executive powers, the Nepali Congress, too, has signaled that its support for constitutional monarchy is, at best, driven by expediency...... Fifteen years later, the palace stepped in to claim a role it believed it never had relinquished under the tripartite agreement...... Discussions have focused too narrowly on how the palace might react to an adverse result. How would the mainstream parties and the Maoists respond to an outcome not to their liking? ..... may be ready to shed some of their doctrinaire policies and rhetoric in exchange for legitimacy ..... The Nepalese Maoists continue to espouse aspects of the Cultural Revolution — including class conflicts and retribution – which modern-day Chinese communists would prefer to forget...... India, extreme left-wing insurgencies grip some 40 percent of the country’s 593 districts..... Growing cooperation between the world’s two most populous nations cannot mask the reality that they are also competitors. The limits to conciliation have been on display for some time....... Despite India’s full recognition of Tibet as an integral part of China, Beijing has hardly shown unequivocal reciprocity on the issue of Sikkim, the Himalayan kingdom India annexed in 1974. China’s reticence on India’s candidacy for a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council provides yet another illustration of this complex relationship........ China wants the Nepalese government to stay clear of any foreign (Indian or the U.S.) influence that could make trouble in Tibet. To further the goal of status quo in Tibet, China is integrating Nepal into the Tibetan economy, and laying a highway that will connect the two...... a permanent U.S. delegation to talk with China one a variety of international issues, including Burma, Nepal and Sudan....... the Pentagon likely would not mind having another emergency air base or logistics center close to Pakistan and Central Asia..... “The U.S. military has bases in Pakistan, throughout Central Asia, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines, and it has relations with Mongolia, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand. Nepal is another link in the chain” .... Rhetorical threats must not be allowed to take the place of substantive discussions. The accusation that King Gyanendra in this day and age is bent on reviving autocracy is an insult to the intelligence of the Nepalese people...... Sanjay Upadhya, a Nepalese journalist based in the United States, has been a Fulbright Scholar at New York University
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