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Kathmandu Tuesday September 04, 2001 Bhadra 19, 2058.
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Defying
culture
It was strange that when Prime Minister Sher
Bahadur Deuba moved his steps for a few minutes in the plain ground of Tundikhel in the
name of the Deuda dance, it became a news story that was covered by most newspapers,
including the esteemed daily The Kathmandu Post. He was presented as if he did a landmark
job, set an example in the country suffering from thousands of illness. The picture in the
front page of your daily looked like he was acting for a movie. I want to know why that
dance of a person who had abandoned his home town years back was given so much importance.
You can’t find the real spirit of Deuda in the richly dressed Prime Minister or other
political leaders and bureaucrats who live in the sophisticated metropolis and hardly ever
remember that they are originally from the backward region, underdeveloped and
poverty/Maoist stricken far western region. They are the people who left their villages,
hills and rivers that gave them clean water and air, to loot the state coffers in the
glamour of the urban life, here. You have to go to Dadeldhura or Dukhuri and see how
people in their tatters, and naked feet make pace their parterres in the famine-threatened
dancing floor if you want to depict the Deuda dance in its heart.
What the people presented was defying the
culture of Kathmandu and showing their solidarity against the ground on which they stood.
If not, why could not the Prime Minister charter a plane and go to Dadeldhura and spent a
few hours in his own village? The Prime Minister is trying to be merely a communal by
showing his village character. If he had wanted to present himself as a national figure,
he would have participated in hundreds of the indigenous people's dances.
Urmila Lama
Kathmandu |
