Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La

FAULTLINES: STRANGE DAYS IN A MAOIST SHANGRI-LA One icy night in Bandipur, a beautiful hill town about four hours from Kathmandu, we are sitting beside a roaring fire on a terrace, the earth illuminated by a wild moon, and a young Frenchman joins our small group. He is an earthquake specialist and has come to Nepal to assist in setting up seismic monitoring systems. But we dont feel like talking about earthquakes because, as everyone says, Nepal is long overdue a major one. We know that subterranean faultlines fracture the country, the Indian and Eurasian plates shifting silently as they go on building the peaks that dominate the horizon, and that one night the monster will wake and groan.we know too that the country is hopelessly unprepared. In September last year there was an 6.9 quake in Sikkim which shook Kathmandu. Friends jumped to prepare their go bags again (last time was after Haiti), but soon slipped back to usual habitsI need that jacket, and that water bottle, I cant leave my portable hard drive in the bag forever. One friend toppled over in the street in Kathmandu, walls came down and mercifully there were very few casualties. Faultlines crisscross Nepal. The tectonic ones we push to the back of our minds; the historical, social and political ones are as unavoidable as they are baffling, though by heading for the hills, and putting space between yourself and Kathmandu, you can imagine yourself in another reality, one that carries still faint whispers of Shangri-La. In 2012 I am back in a country with a Maoist-led coalition government. Not only does the nation seem to be balanced on the brink of chaos, but the Maoists themselves are a rickety mob, swinging from hardline to moderate with the prime minister and party chairman facing off over a chasm, and both a crevasse away from those clamouring for the rank and file. Three years ago, the government was also Maoist and nothing happened; I mean nothing that would suggest these people are anything like the cracked rulers of China back in the day: that was Maoismthose deranged years of extremism, the Great Leap Forward and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. No, they just seem like a familiar claque of desperados, with an everyday ramshackle opposition, also squabbling desperados, there being so many characters who just want to be a minister or better still prime minister; or, in the case of Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the Maoist chairman, executive president. That is

Murray Laurence

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La said to be his dark dream, anticipating the long-awaited constitution. Hes already had a go at PM, but upset the Indians, the Maoists meddling southern power, as well as the Nepal Army, and so they had him levered aside, to be replaced by a man from the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist), the serendipitously named Madhav Kumar Nepal. And now Mr Nepal has gone, with the next incumbent being Baburam Bhattarai, also a Maoist, and one who, singularly, is rumoured to be incorruptible. And for his compromising ways, Dahal is now accused of being in the pocket of the Indian intelligence agency, a savage smear for a Maoist. Meanwhile holy China gazes down from the other side of the high Himal, across tormented Tibet, bemused, paternalistic, bullying, spying on Nepals Tibetan population, and slinging money at eye-catching projects: a railway from China to Lumbini, the birthplace of Buddha, so that more Chinese tourists can visit and more monstrous statues and palaces erected. And so that China can grasp little Nepal closerpulling her away from the maw of India: dont forget what they did to harmless Sikkimannexing her in 1975? The country is in the midst of rowdy, seemingly unplanned construction. I dont mean the building boom that fills the Kathmandu Valley with garish Punjab Gothic castles shrieking of loot from Qatar, nor the hellish road widening frenzy of the capital (developing countries developing are not attractive sights), but construction of a new nation. Ive seen nothing like itthe demands on the parties, the bureaucracy and the lawmakers (who clearly have too much to mull, as the press puts it). I am writing as the sun sets after another perfect, cloudless day behind the hills that impose themselves grandly around Kathmandu, the dust on fire in a luminous sky. In many ways the people do live in Shangri-La, yet it has seldom seemed so to them, only to foreigners who have made Nepal one of the most iconic travel destinations on the planet. The aspirations of the people after a decade of civil war, the stupefying horror of the monarchy massacring itself and so accelerating its demise, the deaths, torture, disappearances, and continuing lack of accountability, as told in Manjushree Thapas The Lives We Have Lost (Penguin 2010)remain unrealised, and increasingly they have only contempt for their leaders.

