The dawn chorus in Kathmandu is unique. Himalayan birds have a high, pure melodic song, still beautifully evident, even omnipresent, particularly at sunrise. But their delightful sound is being elbowed aside by the caw caw of large black crows. According to Nepalis they are blow-ins from India, like so many other unwelcome things. In the distance the sound of metal on metal could be a temple bell, or a hammer on an anvil. It’s probably a temple, because you can also hear the Tibetan-style chanting now and again. A Bollywood song floats across the fields from someone’s transistor radio. But above all this chaotic but gentle near-harmony rises an atonal symphony of dogs barking. Big and small, some bark in loud, deep staccato bursts, others snap in a rapid-fire high pitch; some issue protracted howls. One responds to another, sensing some atavistic threat or possibility. Inaudible are the sighs of the stirring, turning and waking people as the frequency and volume of dogs barking rises to a frenzied crescendo. It’s too early to get out of bed.
Once you do get out of the bed, get dressed, leave the house and get out on the street, the shops are open. Children in smart matching uniforms, hair parted and plastered down with water or oil, are off to school. People go to work on motorbikes or wait for a bus. Hailing a taxi is a vain hope. They are all stationary in endless queues for petrol stretching hundreds of yards; dirty white small Maruti Suzukis (not dissimilar to the short-lived British Mini Metro) wait patiently in line. The drivers are nowhere near the cars because the queue isn’t moving. They have disappeared for a cup of tea. Some have appointed children as watchmen. In the unlikely event of the queue moving, the children scamper off to find the driver, but there is no hurry. Progress is made in yards over hours. Or perhaps there is no petrol at all and the wait will be entirely futile.
Indian Oil supplies all Nepal’s oil, like its crows, from India. It is paid for by the Nepali government. The Government then sells it on at the pump at a subsidised price. World oil prices are now as high as they have ever been - $82 a barrel and still rising for the time being. The wholesale price rises and the retail price stays fixed, so the payment by the Nepali government to Indian Oil simply continues to rise, or to be more exact the Nepali Government’s debt to Indian Oil continues to rise. The Government cannot afford the repayments and Indian Oil have run out of patience, cutting off credit and petrol supplies. The Government is reluctant to increase the price at the pump for fear of a citizens’ revolt. Perhaps their fears are justified. Although the Nepali petrol shortage started some time ago, it was a Government-imposed petrol price increase that resulted in the monks taking to the streets in Burma. Events in Burma will not have encouraged the Government to increase petrol prices – and so the shortage simply continues with no end in sight.
In the UK taxi drivers have opinions about everything and are treated by journalists and politicians as having a Delphic connection to ‘what’s really going on’. In many poorer countries servants play that oracular role. Reality as experienced by most ordinary people only intrudes on the sequestered life of the elite when the servant tells them of some disaster or depredation in their life or in the life of their family. These tales almost always feature unconscionable hardship for someone close to the servant. So the servant of a friend in Nepal reported that her husband, a taxi driver, had defaulted on the bank loan he had taken to buy the taxi as a result of the petrol shortage. The car had been repossessed; the repayments he had already made counted for nought. He was now unemployed and without savings. The family now relies on the maid’s wages.
But the traffic situation was to get much worse as the day wore on. By lunch time news was starting to filter out from a meeting between the Prime Minister and the two Maoist leaders, Prachanda and Bhattarya, that they had not reached an agreement about the Maoist demand that a republic be declared and the King removed from all constitutional roles forthwith before elections to a constituent assembly which had been agreed in a UN-brokered ceasefire. The Maoists had indicated that without the declaration of a republic they would leave the seven-party Government and that would put the elections scheduled for November in jeopardy. Almost everyone agreed about the Maoists true motives for withdrawing from the Government. They had recognised that they were not going to do well at the ballot box, perhaps reduced to eight or ten per cent of the vote so they were keen to find an excuse to delay the election. Sure enough, no deal was reached to continue with the Government and a rally was called for a sports field in central Kathmandu where Bhattarya was to announce the Maoist programme of action to bring about a republic.
