All the prime minister’s men
Nepali Times brings you the behind-the-scenes people that run Girija Prasad Koirala’s office.

If he had followed in his forefathers’ footsteps Hari Sharma would probably be chanting mantras for the British Gurkhas somewhere in the UK. Deciding not to was probably a smart move for Hari, who, as Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister, is today one of the most powerful people in Nepal. Together with Puranjan Acharya, Political Secretary, and Gokarna Poudel, Personal Secretary, he forms the team that Girija Prasad Koirala relies on to run the country from day to day. The fact that they are all men, and all Bahun may also be important, and reflects this country’s governance structure.

Hari and Gokarna are first cousins, although their attachment to Koirala’s office came about in different ways and at different times. They are both from Gulmi district, Hari from what he calls a “100 percent Gurkha” village of Juhang, and Gokarna from Bhurtung village. Puranjan is from Madhumara, in Koirala’s home district of Morang.

Hari was brought up and raised in Hong Kong, where his father was the battalion purohit for the British Gurkhas. “I’m the one who did not carry out what had become a family tradition of joining the army,” he says. A brilliant student, Hari ranked fourth nationwide in the School Leaving Certificate (SLC) examination of 1978. A chance encounter with noted Indian scholar Bhabani Sengupta in a Kathmandu street in 1984 was to have a profound impact on his life. “I had read his articles in Indian magazines and I introduced myself to him,” he says. Sengupta later became Hari’s mentor as they worked together on several projects at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR), the New Delhi think-tank.

It was while he was at CPR that Chakra Prasad Bastola, now foreign minister, and Jaya Prakash Prasad Gupta, the present communication minister and then the PM’s press adviser, suggested that he come home to assist Koirala who had just begun his first stint as prime minister. Hari was only 26 years old when he joined the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) in 1991.

“I helped set up his first real office, providing him all secretarial assistance needed,” says Hari. When Koirala was voted out of office in the November 1994 elections, Hari went for further studies to the US as a Fulbright fellow.

Hari’s official tasks now include just about everything from overseeing the PMO and briefing the PM on any issue that comes his way. He also works out the cabinet agenda together with the chief secretary, and serves as a channel through which government secretaries can communicate with the country’s chief executive. Needless to say, Hari is also the Prime Minister’s eye and ears on foreign affairs, which happens to be his subject of interest.

Gokarna landed his job with Koirala when he was just finishing college, courtesy cousin Hari and Gupta. He was in the mid-20s when he joined the PMO nine years ago and has been with Koirala ever since. Congress insiders call Gokarna a Khum Bahadur Khadka protégé but such labels don’t bother him. “Others can say whatever they want,” he says, adding that his one and only guru is Koirala.

The prime minister is at work early at his official Baluwatar residence, out of bed by four o’clock. After a couple of glasses of tea, he begins his workday meeting politicians from outside the Valley at about seven. His official programme is fixed at least a day in advance, and the evenings are kept aside for meeting government secretaries, ministers and opposition leaders. All  appointments are handled by Gokarna, who also updates Koirala on the law and order situation.

Puranjan was working as a programme officer with Plan International in east Nepal before joining Koirala in 1995 (when the UML was in power), and has been with him both in and out of government. He has a powerful mentor in Nona Koirala, Koirala’s sister-in-law who is said to wield much influence in both party and government. But he hastens to add, “I’ve also been inspired by B.P. Koirala and the Prime Minister himself.”

Puranjan serves as the Prime Minister’s link with the party, and the opposition, and advises him on development policy and economic affairs. His task also involves scanning questions raised in parliament and outside and preparing answers after consulting concerned officials and ministers. All party, parliament and development related issues pass though his desk.

Puranjan spends many evenings discussing politics and policy with key ministers and academics at Baluwatar. His favourite readings include At the Centre of Whitehall by J.M. Lee, G.W. Jones and June Burnham, a treatise on advising the Prime Minister and the cabinet. “Many people come to this office with issues that the state mechanism should have addressed as a natural process,” he says. “My lesson working here is that unless the delivery of state services take place on their own, it will be difficult to the people to internalise democracy.”

Being close to the source of power has its benefits, especially in a society that worships anyone with authority. Hari has a rank equivalent to a minister of state and the other two are of the same level as government secretaries. But the trio have clout similar to what the three royal palace secretaries used to have during the Panchayat era. All three, therefore, also have their own share of followers and hangers-on—people seeking favours for jobs, promotions, transfers, etc.

“Many political leaders still believe the PMO is a place where you can get everything done. Here we get fariads (petitions) on every thing from buffalo thefts to job applications and all sorts of development projects,” says Hari. “We are satellites and can only glow in the light reflected by the leader. I prefer to call myself a conveyor belt to the prime minister.”

Besides his private office assistants and the official support he gets from the Cabinet Secretariat, Koirala also has what can be called an informal, kane-khusi (whisper) network of advisers who are not accountable to anyone. These include members of his family and some ministers who consider themselves close to the prime minister.

Both Puranjan (40) and Gokarna (33) don’t hide the fact that they have political ambitions. That their jobs allow them to observe at close range the conduct of state affairs and the management of a party that has often been paralysed by internal dissent is a bonus.

“Anyone in politics has ambitions, I am now rehearsing,” says Gokarna. “One important lesson I have learnt working here is how to respond to a public that has varied demands.”

Coming from a district that perhaps has more leaders per capita than others, Puranjan knows the road ahead will be tough: “Tomorrow’s politics will be tougher, more competitive. Yes, this experience can help.”

Hari’s interest in politics is only academic. Every time Koirala relinquishes office, he heads back to his den at the Centre of Nepal and Asian Studies (CNAS) and his pet pursuits: analysis of discourse on democracy and dissent, and teaching.

“I have my own small world,” says Hari. And that is made up of his family, a personal library with more than 5,000 books and journals and a classical music collection of over 500 tapes and CDs.

Hari doesn’t hang around Baluwatar more than he has to. Puranjan and Gokarna, however, shadow Koirala from dawn to dusk. On some evenings they sit down with the Prime Minister—when he settles with a cigarette and a glass (not cup) of tea to discuss another eventful day in the life of the prime minister. (Upload date: August 24/00)

STATE OF THE STATE by CK Lal 
The party is over

Many of you will remember the Panchayat-era textbook that had the chapter “Reasons for the failure of the party system in Nepal”. The mess in the political parties these days makes one wonder if there was some truth in the “reasons” manufactured by Panchayat ideologues.

