Condemned to darkness for defying Maoists

RUKUM, March 25: Celebrating the death anniversary of BP Koirala is a ritual event for a Nepali Congress cadre but a person in Kholagaun has been made to live in darkness for the past 13 years for doing so.



Gopal Prasad Sharma, 54, had his eyes burned with acid by the Maoists for celebrating the BP Koirala Memorial Day in 1998. “The Maoists had ordered locals not to celebrate the occasion. Celebrating it was a grave crime in their eyes,” Sharma reminisces.[break]



Sharma, who quit his job as a government school teacher to join politics, had been elected the Village Development Committee (VDC) chairman in the first local election after 1990. But defying the Maoists in Rukum at the start of the insurgency has changed his life for the worse.



The Maoists didn´t take his defiance too kindly and they turned up at his home at around 11 on the night of July 29. “They called me and said they were policemen on patrol. But I didn´t believe them and pretended to be asleep,” Sharma recalls. But the Maoists eventually broke into the house. “They mercilessly thrashed me with barbed sticks after getting me pinned to the ground,” he says. The Maoists had locked his wife Bishnu in another room but she could see all through a hole in the room.



“They started to whisper after getting me blood-soaked. The whole room was filled with my blood and one of them took out a khukuri,” he added. Sharma and his wife had both given up and he says he just hoped that they would finish it off in a single stroke.



The Maoists then decided not to hack him and took out a bottle. “I didn´t know what was inside the bottle. They then poured the liquid into my eyes,” he recalls.



“I don´t know what they did thereafter. I think they took out my eyeballs with the tip of khukuri,” he said. Luckily the Maoists were done with their punishment and left roaring the party slogans. But his eyes were gone for ever.



He was then taken to Kathmandu for treatment but the doctors couldn´t restore his sight. He spent all his belongings for treatment and the Maoists then captured his land. “They have yet to return my land and local Maoist cadre Shyam Lal Nepali has rented the land to another farmer,” he complains.







He cannot get his eyesight back but he has also lost his hope of getting his land back. “I have been making rounds of the district administration office and the local peace committee for over a year but to no avail,” he rues.

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