Notwithstanding the Maoists tactics one can understand the growth of Republican sentiment in Nepal. The Nepali royal family has a particularly colourful recent history that would make most other royal families blanch, even those with the most bloodthirsty pasts. In 2001 a psychopathic Crown Prince committed regicide, murdering the King, his mother, several other members of the Royal Family and, finally, himself. An uncle of the dead king was quickly found to replace him, King Gyanendra. The previous Kings, while not exactly having the superstar reforming status of Spain’s Juan Carlos, had more or less kept Nepali politics in one piece. In particular they had succeeded in keeping the Nepali army in their barracks, except where they were fighting the Maoist insurgency in rural areas. This the military had done in a dirty, oppressive and not very effective way. By the standards of say Latin America in the 1980s, this war was nevertheless a pretty mild affair. About 13000 people are said to have died in the State’s war with the Maoists, but this sounds like a very unreliable statistic.
The new King Gyanendra had pretty quickly tired of his (admittedly ineffectual) Governments and sacked the Prime Minister, executing a kind of a constitutional coup in 2005 with the lukewarm support of some of the army. That situation had only been prevented from sliding into dictatorship by the intervention of the international community, particularly India, who had its own insurgent problems across the border in Bihar. A peace process was established and, one way and another, the Maoists were persuaded to abandon their uprising and join a seven party Government. In reality the Government’s seven parties divide into three factions: the monarchists sympathetic to the military; a broad left republican movement and the Maoists. Plans were put in place, hugger mugger, for a new constitution and elections. All that came to a juddering halt this afternoon.
The Maoists reckon that the monarchy is extremely unpopular and calls for a republic are likely to make them popular with the electorate. They’re probably right about the unpopularity of the Monarchy. Not only has the King displayed unappealing tendencies towards authoritarianism and incompetence, the Crown Prince Paras is also a pretty unattractive prospect. Exceedingly overweight, he also has a reputation for hard drinking, womanising and a generally dissolute lifestyle. He recently had a heart attack at a relatively young age and, according to one of the heart surgeons, was smoking in his hospital bed whilst still coming round from the anaesthetic. Not a nice guy.
The belief that the unpopularity of the Monarchy would make them more popular stands on less sure foundations. The original intention was that the Constituent Assembly, once elected, would decide the fate of the Monarchy, perhaps through a plebiscite of some kind. Calling for a republic now gives them casus belli for further agitation in the streets, villages and towns that would lead to the cancellation of the elections. Their real motives for wanting the elections cancelled is that their polling suggests that they would only get about 10 per cent of the vote and that would leave them in a weak position to join a new Government. This has come to a shock to the Maoists. Perhaps they believed their own PR: that they ‘controlled’ 80 per cent of the country. Nearer the truth is that they had the run of 80 per cent of the country and in some areas where traditional administration had more or less collapsed, they had established some rudimentary local administration along with rough and summary justice, no doubt with considerable emphasis on protection and racketeering.
Again the experience of servants provides a small insight into what’s really going on. An expat was unhappy with her maid and wanted to be rid of her. So she sacked her; not an unusual event. The servant was mightily disgruntled and reported the matter to the local Maoists, who visited the erstwhile employer and demanded compensation. After much discussion and some mild threats, modest compensation was paid, not to the Maoists, but to the servant. Whether a proportion passed to the Maoists is a matter of speculation, but maybe they nevertheless did the lady some good, by fair means and foul. Allegations of skulduggery abound.
The Maoist rally to announce their programme of action was held on a sports field in the centre of Kathmandu. The prospect of the rally pretty soon brought traffic, which rarely flows smoothly through narrow, pot-holed lanes, to a standstill. Occasionally a bus from a rural area would cut its way through the streets full of young people, including those packed on the roof. The horn blared and the people on the roof waved large red flags with hammers and sickles. Many wore combat fatigues and red bandanas emulating Che Guevara chic. Others wore red and blue tracksuits with Y.C.L on their backs: Young Communist League. On the sports fields there was a large passive crowd, mostly standing around, many clearly from rural areas, mostly young. Some stood with their back to the stage, others read newspapers and most looked bored, but mildly apprehensive. The only cheering or clapping came from people at the front near the stage, usually at the mention of Washington or Iraq. Over the stage a large sign had been erected calling for the immediate declaration of a republic. Many people milled about the stage and to one side was a lectern with a hammer and sickle flag planted on it. Prachandra, the boss of the Maoists, had cried off attending the rally through ill-health and Bhattarya was making a long speech lacking much animation, in the familiar prolix style of Leftist leaders, who generally do not regard brevity as the soul of wit. Nor do they have to worry too much about the intimate scrutiny of a television camera. Long-windedness is not a problem.