The Nepali Congress was at the forefront of the struggle against the “Partyless Panchayat Democracy”. Voters gave it an absolute majority in the parliament elected after the new Constitution came into force. But the party literally threw it away when, in 1993, the prime minister was forced by his fellow MPs into going for a mid-term poll when they defied the party whip and abstained from a crucial vote in the House. The Nepali Congress exhibited its well-known knack for extracting defeat from the jaws of victory.

And it never did learn any lessons. All erring lawmakers were nominated again. The party’s whip in the new parliament was even given to the very person who had led those into defying it in the earlier one. The issue within the Nepali Congress has never been one of institutionalisation, but of massaging the egos of sulking stalwarts. The fault-line in the Nepali Congress is so deep that it actually behaves like two parties. K.P. Bhattarai and G.P. Koirala have to hold regular summits to bring the party back from the brink of a formal split.

The Communist Party of Nepal (UML), the main opposition in the parliament, is in no better shape. Showing more discipline, their factional leaders do not squabble in public, but they can’t help taking a dig at each other in public through their respective mouthpieces.

Maybe the reason for the relatively muted wrangling within the UML is that the party has already split once after 1990, with the ML breaking away last year. Even though the ML faction failed to get a single seat in the parliament, it controls powerful local government units, including the Kathmandu Metropolitan Council.

The less said about other sundry leftist political parties the better. They are the private turfs of their leaders. For example, Nepal Workers’ and Peasants’ Party (NWPP) is little more than a front for the political ambitions of Bhaktapur strongman Narayan Man Bijukchhe, better known by his nom de guerre, Comrade Rohit.

Then there are the parties chiselled out of the Panchayat mould, and they seem  reluctant to part with what they see as their historical glory. Leaders who spent lifetimes practising partyless politics, when all they had to worry about was not losing palace patronage, just don’t have the killer instinct to thrive in the cut-throat world of Nepali democracy.

It’s too early to be judgemental, but they seem to be learning all the wrong lessons from the Congress and the Left. And one lesson they have learnt well is how to form factions and split the party. Groupism inside the Rastriya Prajatantra Party and the Nepal Sadbhavana Party tend to get even more destructive than in the Nepali Congress or the UML.

One has to wonder: is this a national trait? Can’t Nepalis ever work together?  Looking at the affairs of political parties in Nepal, it’s hard to believe that they are comprised of the very same people who struggled so hard and for so long for democracy. Many of them went straight from jail to be sworn in as ministers. Just look at them now.

It’s still not too late to institutionalise political parties. Even the unrecognisably  diluted “Political Parties Bill” passed by the Lower House of the parliament before it adjourned last week offers some scope for change. However, the first step must be to free parties from the stranglehold of ambitious leaders who consider contesting organisational elections an insult to their long years of sacrifice. Pious intentions are not enough, parties now need rules to govern their behaviour through institutional reform.

After India gained freedom, Mahatma Gandhi suggested that the Indian National Congress be disbanded. Perhaps he did not want its proud legacy of the independence struggle to be wasted. Maybe it’s time for Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) to think in really radical terms as well. After all, politicians from the two parties do seem to get along better with each other than with rivals within their own parties. And they did work well together during the interim government when the memory of struggle was fresh.

But public memory is notoriously short. And if anything can stop a King Mahendra from emerging again, it can only be institutionally resilient and ideologically unambiguous political parties. If the present mess gets messier, if those who fought for democracy continue to squander it, then another generation of Nepalis may once again be forced to mug up textbooks with chapters like “Reasons for the failure of the party system in Nepal”. (Upload date: August 24/00)

Damning Nepal
Nepal is not responsible for the floods in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh

AJAYA DIXIT

Every monsoon a political ritual takes place in the Mithila and Awadh regions of the Indian states Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Departmental functionaries visiting the flooded areas in these cow belt states point to the north and say: “All the flooding comes from there, and there is very little that we can do”. Even Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee could not remain immune to the finger-pointing, and during his 1998 tour of the flooded eastern Uttar Pradesh, remarked in Lucknow, “The flood [in Eastern Uttar Pradesh] comes from Nepal.”

So it is not at all surprising that the yuppies of the Indian electronic visual media too have picked up the chant. Last week a popular TV channel, covering the Assam floods, did not once mention China, Bhutan, or Arunachal Pradesh upstream of the Brahmaputra Valley for the increased flow in the river, but when reporting on the floods in the northern Ganga plain thought it fit to state: “Nepal released 350,000 cusec water from its dams.”

For anyone who does not know better it could easily sound like Nepal had opened the floodgates at the height of the monsoons. But the fact is the spillover from Nepal’s only reservoir, on the Kulekhani, is miniscule compared to the swollen monsoon flood of the Bagmati River into which it drains. The other two regulating structures are the barrages at the Kosi and Gandaki rivers on the Nepal-India border. A barrage does not store floodwater, and in any case, the state Government of Bihar maintains control over both.

The politics of blaming Nepal started back in the colonial era. In 1941 Sir Claude Inglish, the director of the Hydrodynamic Research Centre at Poona, attributed floods in the Kosi River to the hill farmers cutting trees. Even though the theory of deforestation-triggered flood stands debunked today, the legacy it left behind still makes it convenient to lay the blame on Nepal for the floods in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

A corollary to this view is that dam-reservoirs in the river valleys of Nepal are consistently shown to be the panacea to control lowland flooding. The mantra of the Bihari establishment is—build the “Kosi High Dam” at Barahachhetra (just before the Kosi exits the mountains) and all of Bihar’s problems, including floods, would vanish. It is a different matter that no one mentions that storing floodwater would turn a seasonal natural event into a permanent feature in the hills and nobody is willing pay the cost of submergence.

There is an inherent contradiction in the philosophy of flood mitigation through reservoirs. To attenuate floods, a reservoir needs to be kept partially empty, or to put in technical terms it has to provide for a “flood cushion”. An empty reservoir, however, cannot be economically justified, and in all likelihood electricity and irrigation benefits will be dovetailed in the design of the dam. Which further means that in order to optimise the latter two objectives, the dam will have to be kept full.

Even if these inherent contradictory purposes of the dam—energy (full) vs flood control (empty)—were to be reconciled, it is doubtful that the annual flood disaster in the Ganga plain can be minimised. This is because a large number of rivers of North Bihar and Uttar Pradesh originate in the Siwalik (Chure) Hills. These rivers are ephemeral in nature and have no storage sites in their basin and neither can dams be built to control them.

In the months of July and August the low-pressure monsoon trough shifts north of the Gangetic plains and stations itself over the hills for a few days in a phenomenon called “break monsoon”. During this period the skies can release almost two feet of water in a 24-hour period. The Siwalik rivers, which are no more than drainage channels, then have to transfer the incoming water to the sea and can do it only by flowing downstream.

