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In a country that has survived off remittances from soldiers, porters and doorkeepers serving abroad for over 150 years, death on the line of duty in faraway lands is considered a matter of course. In its immediate aftermath, however, the killings in Iraq had sparked communal riots. Enraged by the video of the beastly mass murder, an eruption of impotent fury on September 1, 2004—an event that sections of the media would later dub ‘9/1’ and ‘Black Wednesday’—Nepalis attacked fellow Nepalis to express their anger against a group of terrorists in a distant country.[break]
A revered mosque with centuries of history behind it and located barely a few steps away from a police station on the main thoroughfare of Kathmandu was vandalized publicly in broad daylight. Several premises belonging to people professing minority religion were wrecked in a coordinated manner. Minority-owned shops in different parts of the country were attacked. The riots had died down as swiftly as it had exploded. However, the criminals behind the mayhem were never brought to book. Victims of the riots would probably never get proper justice. However, it would have helped had activists promoting social harmony marked the date as a day of forgiveness and repentance.
The tragedy of 9/11 would perhaps be marked next week in more appropriate manners. The attacks on the landmarks of US mainland was a cataclysm that had made the European media proclaim in solidarity, “We are all Americans.”
It has been more or less so for the Nepali ruling elite from the early fifties. In a place never formally colonized but forever loyal servitors of imperial masters, the lure of Western life is so strong that this must be the only country in the world where people actually hold hunger strikes for their right to migrate to the USA under Diversity Visa (DV) provisions and stage street protests to claim the privilege of settling in the United Kingdom. And it’s not just the poor who want to get away to wherever they can: It was reported recently that some Nepalis were frantic enough to invest up to five million Rupees to be smuggled into the USA through Brazil, Peru, Bolivia and Mexico. Yankees are the new masters of choice for a subservient people who have never been direct subjects of a Western Empire but served them for so long and so loyally that prospect of freedom frightens them into frenzied desperation.
Free to serve
It’s almost a cliché to repeat ritualistically that Siam—now Thailand—and Nepal have been only two countries of the South and the Southeast Asia to have never been colonized by outside powers. Reality is, of course, somewhat more complex. Thai rulers collaborated with whichever colonizer would guarantee the continuity of their hold over the country. The court in Kathmandu was a little more overt.
Illustration: sworup Nhasiju
The British Empire, George Orwell wrote from his Burmese experience, was “despotism with theft as its final object.” Robbery would perhaps better characterize the criminal enterprise. In a scathing piece recently in The Independent, Owen Jones skewers apologists of the British Empire: “The last large-scale famine to take place in India was under British rule; none has taken place since.” Up to four million Bengalis starved to death in 1943 after Winston Churchill diverted food to well-fed British soldiers and countries such as Greece. “The starvation of anyway underfed Bengalis is less serious” than that of “sturdy Greeks,” he argued. “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion,” he said to his Secretary of State for India, Leopold Amery. In any case, the famine was their fault for “breeding like rabbits.” Churchill had form: back in 1919, he declared himself “strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes,” arguing that it would “spread a lively terror.”’ In a classic display of churlishness, when informed of the severity of the famine, Churchill had enquired whether Gandhi had died of hunger.
The ruling class of Nepal was complicit in the crimes of the British in the South and Southeast Asia. Jung Bahadur happily agreed to become the saddle for the slaughterers in the uprisings of 1857 in the Ganga Plains and actively took part in the Lucknow Loot afterwards. Chandra was a willing instrument of imperialism, and Gurkhas who became the boots of the butcher General Dyer in the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre were recruited from his realm. Juddha eulogized Hitler but was shrewd enough to realize that the Second World War was a competition between imperial powers and he benefited hugely from being a supplier of men and material to British war efforts.
Shah rulers and their courtiers would give continuity to mercenary traditions and let Gurkhas be the jackboots of their masters in Malaya or serve as soldiers of oppressors in distant territories. It is true that Nepalis had never been subjects of British Empire, but their rulers had always been the most loyal servants of thieves, robbers, and buccaneers who pretended to be on a civilizing mission in its colonies.
Long association with the British had primed the aristocracy of Nepal for cooption by outside powers. Beginning in late 1950s, Kathmandu began to emerge as an outpost of the American Empire.
Price of loyalty
In the fantasy world of Facebook aficionados, Nepal is still an acronym with letters of the word standing for ‘never-ending-peace-and-love.’ It is the country of the Buddha; the land of Mt. Everest; the motherland of the famed Gurkha warriors; the homeland of legendary Sherpas; and the land where Yetis toddle in the highlands and the Royal Bengal Tiger prowl in the plains. Like all constructions of imagination, these descriptions have some element of truth. However, it’s the manufacture of meanings inherent in these symbols that really make it menacing. The mod crowd in New Media hides away from complexities of contemporary life into the mystiques of Shangri-La.
In the haze of marijuana smoke of the late sixties and early seventies, draft dodgers hallucinated about ‘never-ending-peace-and-love’ even as Ambassador-at-Large Ellsworth Bunker (1894-1984) lived in Kathmandu to keep an eye on communists of South Asia and took monthly air sorties to supervise the carpet bombing of Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam. By most conservative estimates, US dumped around 500,000 tons of explosives on Cambodia alone. According to an estimate published in the Phnom Penh Post, the figure was probably two million tons of bombs—many times more than the quantity used in World War II—including landmines, experimental weapons and rockets. In an episode of One Square Mile in 2010, the BBC showed that four decades after the Vietnam War, unexploded ordnance continued maiming and killing innocent Laotians as they went about their daily chores. Nepal kept itself blissfully unaware of genocidal wars in Indochina.
