Chairman Gyanendra

Gyanendra went on the air last Wednesday morning to praise himself for theprogress that Nepal has made in the year since his consolidation of power,considered unconstitutional by most legal experts. His speech -- either acomical reinterpretation of the events of the past year or a tragic anddisturbing denial, depending on the observer -- calls to mind the IraqiInformation Minister’s bold (and oft-ridiculed) denials as the US-ledcoalition marched towards Baghdad in the spring of 2003. The repression of theKing’s government and atrocities of both the Maoists and Royal Nepal Army havereached almost every corner of this country in the past year, and the account ofpeace and democracy that is settling into Nepal must have come as an insult tothose that have witnessed family members, neighbors, and friends arbitrarilydetained, beaten, and sometimes killed, as almost every Nepali has.

On the same day that Gyanendra was making this speech, the newspapers wererunning front page photos of security forces ruthlessly beating students withlaathis. As the King was pronouncing that "the nefarious designs to portrayNepal as a failed state a year back have now begun to unravel with acts ofterrorism being limited to petty crimes," four thousand Maoists were circlingthe district headquarters of Palpa for an attack that left at least elevenmembers of the security forces dead, many more injured, and twenty three,including the chief district officer, captured. One hundred and thirty eightprisoners were freed from the jail, the police and army posts were overtaken,and important government buildings, including a historical palace, were laid torubble. If that’s a petty crime, Nepal’s a good place to be a criminal.

The King’s claims that violence in Nepal is now minor and sporadic isprobably no consolation for the parents of the four year old child who wasgunned down in an air raid by the army last week. Or to Dal Bahadur Rai, mayoralcandidate for a major city, who was shot in the chest in broad daylight insidethe Kathmandu valley and remains in intensive care. Nor to the 524 people killedby the Maoists during the eight months in which they fought last year (with afourth month unilateral cease-fire that the government did not reciprocate,since, like George W Bush, the King "doesn’t negotiate with terrorists").The security forces killed 924 people during these eight months, though it’sdifficult to say how many were Maoists and how many were "suspected Maoists",ie. ordinary civilians who become Maoists after their death such as to keep theArmy’s civilian body count acceptable.

Nor will many of the families of the numerous "disappeared" persons takesolace in these remarks; they instead might point out to His Majesty that Nepalled the world for the third straight year in the number of individuals who went"missing", a rather impressive feat for a country whose small population isneighbored by the two largest head counts in the world-China and India.

Economists aren’t as confident as Gyane about theprogress their country has been making, in light of the rather significant dropin GDP growth in the past year, which has led many of them to speculate thatnegative growth is on the horizon. A report last week from the Institute forDevelopment Studies gravely described the potential for economic collapse in thenear future. That tourism, upon which the economy leans heavily, had its worstyear in the past decade is also of considerable concern. The Royal family’smultimillion dollar splurge on an African safari can’t be said to be terriblyrespectful to the ten million of His Majesty’s citizens, thirty-eight percentof the population, who live on less than a dollar a day. That amount could haveenabled a large number of them to stagger out of profound squalor anddeprivation, but the King’s family instead spent it on looking at lions andgiraffes.

Proponents of democracy might express wonder at Gyanendra’s declarationsabout the progress the country has made in terms of political freedoms, thoughtheir leaders would have trouble communicating this to you as they were allplaced under three month detention under the Public Security Act for "defyingthe government ban on demonstrations." Others have been arrested for ever lessclear offenses. Human Rights observers have been repeatedly denied requests tovisit them and check on their condition. Representative government, the sin quonon of democracy, has been abolished for more than three years now.

Despite stressing the importance of a free media in his February 1, 2005speech ("an independent press serves as the medium for raising the level ofdemocratic consciousness"), two major mainstream radio stations were raidedand shut down by security forces last year for broadcasting material, such asthe apparently radical newscast of the BBC, that was deemed a threat to thesecurity of the nation. Journalists and newspapers have faced similar fates; inthe days following the coup, many dailies printed blank op-ed pages for fear ofreprisal, which was came in the form of arrests for those who did otherwise.Sixty-four journalists were arrested on the day of the King’s speech alone andmore than five hundred reporters have been jailed in the past year.

