“Peter, you might as well write the preface to the auspicious anniversary publication for the Trust’s Chairman.”
Read the first part.
Thus I also became a ghostwriter for Prince Gyanendra. Obviously, the Member Secretary was apprising the Chairman, if not the Patron, of the details on the bumper publication through regular audiences at Nirmal Niwas, the residence of the Prince.Soon, Dr Mishra brought the good news. “Sarkar liked your handiwork, Peter.” It was understood, however, that the editor would remain an anonymous and impersonal professional, so the hacked preface, too, would remain confidential in noblesse oblige and not cause lèse majesté.
* * *
However, as the date of KMTNC’s anniversary celebrations and the deadline for the special issue neared, so did the fortissimo and crescendos of the Jana Andolan of 1990.
Virtually, in an unprecedented blitz, the capital was overtaken by the panzers of “Sakkali” Prajatantra, and King Birendra capitulated to give up all his authoritarian powers, one by one and in batches and bulks.
* * *
Nothing fails like failure in Nepal, especially those fallacies founded as facts and rooted on feeble and romantic grounds. Hidebound disarrays showed themselves one by one, and the faulty edifices crumbled in quick succession in the wake of the new aspirations of Nepalis. KMTNC, the royal alibi for nature conservation in the Kingdom of Nepal, too, was waylaid by its own pet policies couched in monarchical wills and ordinances. When demigods’ determinism, however well-intentioned, is undemocratic and without general consensus or people’s participation, the stage is quickly rendered bare and its casts elect to throw their selective costumes and desert the premises. I believe the same fiasco happened at KMTNC, its overnight demise symbolizing the rubbing off of the many Indras in Birendra, Dipendra, and Gyanendra – the Vishnu-incarnate royals of Nepal – who were stricken off with one singular stroke of the people’s raging will.
* * *
By which time, I had long completed my editorial assignment at KMTNC, had collected my payment and gone home, and waited for the publication I had helped edit to see the light of the day. This didn’t happen, and no advanced calculus would be needed to explain why. But I still wonder whatever happened to the PageMaker’s final copies, photographs, charts, transparencies, and other press materials supposed to have gone to a printing plant (perhaps in Bangkok or Singapore) for the glossy anniversary edition of the Trust’s mouthpiece, with the mailing list of the world’s high and mighty addressees. Whatever also happened to the planned soirees, galas and events to commemorate the royal shindigs?
Immediately, rather, “King Mahendra” was removed from the signage of the Trust, and its experts and staffs, too, scattered. Dr Mishra, coincidentally, had already gone abroad for his heart checkup, and soon left Nepal for the World Bank to head its new EIA (Environment Impact Assessment) department. Mingma Norbu Sherpa of Sagarmatha National Park and Dr Chandra Prasad Gurung of the nascent ACAP (Annapurna Conservation Area Project) and other Terai-based people-and-park initiatives underwent humiliating demotions and displacements in Nepal. As a result, both Mingma Sherpa and Chandra Gurung left KMTNC: Sherpa headed an important organization in the US while Gurung led WWF Nepal. But before the two received international recognition, honors, awards and appointments, they were marginalized in Nepal as janajati-s at the hands of the still-dominant Bahun-Chhetri-Newar (BCN) nexus, a point not forgotten by Weena Pun – a member of the Magar Nation, I believe – while reviewing Manjushree Thapa’s aforementioned book on Chandra Gurung. Thanks to Pun, I also take this opportunity to relive the requiem to Nepal’s Panchayat Polity and its monarch-custodians.
* * *
In the above paragraph, I’m mixing the Jana Andolan 1 of 1990 and the 2nd People’s Putsch of 2006. This is intentional, for defining my kind of magic realism that still confuses Nepal to this day. Many monarchical convexes were allowed to remain by the 1990 agitation and the resultant Constitution: The government still belonged to His Majesty; the army still had the prefix of “Royal” that also headed the national parks of Nepal. Royal residues still percolated in the institutions pampered by the Palace, and its courtiers and the BCN triumvirate ruled many roosts well up to 2006. These remaining royal vestiges could be concaved only by the declarations of the 2006 Andolan and state proclamations. But by then, sadly, it was much too late for such marginalized Adibasi Janajati nature conservationists as Mingma Norbu Sherpa and Chandra Prasad Gurung to retain their rightful niches in the chronically Sanskritized bureaucracy and the Urdu-Persian “firman” of the Durbar and aristocratic Kathmandu. They left KMTNC where they had enjoyed the professional camaraderie of a liberal like Dr Hemanta Raj Mishra who himself had left Nepal.
* * *
What is left, then? Well, I take this opportunity, although 20 years have elapsed since then, to thank Dr Mishra for his kindheartedness and concerns for my wellbeing. Had it not been for him, for one thing, I wouldn’t have known the above-mentioned Nepali naturalists and nature conservationists of international reputation.
Even after my brief stint at KMTNC, Dr Mishra didn’t forget me. During my last days under his aegis, he assured me of a job as editor at ICIMOD. Why this didn’t materialize is another story, quite outside these column centimeters.
* * *
In conclusion, then, some more reminiscences of Dr Chandra Prasad Gurung should be in order. He wrote for the tourism magazines we (Kamal Ratna Tuladhar, Samrat Upadhyay, Vivian Yonzon and I) edited. Taller and broader-framed for a Gurung, I asked him one day:
“Doctor Saab, being a martial Gurung of the west and to follow the footsteps of your own fellow villagers, didn’t you try for the British Brigade of Gurkhas, or the Indian Army?” My curiosity was typical of my own eastern Gurkha/Gorkha legacy.
He indeed had tried both services. For the British Army, he was considered too educated and hence overqualified. He cited poor eyesight for the Indian Army commission. Had he been accepted, he would either become a British Gurkha Major, or at least a Brigadier in the Indian Army, and comfortably retired by now. But this “Boy from Siklis” heard other challenging and path-breaking calls, and he outshone all other more fortunate and better-placed Nepalis.
Dr Chandra Prasad Gurung, with a mentor in Dr Harka Gurung, is a happy story, and in league with Mingma Sherpa, Mahabir Pun, Dr Sanduk Ruit, Kul Chandra Gautam et al – all village boys from the high hills of Nepal. That half of them have left us prematurely is a “leela” we have to live with.
(Concluded)