The resulting flood hits all communities in its path. It cuts across political boundaries without distinction. The high stages of river become disasters due to political, social and institutional failures, made worse by poor governance, exploitative social formation, and inappropriate selection of technology for flood control.

The real issue is not what is stored upstream but what drainage congestion has been avoided downstream. Over the last 50 years, Bihar’s embankments, stretching over 3,000 km, have made more land susceptible to floods than what they were meant to do—provide deliverance from the annual inundation. And the reason is simple: embankments prevent the natural backflow of rain and small streams into the main river channel after the monsoon has expended its fury.

Failures remain unacknowledged. And inefficiency is ceremonially transferred elsewhere—upstream to Nepal. The most distressing aspect of this political ritual is the total lack of scientific or historical depth and its appeal to pseudo-universals. Ultimately, it ends up trivialising the complex specificities of flood disaster. Water management analyst Ajaya Dixit edits Water Nepal.) (Upload date: August 22/00)

The Valley's veiled world
Poubha, the Newari devotional painting, is coming out of centuries of seclusion to a world that needs spiritual solace

SALIL SUBEDI

The swirling blue waves evoke Japanese paintings, the billowing white clouds on an azure sky look like Tibetan thankas, the mandalas and the tantric positions of deities are motifs straight out of Himalayan Buddhism. But the images are all from Nepal's poubha school of devotional art, and this underrated and overlooked art form all originated here, in Kathmandu Valley at least 1,200 years ago.

Although there are no records of the original poubha because of the fragility of the medium (vegetable and mineral dyes on canvas) there are many art historians who believe that the poubha art form was the precursor to the Tibetan thanka.

As with many other architectural and artistic skills that were taken from Kathmandu Valley north to Tibet, China and even Japan in the middle of the last millennium, poubha was taken to Tibet by their Newari masters.

In the past 50 years, the thanka gained immense popularity worldwide, particularly because of its linkage to Himalayan Buddhism. But the poubha has largely remained within the private confines of the Valley's bahals and temples. Even Kathmandu's art dealers and young Nepalis seem unaware of the devotional richness and artistic genius of this indigenous art form, although a few recent exhibitions have started featuring poubhas.

Poubha artists work in private, their studios have a tranquil ambience. The act of painting itself is a form of meditation, linking the human painter with the spiritual and divine. The artists are taught to be humble, meditative and detached from the materialistic world, and they carry immense patience and devotion. The sacred Buddhist texts say: "The painter must be a good man, not given to anger and laziness, holy, learned, who is a master of his senses, pious, benevolent, free from avarice."

Before starting to paint, the canvas has to be blessed and the outlines approved by a Vajrayana priest. If it meets canonical injunctions, the master inscribes three syllables: Om, Ah, Hum (for body, speech and mind) at the back of the canvas. The canvas itself is a cotton sheet stretched across a wooden frame and covered with a layer of buffalo glue and white clay.

The artist uses sable-hair brush of a variety of thicknesses. The water-based colours of poubhas come from Himalayan stones like tourmaline, and copper sulphate crystals, indigo from south India to give five basic colours: red, blue, yellow, black and white. A rich red dominates Newari paintings and this sets off the bright blues, greens and gold. There is a strict code for the colours representing various deities.

The subject of the painting itself follows guidelines for philosophical themes and iconometric principles. There isn't much left for the artist's imagination, the rules are governed by records of meditative visions of early sages passed down from generation to generation. The eyes of the deities are always painted at the end, and this is the holiest moment in the entire two months or so it takes to complete the poubha.

Painters can bring in their own individuality only in the decorative patterns. And once painted, the canvas is always kept rolled up and not shown to strangers since they are considered a mirror that reflects the painter's soul.

In recent years there has been some revival of interest in the poubha, mainly because of the popularity (and a certain commercialisation of thankas). There are only a few masters of poubha art in Kathmandu Valley. Among them are Lok Chitrakar, Siddhimuni Shakya and Prem Man Chitrakar. Pokhara-based Mukti Singh Thapa, originally from the Newari hilltown of Bandipur, also paints poubha.

LOK CHITRAKAR

Thirty-eight-year-old Lok Chitrakar is a self-taught poubha practitioner is who has been painting since he was 12. Today, with assistants Komal, Santosh, Sanjaya, Bijaya, Amogh, Kishor, Rajendra Lok Chitrakar runs his Simrik Atelier in Patan. Chitrakar's repertoire runs from ritual geometric tantric designs like the Shri Yantra to the Vajrayana pantheon, including Saraswati, Ganesh, Tara, Manjushree and Avalokitswar. Chitrakar has been working for the past five years on two huge poubha murals for a temple in Japan.

Lok Chitrakar follows the iconic traditions of his forebears, but does experiment with his trademark Chinese rocks, Tibetan clouds and Japanese mountain landscapes as well as silky transparency in shawls or a deliberate lack of symmetry in some forms.

"I have tried to remain true to the ritualistic requirements as far as deities are concerned, but on occasion I have added supportive elements in a manner that artists centuries ago also did," says Chitrakar.

Poubha art is now also developing a select following, and Chitrakar himself has held exhibitions in Kathmandu, Finland and Japan. (Upload date; August 22/00)

FUNNY SIDE UP by Kunda Dixit
Holy Cow

Q. Write an essay on a domestic animal that you like the most. (25 marks)
A. The international animal I like mostly is Kangaroo. But domestic animal I like all most is our cow. There are many holy cows in Nepal. One of them is our army. The other is lying dead at the Tripureswor Roundabout because it ate 350 plastic bags. Kathmandu Metropolitan Council finally brought a big crane to remove it to kingdom come.

A cow is a mammal and is full of many uses for man throughout our ancient history. She is giving curd for eating, and also turd for burning. Every thing cow does is useful: cow urine is healthy drink for some prime ministers. Cow patty is full of antibiotics and hormones, and can be used as disinfectant inside household. Under cow are four udders, which is the most useful component.

Because it is holy, cows are also good for worshipping. We really like to worship cows. One day in every year we put marigold necklace on cows and pray for their long life. Cows love to eat marigold necklace, it is their favourite snack. They like the strings attached.

Another day every year, in Gai Jatra, we like to make fun of all holy cows. It is a very funny day in Nepal. Nothing is sacred to us on this day! We can poke fun at everyone and everything, we can even call our principal a Cow. Sometimes, if we become very brave and foolish on Gai Jatra, we can make funny pictures about Prime Minister like drawing him in newspaper without any under wear, so you can see his private sectors. Hahahahaha. But many VIPs today not having sense of humour, so it is very boring.