Murray Laurence

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La Nepalis have enormous tasks before them. For the political class the main preoccupations are supposedly the peace process and the constitution. These have preoccupied them since before I returned in 2008, indicating that the players may not have been as focused as they claim, but busy with their own positions, wealth accumulation and other distractionsa view held by many commentators as well as by most ordinary Nepalis. So what about these Maoists? A while ago Republica ran an editorial headed A House for Mr Dahal. In a catching echo of VS Naipauls A House for Mr Biswas, the paper noted, Plenty must be wondering about the Communist credentials of the leader of the proletariats shifting to over Rs100,000 ($1200) a month, 15 room behemoth of a building (in a classy district). Come on its not his choice, but absolute necessity that has forced him into the expensive switch. (Dahal himself said it was a security matter; proletarian Dillibazaar was too crowded). Rest assured we understand the comrades compulsions. Much like Mr Biswas, Mr Dahal, too, pines for a permanent home. The Indians, too, leapt at the opportunity to satirise. Under the banner, Red Flag in Nepal, the Indian Express hooted: The new digs, with swimming pool space and badminton court, are far from the monastic accommodation one might expect former guerrillas to choose. The paper hinted that the house might have been purchased, under questionable terms, possibly involving some favour-mongering with a local businessmanSince he entered mainstream politics in 2006, his luxury lifestyle, Rado watches and designer suits have been a blatant declaration that he has come a long way, and does not care even about lip-service to revolutionary pieties... The paper, not wanting to side with those who believe that revolutionaries should camp out forever, makes the point that these leaders are no longer insurgents. They are potentates. But the troubling thing is that Prachanda, (the fierce, the chairmans nom de guerre) and other Maoist leaders. have taken advantage of a weak state, one that cannot enforce minimal accountability on its elected leaders and officials. Nepals republican ideals have been thwarted, its constitution still unresolved, its politics chaotic. The Maoists, as the largest party in the house, must take much of the responsibility. The proletariat, confined to dank rooms without power, water or sunlight, must have watched the guerrilla leaders move with interest, especially the Maoist Murray Laurence 3

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La cadre who are supposedly financing their chairmans Biswas upgrade, and wondered whether Prachanda had unmoored himself from his own people. But the Maoists dont talk as if theyre unmoored from the masses, only from one another as they engage in uninhibited skirmishes. The radicals, led by vicechairman, Mohan Baidya, bragged that they would finish off the rightist-revisionist trend led by prime minister Bhattarai, and drag chairman Dahal, who represents a shaky centrist trend, into the revolutionary fold. Spinning, Dahal confessed that it had been a mistake to compromise with the other parties, and, back in the revolutionary fold for the moment, concluded that the party was now united in pushing for a pro-people constitution that is anti-imperialist, and will foment an urban insurrection if the party fails in its endeavour. Baidya hammered Dahal further, Dont try to become a statesman. Become a leader of the proletariat to lead a revolution (again). But Dahal kept wobbling, and so Baidya, in March, told a gathering of excombatants that it was time to topple the anti-national (Maoist) government with an insurrection. Amongst observers, there are those who believe that it is the hardliners who are upholding the Maoists beliefs that their comrades fought and died for, whilst Prachanda and the rest have lost their souls to the flesh and money pots of Kathmandu. The Maoists are more than their quarrelling leaders. There are the young combatants, who have been wasting some of the best years of their lives in UN setup cantonments waiting for releaseeither integration into the Nepal Army or retirement, both of which are now proceeding, though not without controversy (the party snatching up to half of the agreed retirement money from the former fighters). And the various, highly militant youth branches which are always in the streets clamouring from the roofs of buses for an inspiring smorgasbord of changes. One, the All Nepal Independent Students Union (Revolutionary), ANISU-R (we love these semi-trailer acronyms), is campaigning against private schools (a seasonal favourite) by smearing soot on their teachers. And the latest Maoist gambit, surely a practical joke: the cabinet in midMarch agreed to fund Rs 20 million for the Lumbini-Sagarmatha Campaign, an expedition of 11 Maoist cadre to journey from Lumbini to the summit of Everest to