Bhattarya promised that they would go from house to house seeking support for their call for a republic. They would organise rallies and demonstrations. He stopped short of saying that the Maoists would ‘return to the jungle’ calling out their cadres from the camps where they had been more or less harmlessly installed since the peace process. There is widespread scepticism about the extent that the Maoists had given up their weapons and a ready supply of more guns is available over the border in India, where the Maoists move freely without official obstruction. Presumably they could resume the armed struggle, but, for the time being, they are not going to.
India’s role in all this is complex and contradictory. One often-recycled rumour is that Chou En lai and Nehru did a deal many years ago. China could have Tibet and India would control Nepal. China duly took over Tibet but when India sought to exert its own expansionist territorial claims in 1962, the Chinese sent nearly a million PLA troops over the Himalayas and India was swiftly put in its place. That story is so neat that it is almost certainly apocryphal.
The source of all this tamasha in Nepali politics is increasingly obscure. What everyone wanted and what they want now is more or less lost in confusion. Peace seems far away and economic prospects are very poor. Tourism is still moderately busy, but mostly of the low return backpacking variety, and very susceptible to a crash in confidence. (Neighbouring Bhutan is doing very well at attracting the high net worth crowd, like Mick Jagger and Sting, and they don’t come much higher net worth than them. If you go to Bhutan you are required to spend a minimum of US$200 a day.) Handicrafts are not well organised and exports are minimal, logging is extensive and mostly illegal, even though Nepalis have done groundbreaking work in the past on forestry governance. Long-term investment is negligible. Hydroelectric power generated in the Himalayas to be sold to power-hungry India, though a long-cherished ambition, is for the moment a pipedream.
Because of the Maoist rally many of the tourist sites in Kathmandu’s wonderful Durbar Square were relatively deserted, at least as far as foreigners were concerned. The locals went about their business as usual. The only Sanskrit University in Nepal carries on. Hindu and Buddhist temples made from red brick and beautiful, carved wood, stand side by side in religious and architectural harmony. Some are festooned with colourful bunting. On the steps courting couple sit talking quietly, or just looking at each other. Inside, worshippers light incense and walk along wooden balconies rotating prayer wheels. Someone rings the temple bell, chanting their prayers sotto voce. In the Hindu temples you can buy the prashad. The blessed temple sweets made from condensed milk and sugar.
One temple in Durbar Square is the temple of the Kumari, the child Goddess. Priests choose a girl destined for this role early in her life and she leaves her family and lives on an upper floor of the temple. There she remains until puberty. Occasionally she appears at the window and will, in some circumstances, bless a visitor. Whilst we were there the current Kumari did appear at the window. A full-faced girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old (and therefore nearing the end of her tenure), olive-skinned and heavily made up, her eyes blackened and pointing upwards like an Indian dancer, wearing a surly, bored, unhappy expression appeared for a few seconds, her face filling the carved wooden window like a framed portrait. As quickly as she appeared, she vanished again. Visitors were instructed not to take photos and to put some money into a box for her ‘private tuition’.
The Kumari, despite her divine status, is being drawn into Nepal’s current political tribulations. King Gyanendra has said that he is going to leave his palace and go to the Kumari’s temple to seek her blessing. This was interpreted in the media as a way of currying favour with the more conservative rural citizens of Nepal who still revere the Kumari and the idea of living deities. As a result they would be reluctant, it was believed, to vote for the extinction of an institution and its office holder whom the Kumari had blessed. The Prime Minister evidently took this threat seriously because he was quick to publicly denounce the King’s ‘irresponsible behaviour’. More no doubt anon.