In Rana days, Gai Jatra was allow because rulers want people to let off gas so pressure will not build up. Now-a-day, because of this new democrazy thing every day is becoming just like Gai Jatra.

Kathmandu street is made for cows, because their favourite food is to eat garbage. They like newspapers mostly because newspapers contain a lot of roughage which is good for their digestive system. But like above mentioned, plastic bags are not good for cow’s digestion. Also not good for cows is eating non-veg food, this is why in England many cows are turning mad. It is Nepal’s good luck that cows are strictly vegetarian, so no cows are mad here.

Another useful thing for cows to do is to become traffic islands. Cows in Kathmandu regulate traffic by sitting on middle of road and serve as bovine road dividers. Without cow, traffic would be chaos. Kathmandu Metropolitan Council is paying strict attention to this.

A boy cow is called Bull. He is very useful in our agriculture society to pull hoe and for locomotion. Without bull, tarai region will grind to halt. Even on bandh days in tarai, bullock carts are allowed, so they are most important for public transportation. Nepalis like very much bull sheet, because we can make fire from cow’s backside. According to RSS news report, many Nepali bulls today migrating illegally to Bangladesh via India. The grass always greener on other side, but Nepali bulls don’t know that Bangladesh is kingdom come. Listen, you bulls, “mother and motherland are dearer than heaven.” (Upload date: August 22/00)

Looking behind Lukla
Padam Ghaley

Like too much of a good thing, the trek from Lukla to Namche can be boring after the first two times. Even the dogs come out to greet you as you trudge up past Phakding and Monjo. Once you get to Namche you can branch off in different directions: Thame, Tashi Laptsa, Gokyo or Tengboche. But up to Namche there is just one way in and one way out. It hasn’t helped that a big flood 10 years ago washed off a whole section of the trail, making the other side of the Bhote Kosi quite inaccessible.

But for those who want to get off the beaten trek there is always the side trip you can make from Phaplu up the Hinku valley. The flight from Kathmandu to Phaplu is one of the most dramatic Himalayan journeys. The Twin Otter just about grazes the tops of pine on Lamjura and turns sharply down for the landing. After Kathmandu, you wonder what that pleasant smell is, and of course it is the smell of fresh air. Who said oxygen has no odour?

Just out of Phaplu, you immediately realise how different this trip is compared to the Lukla-Namche superhighway. In fact the trail from Phaplu to Pangkhongma, where the trail strikes off to the east, is probably what the Namche trek was like before the tourists got there. No elaborate tea shops selling San Miguel, no fading posters of Brooke Shields, and the Sherpanis still wear traditional dresses with colourful aprons.

The forests through to Chereme are thick with wildlife, the rustle on the top branches could be a family of Himalayan red panda (“habre” in Nepali) in a feeding frenzy. In the undergrowth, the shy musk deer takes off as you approach. Parties of partridges erupt as you turn the corner, and glide down to the valley below. Choughs soar high in the updrafts of the moist and warm monsoon breeze blowing up the valley.

This is the beauty of trekking in the monsoon. The green goes right up to the snowline. Butterflies are flapping around everywhere, migratory birds are visiting their resident friends. And there is the sound of falling water everywhere day and night: rain dripping from trees, the gurgle of brooks in the forest, the splash of water falling from a rock face, long white tendrils slanting downwards barely audible from a high outcrop, the roar of an unseen river deep in the valley below.

In Chereme, Gambu Sherpa will show you around his little village. How he has renovated a 150-year-old gomba with the help of some British school teachers. The monastery now looks spik and span with its colourful door and beams and elegant cupola. The prayer flags flutter noisily in the afternoon breeze emphasising the serenity of the place. You don’t have to believe in god to feel that you are at a holy spot.

Up the valley, the afternoon clouds are already massing up against the eastern faces of all those familiar peaks you see from around Namche: Thamserku, Kangtega, Ama Dablam. From this side, the peaks look like a mirror image of their west faces—the only difference is that the eastern sides are less steep, there is more snow and the glaciers are fuller.

From here, the air gets thinner and the road steeper, but the views also get more stark. You pass the last few clumps of juniper bushes and enter the moraines that come down from the vast icefields of the Hongu Basin. Our destination is Mera Peak, at 6,600 m one of the highest trekking peaks in Nepal. The fees for trekking peaks has gone up, but they are still cheaper than climbing the big Himalayan names.

One of the great things about Mera is that you can get to the top from highcamp and down to Khahare in one day. But why would you want to hurry? With superb views of Chamlang, Lhotse South Face, Everest, Makalu and Ama Dablam from the top, you just want to linger and let it all sink in. Anywhere else in the world Mera would be a major peak, here it is just one of the little sisters of Thamserku.

The climb itself is not technical, some French school kids even skied down from the top in 1998. You need ropes and crampons but there are no major rock bands to climb over. On the way back, you can walk over Chhataro and descend to Lukla instead of going back to Phaplu. The more adventurous can go up Sherpani Col into the Imja Valley and Island Peak.

The whole roundtrip from Kathmandu to Mera will cost less than US$ 700 plus airfares, per person. (Upload date: August 20/00)

Bestseller in Braille
MANESH SHRESTHA

Bhaktaprasad Bhagyuto, the inimitable amphibian, will now enthral the blind with his adventures. The by-now-classic Adventures of a Nepali Frog by Kanak Mani Dixit , has just been translated into Devnagari Braille for the benefit of an estimated 40,000 Nepali blind children of school going age.

"I am thrilled that the book is going to be available for Nepali blind children. Because this book is descriptive of the people, its geography and culture it will probably be more useful for the blind," says Dixit.

The award-winning Dhumdhamko Ghumgham (the Nepali translation of the English original, Adventures of a Nepali Frog) is the first children's book to be translated into the Braille. "We decided to translate Dhumdhamko Ghumgham into Braille because it is an interesting book and introduces different parts of Nepal to readers in a fun way," says Kamal Ruphakheti, chairman of Nepal Association for the Welfare of the Blind, the book’s publisher.

“Interesting” is an understatement. Since its publication in 1996 by Rato Bangala Kitab, the book has acquired a cult following and is enjoyed by anyone between eight and eighty. The original English version of the book has gone into its fourth printing, making it arguably the highest selling children's book in Nepal. Besides Nepali, Adventures of a Nepali Frog has been translated into Newar Bhasa, Urdu and German and will soon be published in Bengali, Hindi, Dutch and Spanish.