Murray Laurence

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La exert pressure on leaders to conclude the peace and constitution process. The cadre include the son of Dahal, Prakash. As Republica wittily observed, If Prakash Dahal is so concerned about peace and constitution, his journey to exert the required pressure need not be that arduous. It can start from his own room and end in his fathers(even allowing for their 15 room behemoth of a building). As an outsider I hesitate to join those Nepalis who dismiss their leaders as corrupt, caste afflicted, flightless birds, good only at enriching themselves and positioning their families. Looking at the avalanche of major constitutional and peace issues as well as the full spectrum of development needs of a country stranded near the worlds tail-enders, dysfunctional war-torn African states, in per capita income (USD490), I wonder whether most of our own leaders would manage any better. (Though we might consider why Nepal does find itself in this company, and who is to blame). Nepal has moved from being an absolutist monarchy, to figurehead monarchy, to parliamentary republic, with the intervention of a terrible civil war, in a little over a decade, and is now struggling to come up with a model of what they might be next. There is widespread belief that the people will be best served by a federal system, with states created on ethnic lines. Understandably, those far from Kathmandus power elite have felt neglected since time began, and they are due a decentralised future. So far, fine. Federations abound and give people a warm feeling that they belong to a unit closer to home. But ethnic states? High caste Baahuns (Brahmins) and Chhetris have been in a lather about not being represented in any of the proposed models, partly because they are distributed widely but also because there is a view that they are usurpers who had the country for centuries, left everyone else out in the sticks and achieved nothing other than for themselves. Anyway, whatever the outcome, it is likely that Nepali politics and society will continue to be dominated by these holy thread Baahun and Chhetri males for a long time yet as most well-known leaders including Dahal, Bhattarai, Nepal and Sher Bahadur Deuba (Nepal Congress party, former prime minister) representing far left, left centre and right, are from these elite castes (elite used advisedly: an anthropologist who has undertaken extensive research amongst

Murray Laurence

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La Hindu women scolded me for using the term). It is clear that Nepals traditionally harmonious diversity is fragmenting. For the outsider, all these ethnic groups demanding ethnic representation could do your head in, but its not even that straightforward. Manjushree Thapa in her illuminating A Boy from Siklis: The Life and times of Chandra Gurung (Penguin 2009) writes of the environmentalists ethnicity: There are traditionally four high Gurung clans, known as the four-jaat Gurungs, as well as sixteen lesser clans, known as the sixteen-jaat Gurungs. The family belonged to a high clan, the Gothane clan; and, as was the case with most mukhiya families, had some link with Kathmandu, the centre of state power. She continues breezily: when the rana maharajas framed Nepals first civil code in 1854 they created a hierarchy of four groups: the high Hindu castes, the unenslaveable alcohol drinkers, the enslaveable alcohol drinkers and the untouchable Hindu castes. The Gurungs adopted Hindu customs to escape being classified as enslaveable alcohol drinkers, a misfortune that befell other groups such as the Bhotes, Chepangs, Tharus and Ghartis. The legacy of this assimilation remains to this day. Professor Gurung said some families use a Bahun puret for rituals; other use a Buddhist lama; others use Bon pajyu and khebri. (Bon is a pre-Buddhist shamanistic practice). Is that clear? And thats just the Gurungs. There are Tamangs, Magars, Rais, Limbus, Sherpas, Newars, Humlis, Tharus to mention some major groups..as well as clans and religions. And castes, a term Nepalis habitually use in place of ethnicity, because the great and powerful with their antique neuroses assigned caste to even non-Hindus. A Nepali king once observed from sovereign heights that Nepal was a garden with four main castes and innumerable sub-castes. Well, the kings have gone up in smoke but caste hasnt. On Human Rights Day, 10 December 2011, a Dalit (untouchable), Manbir Sunar, was beaten to death by two drunken Brahmins for daring to enter a kitchen in a high caste restaurant to light a cigarette. This shocking news was well covered in the media, including an interview with the deceaseds father who assumed that the murderers would get away with their crime being Brahmins. To compound the horror, both the murderers and Sunar were Maoists. But caste endures and the country does not have the economic dynamism of India which

