No less a person than the Indian Health Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad bemoaned in public that the “the disease of ‘men having sex with men’ is unnatural and not good for India.” If you think that’s a case of indignation extended to its limits, consider the response that his outbursts have elicited: Minister Azad has reportedly been flooded with “Get well soon” messages.
Being a close neighbor, it would not have been possible for Nepal to keep itself immune from the contagious ‘muddled-class’ disease of infantile indignation for long. However, more worrisome is the fact that after crossing the invisible no-man’s-land along the international border, the resentment bug has mutilated into a more virulent form and has begun to show strong symptoms of chronic delusion. There is a risk that just as Hinduism bred fatalism, secularism may end up promoting egotism of highest order and antipathy may turn out to be the new national religion.
DELUSIONAL PAST
Rather than facing inadequacies in a forthright manner, it is still fashionable to blame everyone for one’s failures other than the self. The long power-cut must be the fault of Indians. Maoists are guilty of promoting the culture of revenge. Western diplomatic missions and multi-national NGOs are complicit in the activities of proselytising missionaries. The poor must be blamed for deforestation. The Madheshis are separatists. The Janjati activists practice divisionism. The Dalits have become unnecessarily militant. Oh, how ‘these people’ have destroyed the harmony and tranquillity of once peaceful Nepal where Buddha was born! If you have not heard the line, you have probably shut yourself away from the Kathmandu socialites’ chatter altogether.
The imagined times of yore are often revoked to express resentment against the present. Contemporary failings of Nepali polity are however mere offshoots of proverbial dragon’s teeth planted in the past, particularly during Panchayat period. It would take a long while to uproot these thorns and prepare the ground for amity in society.
Facts are somewhat more disturbing. Peddlers of ideological snake oil sold the belief that private investors would electrify the country if only the state withdrew its visible hand. Some of them have since made good money from government concessions, but nobody thought it prudent to reinvest his profits for public good. Except for a tiny fraction, most of the electricity produced in the country comes from power plants that the government has built. If some diplomatic missions and multinational NGOs do indeed sponsor religious conversion, nothing is stopping the Hindu elite from broadening their own base through provision of better socio-economic services for the marginalized section of population.
Maoists merely benefited from the vengefulness of Nepali society; they could not have institutionalised something that has been a custom among the ruling elite since at least the time of Bhimsen Thapa. While it’s true that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, the maxim appeals the powerful precisely for that reason: They enjoy the game of revenge from their perches atop neighbouring trees while minions play out bouts of reprisal down below in the swamps of hate and enmity. “Don’t defeat your enemy, destroy him,” preaches a motorcycle ad on the small screen. That is perhaps the central tenet of rapacious capitalism.
Huts built on cleared forestland are mere symptoms of a sick polity that has always looked for easy solutions to complex problems and maximised personal benefits whatever be the social outcome. Chairman Mahendra introduced the machination of appropriating Charkoshe Jhadi for his Pahadi loyalists in the name of resettling squatters. In the post-1990 years of turmoil, strongmen allied to UML and Maoists took turns to loot the forest. The poor were accidental instruments in the whole process.
Other than continued neglect and constant alienation, nothing else can turn Madheshis into separatists. If some Janjatis want a share in the spoils of state machinery, they have every right to claim so. After all, their blood and toil have kept the unity, integrity and viability of Nepal even when the elite of the country kept squandering away its scarce resources either to foreign shores or in building pointless palaces in Kathmandu. Bless Biswendra Paswan for expressing the angst of long-oppressed Dalits in a relatively mild manner. If Dalits actually became militants, the priests, warriors, merchants and preachers of Maoism would have no place to hide in the hills and plains of Nepal.
The imagined times of yore are often revoked to express resentment against the present. Contemporary failings of Nepali polity are however mere offshoots of proverbial dragon’s teeth planted in the past, particularly during Panchayat period. It would take a long while to uproot these thorns and prepare the ground for amity in society.
THE SUDAN SWINDLE
The exposé of fraud in the procurement of armed personnel carriers (APCs) for the Nepal police on UN duty in Sudan surprised no one but the naïve, the smart and a few swindlers. Any common Nepali, who had had anything to do with the law enforcement agencies in the past, know that our uniformed forces are capable of doing much more and on a larger scale. Lack of opportunity is the only limit upon their predatory predilections. Investigations of defense deals that were made during the period of Maoist insurgency, especially when forces functioned under the state of internal emergency, would probably reveal more interesting cases of artful rackets involving colorful figures.
Fraudsters are perplexed that their precautions were of no avail as informants fed credible records to the State Affairs Committee, which then prepared an exhaustive report and prompted Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) to investigate the case. The smart set is bewildered that some of their own kind have been caught with their pants down. Simpletons worry that if so many putrid potatoes have been picked already, what is the guarantee that the rot has not already destroyed the lot. However, the most incredulous is the chattering classes of Kathmandu. They can’t believe that ‘People Like US (the PLUS Class) who dress impeccably even in civvies, speak regal baksiyos Nepali or unaccented English, and come from some of the most loyal clans of the former royal family could get caught doing things that have been long considered normal in circles of power.
The culture of commission has Ranacracy roots when no business in Kathmandu could prosper without the patronage of a powerful durbar that often got a cut from all commercial deals. In a hurry to make up with his cousins and in-laws, Chairman Mahendra institutionalized a system whereby all governmental contracts needed to be vetted by loyalists of the palace. The purpose of such inspections was not to ensure compliance with regulations but to keep a close tab on who was getting what from which award. The extended Shah Family then did not need to try too hard to get a foothold in all lucrative economic activities.
By the time of King Birendra’s reign, almost every businessperson in Kathmandu knew which royal door to knock for what kind of contract, deal or license. Commission agent became a rewarding and respectable profession, which then prompted its practitioners into establishing what came to be known as business houses. Some of their scions have since opened banks, dabbled in processing and screwdriver industries and secured sinecures in philanthropic entities and commercial associations apart from buying their way into the Constituent Assembly. A former royal council member Chiranjivi Agrawal alleges that the auction of CA membership fetched political parties anything between 5 to 50 million rupees depending upon their public. Predictably, they are most vociferous in denouncing corruption.
It is this establishment network of government officials, commission community and their collaborators in politics that wants to magnify the Darfur scam and divert the attention away from much bigger builder-banker-criminal nexus. Compared to 150 billion rupee bad loan banking bungle, the VAT swindle variously estimated to be between 5 and 15 billion rupees or capital flight so large that few seem to have any idea about its exact scale, the fraud in the procurement in APCs involves paltry 29 million rupees. Schemers of bigger loot of public money want to draw former ministers in what appears to have been an open-and-shut case, involving junior to senior police officers.
The law must take its own course, but there is no need to humor the permanently moaning middleclass who want to see names of politicians dragged through the streets merely because some of their own kind has been found to be dirty. Who knows, they may not be even guilty. But for now, the court case is a beginning. Onus is now upon the Home Minister Krishna Bahadur Mahara to arrest “100 dons, 100 smugglers and their political patrons” and prosecute them. However, to do any of that effectively, he must first bring peddlers of bribery who fix sleaze-deals into the dragnet.
Like trade in all addictive substances, supply-side is the main problem of chronic corruption. Government official are small dealers who survive on a cut and politicos are end-users that have been lured into the deadly craving. Of all suspects, they are the ones presumed innocent until proven guilty.
cklal@hotmail.com
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