Dhumdhamko Ghumgham is the story of Bhaktaprasad Bhyaguto, a tadpole just out of his teens and thirsting for adventure. He decides to leave home because he wants to “experience life" beyond the fields on the outskirts of Kathmandu Valley in which his ancestors have always lived. Using any and every means of transport he comes across, from a tin can to a taciturn yak, a contemplative bullock and a Twin Otter pilot’s pocket, he embarks on a journey that takes him to many parts of Nepal.

During his travels he meets all sorts of friendly and welcoming creatures. Among them are Jagat Bahadur, carrying loads for Kathmandu merchants; Royal Bengal, the wise and elderly cat who feels claustrophobic in the Chitwan jungle that has been left for animals; Fulmaya, the first woman truck driver of Nepal; and Prajapati Pokhreli, the know-all frog from Pokhara’s Lakeside. Further north his companions are Saligram Shumshere, the mule ferrying goods for traders up the Kali Gandaki valley; Dzo Dzopa, "the most talkative bovine this side of Mongolia"; and Pemba Musa, a wrongly named marmot from the Nepal-Tibet border. In Dolpo, Bhaktaprasad even chances to catch a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard.

The book sets new standards in Nepali children's literature as it moves away from texts that are generally didactic and uninteresting. Full of informative conversations the book shows that descriptive stories need not necessarily be dull. It's greatest worth is that it makes the reader feel for this beautiful land of Nepal.

This children's book is also probably one of the best introductions to Nepal, and is a favourite among tourists too. Probably recognising this, the Pakistani government has even prescribed it for its schools. And now the book will take Nepali blind children (and adults) on a delightful tour of their country. (Upload date: August 20/00)

Into the valley of AIDS

It’s not just truck drivers, sex workers or drug users who are at risk—all Nepalis are vulnerable

KUNDA DIXIT

There was a time when HIV-AIDS was regarded as a donor preoccupation. It was considered the prerogative of perverts and outsiders. Most of us blamed Nepali girls in Bombay or drug addicts, and considered ourselves risk-free.

Today, alarm bells are ringing loudly. Public health experts are shocked by the frightening speed at which the disease is spreading in Nepal, and especially in Kathmandu Valley. And they are also dismayed at the lack of political will and the prevailing official confusion over preventive measures.

There is growing recognition of the serious economic consequences of an Africa-type nationwide epidemic, but Nepali officialdom is still largely in denial.

“We are sitting on top of a volcano,” says Michael Hahn, of the UNAIDS office in Kathmandu. “Nepal has entered a concentrated epidemic, and there is a window of opportunity to prevent a generalised epidemic if steps are taken immediately.”

The latest Family Health International survey shows the following figures:

·         17.3 percent of sex workers in Kathmandu are HIV positive, up from 2.7 percent four years ago;

·         half of all injecting drug users in Kathmandu Valley are infected;

·         more than 80 percent of injecting drug users are sexually active, and 40 percent are married;

·         Nepal’s nationwide estimates for HIV/AIDS cases is now crossing 35,000.

HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is spread mainly by unprotected sex and direct blood contact like sharing injection needles or blood transfusions.

The figures show an urgent need to arrest the spread of the disease by immediately reducing the risk for drug users, and the section of the population that visits sex workers or has multiple sex partners.

Reducing vulnerability means ensuring not only that brothel clients and intra-venous (IV) drug users know about the dangers of infection, but that they also take preventive measures.

It also means giving the drug users alternatives like safe needles and less harmful drugs while they work towards kicking the habit—a process known as “harm reduction”.

“The most effective way to stop the spread of HIV and hepatitis among injecting drug users is ensuring that needles are not shared,” says Sambhu Dhital, a community health worker at the Live Giving and Life Saving (LALS) organisation in Kathmandu.

LALS has been working on harm reduction with counselling, family meetings, rehabilitation, and needle exchange programmes for drug users in Kathmandu. But LALS reaches less than five percent of the estimated 30,000 injecting drug users in Kathmandu.

Most IV drug users in Kathmandu don’t use hard drugs like heroin, but cheaper “pharmaceutical drugs” like tidigesic, a sedative containing morphine, synthetic morphine, codeine, or benzodizapiom. LALS estimates that drug users in Kathmandu spend an estimated Rs 5 million a day.

Estimates of the number of sex workers in Kathmandu Valley range from 5,000-25,000. One survey in 1996 showed that 15 percent of them never used condoms, 21 percent did, and 56 percent “sometimes did and sometimes didn’t”.

Even if sex workers had heard about AIDS and condoms, and knew how to protect themselves, they were often forced by clients who didn’t want to use condoms. An average Kathmandu sex worker services three clients a day—making the 30,000 men who liaise with them every day the key vectors of this epidemic.

Many of these clients are married, or have other partners, and the chances of infections spreading into the general population are very high. This is why public health experts warn: everyone is at risk.

With half the injecting drug users HIV positive, this group is another important target group if the epidemic is to be controlled.

We know what does not work: the police approach. Cracking down on IV drug users, putting them in jail hasn’t worked anywhere in the world. It just criminalises drug use and drives addicts underground.

One place in the region with a similar problem to Kathmandu Valley is the eastern Indian state of Manipur, bordering Burma. Up to 70 percent of injecting drug users in Manipur are HIV positive.

At a recent AIDS conference, Manipur’s minister of health, Morung Makunga sounded a warning for Nepal: “I appeal to you, don’t make the mistake we made of arresting drug addicts and punishing them to control HIV/AIDS. In countries like Nepal, the epidemic among injecting drug users is just taking off, you have plenty of opportunities to think of new strategies.”

It was only after Manipur became the only state in India to adopt the three-pronged approach of using counselling, drug maintenance therapy and needle exchange that the epidemic started showing signs of slowing.

And this could only happen because of political will at the highest level, and a coordinated approach among government departments, the police and activists.

A similar strategy called “Harm Reduction” is required for Kathmandu Valley that will go step by step to:

• persuade drug users to stop injecting;
• get injecting drug users to switch to other less harmful drugs;
• persuade them to stop sharing needles if they can’t stop injecting;
• get them to clean needles if they have to share;
• stop using drugs.

Vijay Kumar is an Indian activist from Manipur who is now with Save the Children (UK) in Kathmandu. “The biggest problem in Nepal is that at the government level there is a clash between those who favour harm reduction, and those who want to use the police model,” he says.

Unfortunately, drug users are often seen as deviants, law enforcers are known to get a cut from street transactions, and there is a low tolerance for needle exchange because of the public perception that it encourages addicts.