Murray Laurence

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La has propelled a handful of Dalits into the celebrity stratosphere occupied by the super rich. In Nepal, caste discrimination was declared unconstitutional in 1951 and criminalised in the 1990s, but it was only 2010 that saw the adoption of the Castebased Discrimination and Untouchability Offence and Punishment Act, a milestone for the Dalit movement as it gives them weapons to seek justice. Nepals historic and structural inequalities are deeply entrenched so the test will be in the quality of the acts implementation. Where were we? Ah, federation. Enter the Madhesis, and an altogether unholy, portentous row. The Madhesis are the inhabitants of the Terai, the plains spreading from the open border with India to the foothills. Really, most of us didnt give them a thought until a few years ago. We travelled as fast as possible in clapped-out buses from ramshackle frontier towns through stifling heat to the Kathmandu Valley and then into the timeless mountains. Most Nepalis didnt think about them much, either, the Madhesis being dismissed as immigrants from India. But they grabbed attention in 2007, when Nepal was still reeling from the civil war, with an unanticipated uprising. The result was that the Madhesh became a battlefield where the political classes fought like banshees for the spoils and the people, and, significantly, where the current agenda of federalism and ethnic identity politics spread beyond its Maoist origins. The result, strangely, is that while there has never been a greater presence of Madhesi politicians in Kathmandu (though still not in the bureaucracy, the forces, media or NGO sectorthat cash machine for the elites), there are stronger than ever feelings of exclusion. Even the jailing for corruption of a Madhesi minister in the coalition has been savaged as an attack on Madhesi ambitions and activism. Such indignation may be justified in the context of other eminent persons, also sentenced to prison (in one case for murder), being spotted at functions with their well-placed Maoist mates. Madhesi opportunists clambered aboard the identity express; reliably caustic commentator, CK Lal, labels them conformists, arrivists and dregs. The conformists lap up their second class status in Kathmandu in preference to the dustblown wastelands of home; they are sanitised and tame. The arrivists grasp status,

Murray Laurence

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La the filthy wrestling match of party politics makes them twitchy and they dont really want to be associated with the wretched of the earth. So they find the dregs useful criminals who have infiltrated Madhesi politics as thugs for hire; and they all rise through the muck, while nothing at all is done for Dalits, women and other immemorially excluded groups. And that is why a new storm is gathering. The Madhesi representatives have been helping themselves in time honoured ways, but everyone else languishes. Lal observes, It is difficult to predict the trigger, an upheaval in West Asia, communal flares in Gujarat, economic slowdown in Malaysia (millions work abroad) which will bring enraged masses out to the streets of the Terai. The leadership which emerged would be completely different from the complacent corps of yore. A proposal to induct several thousand into the Nepal Army was brought down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional even as the integration of 6000 former Maoist combatants into the army of their erstwhile enemy goes ahead. It is said that the traditional hill and valley elites while tolerating trained Madhesis, like the current president, simply cannot cope with the threat to their notion of Nepali nationality that the Terai denizens represent. So the faultlines of ethnic politics are real and widening, and the political grandees face the extraordinary challenge of balancing identity, now that they have opened fissures and raised expectations for their own purposes, with social harmony. And so far, a way through this conundrum eludes them. The dangers are real and terrifying. So lets escape from Kathmandu. The capital might have some imperishable World Heritage sites in its temples and ancient citiesplaces where you lose yourself in a surviving medieval worldbut the Himalayas beckon. To trek in Nepal, as I have done now on many occasions over nearly 40 years, is to enter an eternal land that captures you completely and renders meaningless the shenanigans, mini-triumphs, crimes and crises of the urban areas and lowlands. It is here, on the Annapurna Sanctuary trail, or Everest Base Camp trek, above the aquamarine light of Lake Gosainkund, or on any of the innumerable foot trails that lace the middle and high hills, that you feel that Nepal is no longer an accessory or plaything of venal elites and neighbourhood powers, but is itself the vibrating heart of the great Indo-Tibetan geological, cultural and spiritual domainfrom the birthplace of Buddha to the grand Himalayas where the gods of Hindus and Buddhists meet and Murray Laurence 8