At the end of the Maoist rally towards dusk, the YCL cadres took once more to their buses and, horns blaring, flags waving, left Kathmandu. Rumours were that each participant was paid about 200 rupees to attend, about £1.30. Most people cancelled their evening arrangements and stayed at home and so, after dark, the streets were quiet, the shops were shuttered and the only people on the streets, other than us, were a group of brightly made up transvestite prostitutes, mourning the poor business, hoping that we might offer a little relief, or perhaps they might offer us some.
Once you do get out of the bed, get dressed, leave the house and get out on the street, the shops are open. Children in smart matching uniforms, hair parted and plastered down with water or oil, are off to school. People go to work on motorbikes or wait for a bus. Hailing a taxi is a vain hope. They are all stationary in endless queues for petrol stretching hundreds of yards; dirty white small Maruti Suzukis (not dissimilar to the short-lived British Mini Metro) wait patiently in line. The drivers are nowhere near the cars because the queue isn’t moving. They have disappeared for a cup of tea. Some have appointed children as watchmen. In the unlikely event of the queue moving, the children scamper off to find the driver, but there is no hurry. Progress is made in yards over hours. Or perhaps there is no petrol at all and the wait will be entirely futile.
Indian Oil supplies all Nepal’s oil, like its crows, from India. It is paid for by the Nepali government. The Government then sells it on at the pump at a subsidised price. World oil prices are now as high as they have ever been - $82 a barrel and still rising for the time being. The wholesale price rises and the retail price stays fixed, so the payment by the Nepali government to Indian Oil simply continues to rise, or to be more exact the Nepali Government’s debt to Indian Oil continues to rise. The Government cannot afford the repayments and Indian Oil have run out of patience, cutting off credit and petrol supplies. The Government is reluctant to increase the price at the pump for fear of a citizens’ revolt. Perhaps their fears are justified. Although the Nepali petrol shortage started some time ago, it was a Government-imposed petrol price increase that resulted in the monks taking to the streets in Burma. Events in Burma will not have encouraged the Government to increase petrol prices – and so the shortage simply continues with no end in sight.
In the UK taxi drivers have opinions about everything and are treated by journalists and politicians as having a Delphic connection to ‘what’s really going on’. In many poorer countries servants play that oracular role. Reality as experienced by most ordinary people only intrudes on the sequestered life of the elite when the servant tells them of some disaster or depredation in their life or in the life of their family. These tales almost always feature unconscionable hardship for someone close to the servant. So the servant of a friend in Nepal reported that her husband, a taxi driver, had defaulted on the bank loan he had taken to buy the taxi as a result of the petrol shortage. The car had been repossessed; the repayments he had already made counted for nought. He was now unemployed and without savings. The family now relies on the maid’s wages.
But the traffic situation was to get much worse as the day wore on. By lunch time news was starting to filter out from a meeting between the Prime Minister and the two Maoist leaders, Prachanda and Bhattarya, that they had not reached an agreement about the Maoist demand that a republic be declared and the King removed from all constitutional roles forthwith before elections to a constituent assembly which had been agreed in a UN-brokered ceasefire. The Maoists had indicated that without the declaration of a republic they would leave the seven-party Government and that would put the elections scheduled for November in jeopardy. Almost everyone agreed about the Maoists true motives for withdrawing from the Government. They had recognised that they were not going to do well at the ballot box, perhaps reduced to eight or ten per cent of the vote so they were keen to find an excuse to delay the election. Sure enough, no deal was reached to continue with the Government and a rally was called for a sports field in central Kathmandu where Bhattarya was to announce the Maoist programme of action to bring about a republic.
Notwithstanding the Maoists tactics one can understand the growth of Republican sentiment in Nepal. The Nepali royal family has a particularly colourful recent history that would make most other royal families blanch, even those with the most bloodthirsty pasts. In 2001 a psychopathic Crown Prince committed regicide, murdering the King, his mother, several other members of the Royal Family and, finally, himself. An uncle of the dead king was quickly found to replace him, King Gyanendra. The previous Kings, while not exactly having the superstar reforming status of Spain’s Juan Carlos, had more or less kept Nepali politics in one piece. In particular they had succeeded in keeping the Nepali army in their barracks, except where they were fighting the Maoist insurgency in rural areas. This the military had done in a dirty, oppressive and not very effective way. By the standards of say Latin America in the 1980s, this war was nevertheless a pretty mild affair. About 13000 people are said to have died in the State’s war with the Maoists, but this sounds like a very unreliable statistic.