Kumar’s other experience from Manipur is the serious implication of the epidemic on women and children as the men start dying at a productive age. “We have seen what a crisis this can be for widows and orphans, many of whom are also infected, and are then stigmatised by society and have no support.”

There is no doubt that to come to grips with the epidemic the government and activists must urgently reach a critical mass of sex workers, their clients and injecting drug users.

Hahn of UNAIDS says a piecemeal approach will have no impact: “We have to get to at least 80 percent of those who need access to protection if we are going to make a dent on this epidemic.”

In the end it boils down to resources. In India, the unit cost of getting an injecting drug user rehabilitated is $30 per person per year. With 30,000 drug users less than a million dollars would be enough for Kathmandu Valley.

The cost of doing nothing would run into hundreds of millions in the years ahead for the Nepali economy. (With reporting by Manish Gautam) (Upload date: Aug 18/00)

CONGRESS vs CONGRESS

The Nepali Congress is its own worst enemy, and the chronic quarrelling between Koirala and Bhattarai points to a larger power struggle among their younger cronies.

BINOD BHATTARAI

It has become a predictable ritual in the Nepali Congress: hard-fought elections are won, there is a majority in parliament, within months the party begins to self-destruct as a dissident faction mutinies, a new alignment is set up and the same cycle is repeated.

This time, a crisis that started with a dissatisfied Khum Bahadur Khadka trying to oust his boss ended when the rebellious minister suddenly found himself sacked. Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala then moved swiftly to outflank dissidents by meeting their guru, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, and smoking the peace pipe. A cabinet reshuffle any day now will indicate how well the compromise works—the clue will be the number of Bhattarai men (and women) in it.

The cease-fire has now gone into force, but only after warning us once again of our rulers’ narrow political horizons and compulsive obsession with factionalism. In effect, this week’s tussle was the preliminary round of the knock-out to take place at the party’s General Convention originally slated for November in Pokhara.

Koirala is both prime minister and party president. Many dissidents, including Khum Bahadur, thought this made him too powerful. The convention will be a showdown in which Koirala is most likely to be challenged by another ambitious leader who has once tasted power: Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Deuba leans on Bhattarai a lot and will be banking on this support to counter Koirala. For his part, Koirala relies on his cousin, General Secretary Sushil Koirala, feared by both Deuba and Khum Bahadur for his politics, to get him the votes.

On Monday morning Koirala and Bhattarai met one-on-one for 25 minutes, and two versions were made public. Koirala’s supporters said the prime minister repeated his commitment made at the 11 August Central Working Committee (CWC) meeting to fulfill two of Bhattarai’s five demands: reshuffling the cabinet and the party’s CWC, and not to play dirty during the party election. Koirala is also said to have given his old friend a lollipop—rescheduling the party Convention, if needed. (Baluwatar sources say Koirala would prefer an early Convention to resolve the power struggle so he can get down to the business of running the country.) Bhattarai’s version is that a team would be formed to “carry the talks forward”.

On the key question of one person-one post, Koirala gave Bhattarai a blunt “no”. Said one Congress insider: “Koirala basically dared Bhattarai to vote him out.”

Meanwhile, Young Turks Deuba and Khum Bahadur are still plotting. But they still have to get their arithmetic right. What worked in Koirala’s favour this time was that even some ministers identified as being close to Bhattarai were fed up with the instability that a signature campaign would entail. Sources said Bhattarai himself had approached some junior ministers to seek their support but they refused.

Khum Bahadur, who found himself in the eye of the storm after his sacking, is now backstage, an unfamiliar place for someone who has always been a high-profile minister in most Congress governments. Khum Bahadur was likely to have been dropped in a cabinet reshuffle Koirala had planned before leaving for India in late July. Among those who could possibly have joined the cabinet are well-known Bhattarai confidantes: Chiranjibi Wagle, Purna Bahadur Khadka and Ram Sharan Mahat.

Sensing the impending reshuffle, Khum Bahadur had pressed his earlier demand calling for the sacking of the Inspector General of Police, Achyut Krishna Kharel, a request Koirala had repeatedly ignored. Khum Bahadur told us he had not begun collecting signatures, but that he strongly believed it was time a younger leader like Shailja Acharya took charge of the party.

The Koirala side interpreted Khum Bahadur’s support for Shailja, Koirala’s niece, as a ploy to make it easier for Deuba to win in the party election, and hence his swift sacking.

Bhattarai, who had been in semi-retirement at his residence in Bhainsepati and seldom attended parliament after his ouster in March, jumped at the opportunity Khum Bahadur’s ouster provided to get his revenge. Within hours, he had announced five demands: reshuffle of the cabinet and the party CWC, step down from the post of party president, appoint someone like Deuba to take over, re-schedule the General Convention and not seek re-election as party president.

The lesson from all this is that if the two 78-year-olds had met earlier, the country may have been spared the spectacle of that ensued. Actually, Bhattarai had agreed to go to Baluwatar on 10 August for consultations before the CWC met, but called it off at the last moment after talking to his protégé, Deuba.

For now, Mahat mouths the mood in the Bhattarai camp: “Peace will be durable only if two sides keep their word.” (Upload date: Aug 16/00)

STATE OF THE STATE by CK LAL
Déjà vu in Kathmandu

One night last week, according to reports of eye-witnesses, Prince Paras, driving erratically after a row at a local disco ran over and killed a renowned singer. This is not the first time the problematic Prince has been involved in something like this, and according to Police, it is at least the third time someone has been killed. Sooner or later, the law of the land has to be applied if the family that Paras represents is not to be sullied by his notorious reputation.

Technically, Shahjada Paras is not a “Prince”. According to the Nepali Brihat Shabdakosh, the authoritative Nepali dictionary published by the Royal Nepal Academy, “shahjada” means the male offspring of a King, which in our case is either the Crown Prince or his brother. Shahjada Paras is neither. His father is a Prince, but he is not. A more appropriate appellation for this compulsive law-breaker could have been Sahabjade, the Urdu term of Persian origin commonly used to denote a spoilt brat. But even that seems to be too weak a tag for such a serious habitual offender.

In the past week, Kathmandu has been gripped by a feeling of déjà vu as efforts were on to brush the whole episode under the carpet, and pretend nothing had happened. In the eyes of Nepal’s alert citizenry, however, this is now no longer a case of one lone offender. It now touches Paras’ father Prince Gyanendra, it touches the royal family and it touches the institution of monarchy. This is a hard case, and as they say, hard cases make the law.

