FIFTH COLUMN

Fears

By C K Lal

For those left to die at Aryaghat, dogs are the best of friends. They listen to the wails with sympathy. They bark loudly to scare away crows waiting to steal morsels lying in the cup. In wintry nights, they are a warm company.

Dog is a man’s best friend. But when too many dogs start befriending him on their own, perhaps, the man is in real trouble. According to Aryaghat analogy, he may be breathing his last.

To tell you the truth, the morning I read the news that the International Red Cross is going to open an office in Nepal, I was restless all day long. IRC is a faithful rescue-dog that guards the dying in the cruel battlefields of the world. Why have they decided to come to Nepal? Do they know something that we don’t?

Soon after, as if on cue, Amnesty International also made public its report and hinted that we may be on a closer watch. For population under seize anywhere on the globe, AI is a fairly reliable watchdog, despite its well-known biases against communist regimes.

Together, these two organisations get active only when they expect something serious to happen. To add to the ominous portents, various diplomatic missions, Americans being the most prominent among them, have accelerated their ‘travel advisory’ attacks. It would be perhaps naïve to believe that all these events are coincidences.

Despite the government’s claims to the contrary, the intensity of the Maoist insurgency hasn’t decreased at all. If anything, probably it has become more wide-spread. It’s not just in the Maoist dominated areas of the middle-west that the police personnel are on the defensive, almost every where they scamper like scared hares at the first sign of slightest disturbance.

 Right in the valley, a policeman posted to guard a local FM Radio Station refuses to sleep outside at night in the beat-box, poor guy shamelessly deserts his post and sleeps with the watchmen inside the compound. Clearly, morale of the policemen is at its lowest ebb ever. The leadership, political as well as of the police itself, has failed in inspiring a force that was once said to be arguably the best in all of South Asia.

Given the apparent failure of the police in controlling the insurgency, and the abject incompetence of the political leadership in managing the crisis, do the watchdogs of the world foresee the possibility of the army stepping in on its own, without the civilian control? In that case, is Nepali democracy breathing its last? The real danger is that if the democracy breathes its last this time round, many more important things will go up in flames on its funeral pyre.

“Fear cannot be without hope, nor hope without fear,” said Spinoza. This Democracy Day, the Seventh of Falgun, as a  common citizen of this country, I want to reaffirm my hopes. Will our leaders take care of my fears?