The new King Gyanendra had pretty quickly tired of his (admittedly ineffectual) Governments and sacked the Prime Minister, executing a kind of a constitutional coup in 2005 with the lukewarm support of some of the army. That situation had only been prevented from sliding into dictatorship by the intervention of the international community, particularly India, who had its own insurgent problems across the border in Bihar. A peace process was established and, one way and another, the Maoists were persuaded to abandon their uprising and join a seven party Government. In reality the Government’s seven parties divide into three factions: the monarchists sympathetic to the military; a broad left republican movement and the Maoists. Plans were put in place, hugger mugger, for a new constitution and elections. All that came to a juddering halt this afternoon.
The Maoists reckon that the monarchy is extremely unpopular and calls for a republic are likely to make them popular with the electorate. They’re probably right about the unpopularity of the Monarchy. Not only has the King displayed unappealing tendencies towards authoritarianism and incompetence, the Crown Prince Paras is also a pretty unattractive prospect. Exceedingly overweight, he also has a reputation for hard drinking, womanising and a generally dissolute lifestyle. He recently had a heart attack at a relatively young age and, according to one of the heart surgeons, was smoking in his hospital bed whilst still coming round from the anaesthetic. Not a nice guy.
The belief that the unpopularity of the Monarchy would make them more popular stands on less sure foundations. The original intention was that the Constituent Assembly, once elected, would decide the fate of the Monarchy, perhaps through a plebiscite of some kind. Calling for a republic now gives them casus belli for further agitation in the streets, villages and towns that would lead to the cancellation of the elections. Their real motives for wanting the elections cancelled is that their polling suggests that they would only get about 10 per cent of the vote and that would leave them in a weak position to join a new Government. This has come to a shock to the Maoists. Perhaps they believed their own PR: that they ‘controlled’ 80 per cent of the country. Nearer the truth is that they had the run of 80 per cent of the country and in some areas where traditional administration had more or less collapsed, they had established some rudimentary local administration along with rough and summary justice, no doubt with considerable emphasis on protection and racketeering.
Again the experience of servants provides a small insight into what’s really going on. An expat was unhappy with her maid and wanted to be rid of her. So she sacked her; not an unusual event. The servant was mightily disgruntled and reported the matter to the local Maoists, who visited the erstwhile employer and demanded compensation. After much discussion and some mild threats, modest compensation was paid, not to the Maoists, but to the servant. Whether a proportion passed to the Maoists is a matter of speculation, but maybe they nevertheless did the lady some good, by fair means and foul. Allegations of skulduggery abound.
The Maoist rally to announce their programme of action was held on a sports field in the centre of Kathmandu. The prospect of the rally pretty soon brought traffic, which rarely flows smoothly through narrow, pot-holed lanes, to a standstill. Occasionally a bus from a rural area would cut its way through the streets full of young people, including those packed on the roof. The horn blared and the people on the roof waved large red flags with hammers and sickles. Many wore combat fatigues and red bandanas emulating Che Guevara chic. Others wore red and blue tracksuits with Y.C.L on their backs: Young Communist League. On the sports fields there was a large passive crowd, mostly standing around, many clearly from rural areas, mostly young. Some stood with their back to the stage, others read newspapers and most looked bored, but mildly apprehensive. The only cheering or clapping came from people at the front near the stage, usually at the mention of Washington or Iraq. Over the stage a large sign had been erected calling for the immediate declaration of a republic. Many people milled about the stage and to one side was a lectern with a hammer and sickle flag planted on it. Prachandra, the boss of the Maoists, had cried off attending the rally through ill-health and Bhattarya was making a long speech lacking much animation, in the familiar prolix style of Leftist leaders, who generally do not regard brevity as the soul of wit. Nor do they have to worry too much about the intimate scrutiny of a television camera. Long-windedness is not a problem.