It is an indication of the public’s disgust (and, in a sense, its helplessness) that the overwhelming reaction in Kathmandu when people heard of the incident on Monday morning was: “Not again!” Praveen Gurung, an up-and-coming musician, is dead. His family may be compensated, there may be an out-of-court settlement. But what of justice? Who is going to ensure that the Prince does not run amok again? Unless there is some admission of guilt, some attempt to redress this wrong, some attempt to bring the guilty to justice, this man’s actions sooner or later will further dent that pillar of Nepali nationhood: the Monarchy. It now seems that prosecuting Paras would be as much in his own interest and safety as in the interest and safety of the public. The law must take its course, and the powers that be would do well to refrain from interfering.

Tragic though last week’s event was, and reproachful as the attempt to hush it all up has become, it did show that the Nepali press fulfilled its role of informing the public. Ten years ago such a thing would have been covered up easily. People would have pretended they heard nothing, saw nothing. The rumour mills would have gone into overdrive, but the matter would have ended there. Public outrage would have been expressed in private.

Those were the days when walls had ears. People used to raise eyebrows about the kind of business Prince Basundhara was up to, but none ever dared speak about it. In the seventies, it was the antics of ex-Prince Dhirendra that would be the subject of whispers. Tales about him were legion. There may have been many reasons why Dhirendra’s royal title was snatched away, but we commoners were not told what they were. There is a lesson in there somewhere for Paras. But since he does not seem capable of learning it himself, it is for his elders in Narayanhity to take action.

In England, the royalty has at least one function: provide cheap entertainment for the masses through tabloids. Their posteriors and peccadilloes are recorded for posterity by the gutter press.  Our royals, on the other hand, can’t get into the press unless it is a press release read out on Radio Nepal, or unless they hit a policeman on duty, create a rumpus in a disco or actually run over an innocent person.

Our royals need a role, and they need role models. The Thai royalty which takes an avid interest in grassroots development could be one, or the Scandinavian monarchs who ride trams to work. Elsewhere, the royal family commands genuine popularity not by putting on airs, or by remaining aloof and hiding behind dark glasses, but by trying to behave like ordinary citizens in their everyday lives, and by showing a passionate interest in the welfare and progress of their country. A lot of it has to do with the public’s perception. And here, the public perception is turning iffy, something that the mandarins guarding the monarchy’s image should take note of. The superb human interest picture of King Birendra and Queen Aishwarya walking to their daughter’s house on Sunday got page one in The Kathmandu Post, but only because a photojournalist happened to pass by.

Members of parliament across party lines have raised a valid point: supremacy of the law must be established if it is to be respected by all. Let’s get on with it before another innocent person on the street is killed, or before the monarchy takes another knock. (Upload date: Aug 16/00)

FUNNY SIDE UP by Kunda Dixit
The August House

Whatever else you may say about our honourable People’s Representatives, you have to hand it to them: with only a little bit more training they could join the Nepali martial arts contingent heading out to Sydney. There is still a month and a half to go, and an intensive karate clinic to teach them deep breathing skills, exhalation and sudden shouts would ready them to do battle with the best dans in the world.

I know talent when I see it. And looking down at the floor of the August house last week, I could tell that the honourable representatives of the Unified Marxist-Leninists are born sen seis. And for the first time in the history of this sports-loving nation, Parliament for half a day was turned into a dojo. The Representatives showed mastery of the three elements that every great karate expert needs: an instinct for speed, strength and technique.

During the first round, the UML's Resident Black Belt made a lunge from his seat, carried out two impressive triple flips down the aisle, and emitting a blood-curdling "NEEEEEEEEYAHAAAHH!" pirouetted in the air to land a perfectly placed knuckle punch on the solar plexus of a rather astonished Honourable Member from the Nepali Congress.

That day, the Unified Marxist-Leninists showed why their forebears of the Great Proletarian October Revolution rocked the world in ten days. Following Lenin's famous advice to "take one step forward and two steps back" the Honourable Member from the UML then turned quickly around and placed an accurate reverse jump kick on another unsuspecting member of the ruling party, following it up quickly with a finger jab into his (the ruling party member's) eye socket.

If these were actual blows, these karate movements could have been fatal. It is a tribute to the non-violent nature of the Nepali people that all punches were pulled, tremendous restraint was shown. Some nose cartilage got mashed, a groin or two needed first aid, a couple of ears were missing but in the spirit of this great sport all participants showed supremacy in the kata movement routines.

By this time, the tournament was in full swing with the quarter-finals and semi-finals being waged in various parts of the August House. A particularly interesting bout was going on near the exit where an exasperated usher was trying to untangle two MPs who, it seems, had mistaken the ongoing National Karate Championship Cup for the World Wrestling Federation-Nepal (WWF/N) Tournament. While an honourable member from the Nepal Peasants' and Workers' Party cheered him on, the Unified Marxist Leninist MP had got the Nepali Congress MP in a firm half-nelson. The desperate Nepali Congress MP then stuck his fingers up the nose of his opponent, briefly easing the vice-like grip. The usher, who was trying to play referee and extricate the two, himself got embroiled in this exciting match. After that it became a three-way fight, leading to an electrifying finish in which the judges pronounced the usher the winner.

At the other end of the House, another interesting match was taking place under the Royal Sceptre. Two MPs had abandoned karate rules and had got involved in a Thai-style kickboxing match which was now in its final round. Borrowing heavily from fight scenes in film episodes they had watched on Zee Cinema, two Honourable Members were using each other's heads as punching sandbags.

By the time the final bell rang, everyone present agreed that a good time was had by all and that such tournaments should be held regularly in future. If the August House was so much fun, I can't wait for the September House. (Upload date: August 16/00)

"Looking grey-t"
by Rupa Joshi

It's two years old now, this salt-and-pepper hair. It took me two years to give up henna and go completely 'natural' and let the white hair outgrow its tint. Two years for me to appear in my true colours. 

Grey hair is no stranger to my family. My parents and then my brothers went prematurely grey, and at 40 I was considered a late bloomer. When a few odd strands of grey started appearing about five years ago, I camouflaged them under a sheen of mehndi. When the strands started gathering force, using mehndi still made sense. In fact, the henna added trendy streaks of red—highlights that young girls would pay fortunes to have. But two years ago white hair started sprouting up from all over: white hair with an attitude, fierce and adamant, spearheading their way out of my scalp, refusing to lie supple and silky like the rest of their dark colleagues. “We’re here to stay,” they seemed to declare.

I heard them loud and clear, and called a truce. It was quite a headache trying to cover up: if I didn’t use henna for three weeks the white roots would start teasing me. So one New Year’s Day, more than two years ago, I made a resolution to go natural.