The jails are indeed filling up quickly, as security forces arrested overfive hundred pro-democracy and human rights activists on the day of the King’sdeclaration of Nepal’s "unflinching faith" and "total commit[ment]" tohuman rights, for which his government has been "rectifying any shortcomings."The UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, Manfred Nowak, saw things a bitdifferently: "Torture [is] systematic in Nepal, practiced by police forces andthe Royal Nepalese Army. . . the incidence of human rights violation has notdecreased, disrespect for court orders and lack of response to the Maoists’unilateral ceasefire continue, obstructing the people’s desire for peace andhuman rights protection."

The international community, which had stood by theKing in the earlier days of his experiments with autocracy, is gradually backingaway. India, the UK and the EU have repeatedly condemned the regression that hastranspired over the past year. In a rare display of concern for democracy in anon-oil-rich-state by the U.S., George W. Bush excluded Gynanendra from hisannual banquet to heads of state attending the UN General Assembly in New York,causing considerable embarrassment for the King and leading him to abandon hisplans for the UN trip. All the while, Nepal continues to climb the list ofcorrupt countries, as reported by watchdog Transparency International.

In spite of these conditions, the King is pressing forward with plans formunicipal elections, which are considered farcical by the political parties, allof whom, including the Royalists, are boycotting them. For the first time in thecountry’s history, there are more seats available than candidates, with morethan half of the posts being without a candidate, leaving little choice for thevoters. Many of those who are running report being forced to do so and arehidden in army barracks, rather than campaigning, for fear of Maoist reprisal.The international community, with varying degrees of discretion and openness,has been dissuading the King from pursuing the polls, which are anticipated todrive a further wedge between the King, parties, and Maoists, destroying hopesof reconciliation.

As any casual observer can see, Nepal is not in a goodstate, contrary to Gyanendra’s claims otherwise, and I could go on for pagesabout the abuses and repression of both the government and the Maoists. Humanrights organizations, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, willdo this far more proficiently. What concerns me, and I hope is troubling to theinternational community and anyone who cares about the fate of Nepal’s 26million inhabitants, is not simply these human rights abuses and constraints onpolitical freedoms that the Nepalese civil sector is becoming increasing adeptat documenting and publicizing (and accordingly, one hopes, diminishing). I’mmore worried about that which isn’t being spoken: the social and economicrights of the rural poor, which haven’t been violated because they were neverthere. Despite the widespread recognition that the insurgency is a result of theneglect of this population (to figure it in more formal and sterile terms: theproduct of a pernicious combination of vertical and horizontal inequalities-intrasocietyeconomic stratifications, persistent caste discrimination, and, perhaps mostimportantly, a stark urban-rural economic divide), the political discourse,reproduced faithfully by the domestic media, is focused predominantly on thepolitical disputes of the elite in Kathmandu, turning its attention outside thisrelatively wealthy, urban domain only when a bomb goes off. And then onlymomentarily.

I’m nowhere near the first (and hopefully not the last) writer to insistthat elementary deprivations not be forgotten during the tussle for politicaland civil freedoms; what, then, is enabling this to happen in Nepal?

The experiences of its neighbors may shed some light. In their alreadyclassical work, Hunger and Public Action, Amartya Sen and Jean Dreze posethe question: why is it that China hosted the largest famine in history but hasmaintained otherwise low levels of malnutrition, while India’s population isplagued by persistent, high levels of malnutrition but hasn’t had alarge-scale famine since independence? The answer that they arrive at is thatChina took aggressive measures to provide for the elementary needs of the ruralpoor but suppressed the media and other forms of dissent, which enabled famineto develop unchecked by popular uproar, whereas India has a vibrant civilsociety and media who serve as an early warning system for acute hunger crises,but who cast less attention over chronic deprivation.

Nepal, sandwiched in between these countries, appears not to have learned thelessons of either and instead adopted the worst traits of both.