Bhattarya promised that they would go from house to house seeking support for their call for a republic. They would organise rallies and demonstrations. He stopped short of saying that the Maoists would ‘return to the jungle’ calling out their cadres from the camps where they had been more or less harmlessly installed since the peace process. There is widespread scepticism about the extent that the Maoists had given up their weapons and a ready supply of more guns is available over the border in India, where the Maoists move freely without official obstruction. Presumably they could resume the armed struggle, but, for the time being, they are not going to.
India’s role in all this is complex and contradictory. One often-recycled rumour is that Chou En lai and Nehru did a deal many years ago. China could have Tibet and India would control Nepal. China duly took over Tibet but when India sought to exert its own expansionist territorial claims in 1962, the Chinese sent nearly a million PLA troops over the Himalayas and India was swiftly put in its place. That story is so neat that it is almost certainly apocryphal.
The source of all this tamasha in Nepali politics is increasingly obscure. What everyone wanted and what they want now is more or less lost in confusion. Peace seems far away and economic prospects are very poor. Tourism is still moderately busy, but mostly of the low return backpacking variety, and very susceptible to a crash in confidence. (Neighbouring Bhutan is doing very well at attracting the high net worth crowd, like Mick Jagger and Sting, and they don’t come much higher net worth than them. If you go to Bhutan you are required to spend a minimum of US$200 a day.) Handicrafts are not well organised and exports are minimal, logging is extensive and mostly illegal, even though Nepalis have done groundbreaking work in the past on forestry governance. Long-term investment is negligible. Hydroelectric power generated in the Himalayas to be sold to power-hungry India, though a long-cherished ambition, is for the moment a pipedream.
Because of the Maoist rally many of the tourist sites in Kathmandu’s wonderful Durbar Square were relatively deserted, at least as far as foreigners were concerned. The locals went about their business as usual. The only Sanskrit University in Nepal carries on. Hindu and Buddhist temples made from red brick and beautiful, carved wood, stand side by side in religious and architectural harmony. Some are festooned with colourful bunting. On the steps courting couple sit talking quietly, or just looking at each other. Inside, worshippers light incense and walk along wooden balconies rotating prayer wheels. Someone rings the temple bell, chanting their prayers sotto voce. In the Hindu temples you can buy the prashad. The blessed temple sweets made from condensed milk and sugar.
One temple in Durbar Square is the temple of the Kumari, the child Goddess. Priests choose a girl destined for this role early in her life and she leaves her family and lives on an upper floor of the temple. There she remains until puberty. Occasionally she appears at the window and will, in some circumstances, bless a visitor. Whilst we were there the current Kumari did appear at the window. A full-faced girl, perhaps ten or eleven years old (and therefore nearing the end of her tenure), olive-skinned and heavily made up, her eyes blackened and pointing upwards like an Indian dancer, wearing a surly, bored, unhappy expression appeared for a few seconds, her face filling the carved wooden window like a framed portrait. As quickly as she appeared, she vanished again. Visitors were instructed not to take photos and to put some money into a box for her ‘private tuition’.
The Kumari, despite her divine status, is being drawn into Nepal’s current political tribulations. King Gyanendra has said that he is going to leave his palace and go to the Kumari’s temple to seek her blessing. This was interpreted in the media as a way of currying favour with the more conservative rural citizens of Nepal who still revere the Kumari and the idea of living deities. As a result they would be reluctant, it was believed, to vote for the extinction of an institution and its office holder whom the Kumari had blessed. The Prime Minister evidently took this threat seriously because he was quick to publicly denounce the King’s ‘irresponsible behaviour’. More no doubt anon.
At the end of the Maoist rally towards dusk, the YCL cadres took once more to their buses and, horns blaring, flags waving, left Kathmandu. Rumours were that each participant was paid about 200 rupees to attend, about £1.30. Most people cancelled their evening arrangements and stayed at home and so, after dark, the streets were quiet, the shops were shuttered and the only people on the streets, other than us, were a group of brightly made up transvestite prostitutes, mourning the poor business, hoping that we might offer a little relief, or perhaps they might offer us some.
see the photos of Nepal at www.flickr.com/photos/gerardlemos/sets
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