I am pointing at the less visible yet widespread war that thrives on hatred, gnawing at the values without which a society cannot function as a unit. This war has escalated to such an extent that psychologists say a sizable section of the nation’s populace is showing clear symptoms of acute character disorder needing immediate psychiatric assistance.
Mind you, the malady is of a national scale, more pervasive than the cholera outbreak in western Nepal!
A malady of character disorder is characterized by a pathologically elevated sense of self-righteousness. People with such disorder feel no responsibility for what they are or what their living conditions are. For such people, their being poor and unsuccessful has no relation to their laziness or dumbness. For them, anyone who drives a private car is corrupt, and anyone who owns a house has plundered. For the malady-stricken populace, everything is back and white, and all their inadequacies are someone else’s responsibility.
Even nature! If you don’t believe it, here is a recent case.
In the night of July 27, some 200 believers of such a simplistic philosophy of life taught them by the greatest communist leaders of the 21st century stormed a journalist’s house in Kathmandu to burn the house.
It had rained cats and dogs that day and the whole valley was waterlogged. But these 200 youths wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it had rained 99 millimeters in Kathmandu that day, as if to make up for a long, dry spell. Naturally for them, climate change and its impacts on the water cycle were non-issues. Their natural reflex was to find someone responsible for the rain and for the two inches of water that was flowing over a road leading to their ‘squatters’ settlement’, and to punish that person.
The men singled out this house because the family that lives in it had floated an idea two years ago that the pungent stream that the road used to be back then could be converted into a road by placing wide-radius hume pipes over it. The ‘squatters’ bought the idea, metropolitan authorities released the budget and the stream was finally converted into a motorable road a year ago.
But on the night of July 27, the ‘squatters’ didn’t give a thought to the fact that for a whole year they had slept peacefully in their houses without being disturbed by the gurgle of semi-solid human waste that used to flow openly on the stream, and without having to inhale air flavored with that waste.
“Burn this house,” they shouted, while it continued to rain. Police arrived and the youths were intimidated with threats of arrest. They left agreeing to discuss the issue the next morning. But the next morning, there was no water left over the road, and therefore nothing left to discuss!
This is a small incident in a country where a former prime minister was clown enough to tell the press that an incident cannot be called violent unless someone gets killed. What profound wisdom! A school van with kids inside getting attacked by mobs is a non-issue! The driver of a car being hurled with expletives and being threatened with arson for the simple reason that he arrived in the area without realizing that some youths had just engaged in a gang-fight and the ones’ who had been bashed up had decided to stop traffic does not even qualify for a topic of discussion!
The war fought in the name of the people glorified anger, violence, retribution, and instant justice. In the name of the peace process, social outcasts, career discards, thieves, murderers and plunderers were rewarded with high offices, thus reinforcing the idea that these are indeed virtues that must be honed and demonstrated as widely as possible and to as big an audience as possible.
While all this happens, sensible citizens await the age of reason. They hope, because that is what one must do when things go as awfully wrong as it has in our country. They tolerate, they remain patient, they talk politely, and they are cautious because they want to survive to see the day when they can sit over a cup of coffee with friends and laugh at the nightmare they lived through.
bikash@myrepublica.com
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