Gyanendra’s delusions and illusions recall those ofMao’s government, whose denial of local food shortages led China to exportfoodgrains as the largest famine in recorded history unfolded. His plan torestore peace and democracy, which he assures the country will be accomplishedin three years, is likewise reminiscent of the promised "great leap forward".Like Mao’s government, Gyanendra’s coterie claims to be acting in the nameof the people while devoting most of its energy to suppressing all vestiges ofdissent.

Unlike pre-reform communist China, however, the Nepalese government, wellbefore Gyanendra took the reins, chose to pursue liberalization and monetariststrategies while neglecting to build a strong infrastructure for socialservices, which as many development experts have now recognized, left the ruralpoor behind. In this sense, Nepal followed India, and most of its developmentstatistics accordingly mirror (with a slight lag) its southern neighbor.

The UN Economic and Social Survey of Asia and the Pacific describes thesecircumstances: "Nepal has placed reliance on private-sector development andmarket-oriented reforms… on the one hand, a modern urban sector based onorganized industry, trade and services are gaining ground and on the other, themajority of people living in the rural sector are eking out a meager existencewithout access to the minimum services and facilities."

Nepalese economist and development planner Kishor Kumar Guru-Gharanasummarizes things even more pointedly:

"The experience of Nepal for more than a decade is that SAP [structuraladjustment programmes] and liberalization are urban-biased, modern-sector biasedand anti-rural, anti-poor, anti-agriculture, and anti-traditional sectors."

The reduction in poverty that did occur between the last two head counts (thevalidity of which is questioned openly by economists) has been attributed, evenby the World Bank, to conflict-induced migration and foreign remittances.Consequences for the health sector have been particularly harsh. Outside ofKathmandu, there is one doctor for every 150,000 people, one of the worst ratiosof any place in the world. Even this figure is misleading, as many doctorsstationed outside of urban centers are rarely at their posts. Only 11% ofchildbirths are attended by trained health personnel, which puts Nepal aboveonly Ethiopia in this measure. Infant and child mortality rates are likewisehigh; if Nepal were to attain the same rate of child mortality as Sri Lanka,more lives would be saved every year than have been lost in the ten years of theMaoist conflict.

Military expenditure, as a fraction of the GDP, more than tripled from 1990to 2005, while proportionate expenditure on health remained constant and low, alittle over a third of that spent on defense. The government currently spends$96 million a year on health, which comes out to be approximately $4 per person,far less than the $11 minimum recommended by the World Health Organization for abasic package of care. This spending, too, is plagued by an urban bias. Thegovernment continues to depend heavily on foreign aid and internationalnongovernmental organizations, whose services, again, are concentrated largelyin the Kathmandu valley and a handful of other major cities.

The media-somewhere between that of China and India, alternately censored andpreoccupied with the political crisis-is scarcely reporting the decline of therural health infrastructure, its attention captured more by the sensationalevents-strikes, arrests, curfews and killings. This week’s announcement of anew ordinance aimed at "disciplining" the media, further institutionalizingrepression, won’t make matters much better. Meanwhile, the political parties,more concerned with their prospects for return to power, rarely make an issuethese days of the plight of the poor.

Caught between a delusional and neglectful government and a preoccupied civilsociety and media, the rural poor seem relegated to continue shouldering theoverwhelming burden of deprivation from this conflict. And to do so untended to,unnoticed. A colleague of mine, seizing upon a term no doubt thrown aroundfreely among Nepalese educational institutions and academic circles, is fond ofreferring to the rural poor as "the voiceless ones", no doubt with liberalgood intentions. Every time he writes this phrase, I can’t help but recallArundhati Roy’s perspicacious remark: "We know of course there's really nosuch thing as the 'voiceless'. There are only the deliberately silenced, or thepreferably unheard."

In Mao’s China, they were deliberately silenced during the famine. InIndia, they have been preferably unheard, even after Independence. In Nepal,now, they suffer both.

Jason Andrews is with Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven,Connecticut, USA and SPARSHA Nepal, Kathmandu, Nepal