King Mahendra had accorded Ambassador Bunker the diplomatic protocol reserved for royal relatives of other countries: “Distinguished Visitor Without Rank.” Bunker’s Boys at the Center for Economic Development and Administration (CEDA)—established on May 15, 1969 under a tripartite agreement between His Majesty’s Government of Nepal, Tribhuvan University and the Ford Foundation—would later help anchor Nepal ideologically in the western camp. Nepal stayed there throughout the Cold War decades despite its formal allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement.
Under pressure from the new US administration contemplating withdrawal from Vietnam and opening surreptitious channels of communication with communist China, Nepal slowly swept draft dodgers and other flower children of various nationalities out of the country in the mid-seventies; coronation of King Birendra being a convenient excuse. UN Secretary General U Thant had already shed obligatory tears at the Birthplace of Lord Buddha in 1967 and Prof. Kenzo Tange had been hired to design an oriental Disneyland of Tranquility at Lumbini. The ubiquitous presence of shutter-happy Japanese tourists in the late seventies made traders of memorabilia in Kathmandu deal in postcards of the Mayadevi Temple and Ashoka Pillar. The land of never-ending-love-and-peace acquired a fitting mascot—Lord Buddha Himself.
The inveterate Swiss explorer Toni Hagen had already turned Sherpas into legend; mountaineer Edmund Hillary worked tirelessly to bring the community into further limelight through his activities in awareness, health services and modern education. Elusive Yeti and reclusive Royal Bengal Tiger helped propel adventure and safari tourism into the big league. There is a reason the ruling elite in Kathmandu loved these symbols of Nepaliness of the seventies so much: They were all non-political and helped them become Non-Resident Americans in lifestyle, habits and beliefs. The American model of nationalism was ideal to give continuity to their complete hegemony.
Somewhat like the Chicago Boys of Augusto Pinochet in Chile, the Berkeley Mafia of General Suharto in Indonesia, and the Ford Fundoos of Field Marshal Ayub in neighboring Pakistan, Bunker’s Boys gave a veneer of modernity to traditional templates of unitary nationality, proto-capitalism and watered-down despotism in the name of controlled democracy. It’s possible to shake off serfdom through a political revolution. New forms of economic activities have made slavery superfluous: Desire drives people not only to toil tirelessly in sweatshops to serve the interests of the salaried bourgeoisie managing multinationals but some in the proletariat are also desperate enough to sell their kidneys to acquire the latest iPod. The intellectual servitude, however, is so insidious that it destroys the soul of a nation without anyone taking notice.
Like in most client countries of the Western Block during the Cold War era, Ford Foundation had funded American thinkers to mentor the best and brightest minds of Kathmandu. In the late Sixties, it helped that Samuel Bunker, the Assistant Representative of Ford Foundation’s New Delhi Office, was Ambassador Bunker’s son. Thus were born Nepali intellectuals who would go on to draft the National Education System Plan in the mid-seventies, privatize banking in the mid-eighties and throw open the national economy to gleeful profiteers in the 1990s without making any effort of first putting a strong regulatory mechanism in place. These days their inheritors in the Planning Commission raise objections over terms of description such as ‘stigmatized,’ ‘impunity,’ ‘religious minority,’ and ‘structural discrimination.’
Despite being one of the most loyal foot soldiers of the British Empire, all that ordinary Gorkhalis ever got was crumbs from devious deals their imperial masters struck with native collaborators. Post-1950s, all hues of Nepalis—right, left and center—have been ardent adherents of the foreign policy goals of the new imperial power. Once upon a time not too long ago, Nepali envoys would be told to consult the nearest US embassy should confusion arise about voting in any UN forum. Remnants of the US-directed era in Nepali politics, administration and diplomacy would continue to dominate national discourse for still sometime to come.
In Marx’s analysis, the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. He further adds that the class, which is the ruling material force in society, is at the same time its leading intellectual force. The ruling material force in Nepal continues to be the comprador bourgeoisie—importers of consumables, manpower exporters, service syndicates, commercial cartels and their mouthpieces in the media that control the economy—and it happily deals in unitary ideas dispensed by the most powerful industrial-military force in the world history where over 80 percent of the population speak only one language.
Association with the ruling deities of the American Century has extracted a heavy price, just as the British had helped Ranas keep Nepal in the dark ages for over a century. A thought would need to be spared for the Nepali laborers massacred in Iraq—they died serving US interests in occupied territories—when memoriam are held for the victims of the 9/11 terror attacks.
New Nepal may have become a hackneyed phrase, but intellectual servitude must make way for fresh ideas and new imagination of an inclusive nation. It would come from confident youngsters emerging on the margins of the Nepali society rather than the grey-haired or white-shirted alumni of Ivy League dominating every discourse in the Old as well as the New Media.
Lal contributes to The Week with his biweekly column Reflections. He is one of the widely read political analysts in Nepal.
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