Welcome to Nepal

The bandh today brought the streets of Kathmandu to near silence. What yesterday was a caterwaul of sound—vans, trucks, thuk-thuks, motorcycles, and pedestrians mashed against the dusty streets beneath the chaotic tangle of electrical wires-by 7:00 this morning the streets were clear of all but quiet foot traffic.

One of our major worries in traveling to the patchwork democracy of Nepal, the world’s newest republic, was that the majority party of the former Prime Minister, the Maoists, would stage a protest or worse. It has happened on our first full day here, and the questions it has provoked are also exactly why I’m here.

Rather than write too much of a description of the new government which readers can find elsewhere, I will add only so much as frames these questions.

The bandh is a shutdown, and it was declared at 5:30 Monday morning in Kathmandu in protest of an alleged political killing of a young Maoist leader; the man was discovered yesterday in a small hospital where his body, the government claims, has been unclaimed for four days. As a result, Maoist supporters protested and the police used tear gas last night to drive them back.

Nevertheless, they have erected checkpoints at intersections throughout the city to prevent traffic—including ambulances and UN convoys—from passing. Out of respect, out of fear, out of loyalty, out of acceptance—the city has complied. So have our drivers, reasonable, and we have altered our itinerary, canceling our visits both with the US Embassy and Nepal University for our formal Fulbright welcome here.

Welcome to Nepal.

Today, as we are surrounded in the hotel lobby by groups of foreigners working of development projects in Pakistan, educational grants from India, and other informal growth opportunities throughout south Asia, we questioned our speaker from NU who walked an hour to the hotel to be with us. Across the lobby is a tourist shop. Next to me is a refrigerated display of cheesecake and a smiling woman eager to sell me a slice: 100 rupees (about $1.40). The electrical power was cut from 8-10 am today, a routine of revolving electricity as the country grows faster than its infrastructure, but we have back-up generators.

What are the essential elements of democracy? I know that we teach these in civic courses, but that, I fear, is an American exercise. It took me only ten minutes of conversation to learn how much I am an American ideologue.

The Maoists—Are they determined to obstruct the next coalition government which now scarcely includes them? Are they buying political leverage against a new bid for power; are they threatening another insurgency (though the UN holds one of the keys to their arms cache)? Do the Maoist leaders hope to demonstrate their power within their destabilizing party? But does such abandh also impress or create resentment amongst the Nepalese people who lose sorely-needed business?

Perhaps none of these, for as I was reminded, instrumentality is ideology. In other words, I think of means as a tool for ends, and that is merely narrow (Western) thinking. Sometimes means and ends are the same, that form follows function. . . .

. . . that the method of democracy, the creation of voice, is formed in disparate ways across diverse cultures.

Nepal is a country in search of identity (more later), but the democracy is an experiment in trial and error, of opportunities seized and popular power tested. Today it is the bandhfor respect; tomorrow it will be someone else’s turn to be heard. And while one protestor was hospitalized in critical condition last night, no foreigners were (or have ever been) involved.

The price of testing new freedom is small, indeed. (Though the price of 13,000 lives to end the monarchy is a different story.)

Why aren’t all of the 20,000 PLA rebel fighters yet taken into the military? Is it an advance in gender rights to note that 40% of these are women? And why would a King’s Army need to remain in any event? Doesn’t this protest a King from his people rather than defend the people? Why would the UML (Leninists) do disagree with the Maoists and with the dozen other Communist parties who comprise the coalition? Is it fatalistic (a Hindu philosophy stemming from karma and dharma) to resign one’s self to injustice and a status quo of corruption?

I won’t pretend to answer here but the questions begin in me with a violence I have not encountered before. And this is when I was challenged:

As a Fulbright scholar and educator, what message can I send about what democratic discourse might look like? And to whom will I send this lesson? This is why I was chosen.

Tomorrow, it is rumored, the bandh will continue-and we will set aside our speakers to experience this lesson first-hand. Tonight we ate dinner under the dusky foothills of Everest, talking with new friends about our passion to teach, how and why we do. It was a discussion for which I have been thirsting. I had no idea how much.