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La harmonise. All right, Shangri-La was an imagined utopia in a 1933 novel, Lost Horizon, but it has come to signify a sublime paradise on earth, and even its misappropriation by hotels and massage parlours has not diminished its potency. The la has an everyday use familiar to trekkers: Thorung La, Cho La, Renjo La are some of the high passes which have been used for centuries by Tibetan traders. At altitude Nepal seems eternal. And while electricity has now come via micro-hydro and solar, along with a mobile phone network that seems more reliable than that in the Australian bush, and roads are intruding, a sacred silence prevails in which the laughter of children, the songs of contented men and women, bird calls and the bells of toiling animals can be heard, echoing on the winds from afar. At times you could almost believe in the beyuls, secret valleys whose location is revealed in oracular texts to crazy sages and sky dancers, and which Tibetans and other high country dwellers imagine as places of abundance, magic and immortality. But back on this earth, we know the Himalayan lands are far from this. The Nepali hill and mountain peoples, long forgotten by Kathmandu, are amongst the worlds hardest working, whether as farmers on terraces carved over centuries on vertiginous slopes; as porters carrying loads of up to 50kg to supply tourists drawn by the extraordinary landscape; as Sherpa guides, engaged in a risky trade for the benefit of foreign climbers; as lodge operators, mostly energetic women, seemingly freed from Hinduisms finicky and discriminatory obsessions, whose men are away overseas and who leave men in their wake anyway; and, lets not forget, as teachers and health workers who often live and work in humble, harsh circumstances. Life has never been easy in this Shangri-La. Only a short while before another constitution deadline, Nepals leaders continue to rush about and attend meetings, but seem most intent on plucking one others feathers. When they announce, as they have recently done, a desire to end Gurkha recruitment to foreign armies because it has not allowed Nepal to hold its head high, they sound unhinged, cynical and desperate, all at the same moment. After all, it is the Gurkhas, mostly ethnic boys from poor farms in the middle hills, along with the Sherpas, who have given Nepal its international reputation. The elites have shown themselves incapable of engaging the historically marginalised peoples other than as parties on the sidelines in rhetorical disputes about exclusion and inclusion and models for a federation. Yet, as a foreign Murray Laurence 9

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La constitution adviser noted in 2012, No politician that we met showed the least bit of interest in establishing and managing a federation. *** July 2013: two constitutional deadlines have passed amidst periods of violent strikes and brinksmanship. The fractures remain with the widest being between those who favour a federalism based on an uncertain number of states with ethnic names and those favouring fewer states with neutral geographical names. I had the experience of giving talks to several ethnic-based parties on Australias federal structure, and the problems that can arise between states in our long-established, uncomplicated system, for example over the management of the Murray - Darling rivers, and being astonished at the passion and sophisticated work which had gone into preparing maps and other positioning documents to fight the case for these particular groups. Writer Kunda Dixit summarises the stance of the protagonists: Proponents of ethnic federalism argue that it will devolve power to Nepals 100 or so marginalised ethnic groups, bring them into mainstream national politics and encourage autonomy and local self-governance. Opponents fear that ethnic federalism will weaken Nepals fragile national unity, fragment the country into warring ethnic fiefdoms, encourage conflict over natural resources and keep the country poor. Repeatedly postponed elections for the Constituent Assembly are now to take place in November. Weary Nepalis are under a caretaker leader, a former chief justice. But the divisions between and within parties are ever wider. Mohan Baidya now heads a breakaway Maoist party and has begun an anti-election campaign, generously offering not to take up arms immediately; Dahal, still chairman of the Unified Maoists, rationalises that the disputes between Maoist leaders are just a tactical game played against India. He recently regretted that the international community had not awarded him the Nobel peace prize for his miraculous work in the peace process and political and social transformation; whatever the merits of that claim, his evident attraction to power and money, like that of his rivals, should mean that he will have some explaining to do in November. Meanwhile the oldest of the parties, Nepal Congress, is fractured by disputes between senior and younger figures. How can you expect a fresh vision for a new republic from a bunch of old men who refuse to unlearn and relearn? complains a Murray Laurence 10

Strange Days in a Maoist Shangri-La young NC leader. And the venerable Communist Party has also split, with the Madhesi and Janajati (non-caste Hindu) representatives bolting in 2012 in revolt against the continuing domination of high castes. The remnant party is described as reactionary, flip-flopping and fickle. Finally, various shadowy outfits are talking of an alliance with nationalist forces around despised ex-king Gyanendra, though Dahals expected response on the question of the restoration of the monarchy was impossible, the people wont let it happen. He added that the revolution was yet to be completedrepublicanism, federalism and secularism were not the final objectives of his party. Nepal is riven by faultlines and, right now, as for the past decade, seems to be trembling on a perilous edge.

Murray Laurence

11