Two torturously slow years spent with tri-colour hair—black, white and red. There was not much I could do to hasten the transformation, with the white hair creeping from under the roots. I tried to do away with as much of the dyed portions as possible by cutting my hair short. Now it’s all gone.

Accepting grey hair at 40 when my grandmother-in-law has less white hair than me was not easy. But once the decision was made, I felt a sense of liberation. Freedom from the unseen, unwritten rules of “have to dos.” I made up my mind that I would accept the dictates of my body and present myself as I was: whether society liked it or not. It was their problem, not mine. In my mind I’m still young as ever.

Hennaing hair is an elaborate ritual. Every fortnight I had to plan 24 hours ahead to prepare the henna mix. The schedule went something like this:

1.      Take an iron pot, the rustier, the better.

2.      Take six heaped tablespoons of henna, add a whipped egg and some mustard oil in enough cold tea and coffee brew to mix to a thick consistency. Stir from time to time to ensure all of the mix gets into contact with the sides of the iron pot and borrows the resulting black oxidised colour.

3.      Next day when the hair marinade is ready, with a crust of healthy black on the top and sides, search for a pair of rubber gloves without holes (blow them to find out). This is important so that the fingers didn't end up with orange spots that linger for a week.

4.      Plop the gooey henna on your hair, ensuring that every root is trapped in the greenish-brown paste.

5.      Wrap your hair in cellophane to “keep the moisture in”. Hide the ugly mess under a fancy scarf so as not to scare away unsuspecting guests. Keep yards of tissue handy in order to blot away henna seepage.

6.      Two to three hours later... when the body heat has gently steam-cooked the henna and when the outside of the glob begins to feel like a pie crust it’s time to wash the thing off.

7.      Get under the tap real low so as not to let the brown slime splash and splotch your shower curtains, tiles and tub.

8.      Rinse with water and apply hot mustard oil to ‘fasten’ the colour.

And so it was, every fortnight, after spending a couple of hours with a headful of cow-dung look-alike, I was forced to spend another night with a head reeking of wasabe. My husband and children gave me looks that were a combination of awe and disgust.

Two henna-free years later, the sense of being me, just the way I am is deeply satisfying. No pretences, no deception, no showing what’s not there. Looking grey’t is feeling great. Those who know my family and their greying tendency are surprised at the strength of the hoary genes. Friends who have not seen me for sometime do double takes. Many male acquaintances and young females appreciate the ‘bold’ and ‘smart’ look. Then there are the slightly older females, and most often those who colour their hair, who seem uncomfortable and vehemently oppose my decision to go ‘prematurely’ grey.

These days when I see men and women strutting around with outlandish henna hair, I feel like screaming: “Let it be, don’t hide behind the dye, don’t live in a lie, let it be.” (Upload date: August 16/00)

Private airlines eye international routes
After many false starts, private airlines are getting serious again about operating regional routes

BINOD BHATTARAI

The government is getting ready to renew its call for private operators to apply for international routes. And learning from past experience, it is tightening procedures and enforcing stricter licensing terms.

Nepali private airlines will henceforth be required to pay royalties to fly the various routes on offer and only airlines that plan to use jet aircraft will be allowed to bid. Private airlines which were earlier required to begin services within six months of getting a licence will now be given a year to commence operations.

Alpine Air and Air Nepal International, the two Nepali airlines that had been squatting on permits to operate international routes out of Kathmandu for the past five years, had their licences scrapped in May 1999 after the expiry of the final extension. The two had received licences to operate flights to India and Europe, but were woefully unprepared to start operations.

Of the five airlines that were licensed for international routes in 1996, only one (Necon Air) is operating flights to India today. Everest Air forfeited its Rs 4 million security deposit when it failed to start flights, although it was later able to get the decision reversed through the courts. Alpine Air and Air Nepal were given several extensions, and even had their status changed from Class A (to Europe) to Class B (regional). Yet they could not take off.

The fifth airline, Trans Continental Air Cargo, was licensed to carry international freight, and it actually brought over a cargo plane and carried out a few flights. But because the aircraft did not have a Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS), it was not allowed to fly to India. The plane flew off to get the system installed, and never returned.

Air Nepal also brought in a Malaysia-registered Boeing 737-200 on the very day its licence was due to expire for the last time. It was probably timed to get an extension, but as the rules state that airlines have to actually begin services to qualify, the plane sat on the tarmac for ten days before heading back home.

Analysts say the government was too ambitious in hoping that new companies would be able to begin operations within six months. Also the fact that licence extensions were for short periods showed a lack of understanding of the aviation industry.

The government’s latest policy looks really tough, especially since it had granted “squatters” like Alpine Air and Air Nepal several extensions. But there is a catch; the final decision on granting licences is decided by the cabinet. And given their political connections—Alpine has Pradip Man Singh, son of the late Ganesh Man Singh as promoter, and Air Nepal has Pradip Rana, an in-law of former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba—the revival of their licences cannot be ruled out.

Several thousand seats a month on Nepal’s international routes remain wasted or under-utilised because the flag carrier Royal Nepal Airlines is unable to fly many routes. The airline is foolishly over-extended, flying long-distance routes to Japan and Europe with medium-range, narrow-body Boeing 757s, instead of concentrating on ferrying passengers to Kathmandu from regional hubs like Singapore and Dubai.

For those who think Nepali private operators will make international routes more efficient, the performance of Alpine Air and Air Nepal over the past five years is a sobering reminder that things will not be much different. Nevertheless, Alpine Air is now trying to get back its licence. Said a source: “We are trying to revive our licence because we’ve now found external partners and can now operate. We are now at the stage of launching the airline and are negotiating with the government.”

Alpine Air promoters claim they understand the needs of Nepali tourism and will meet them, and also deny rumours of a rift between partners. According to the company, the reason it switched its licence category was that more established airlines (Qatar, Transavia, Gulf Air, Lauda Air) began operating from Europe soon after it received permission. Now with its Category B status, it can fly to India, Thailand, Bangladesh and Burma.

Air Nepal is still said to be around even though its listed telephone numbers don’t work anymore. Industry sources say its licence is also in a limbo and a group of hoteliers are exploring the possibility of reviving it.

Not everyone can get a foreign route licence. The companies that acquired them in the first round were either moneyed or had political connections, or both. But what they all had in common was a total lack of experience in running an international airline.

Necon Air has had the most professional approach—taking one step at a time and building up its experience through its routes to Calcutta, Patna and Varanasi. With an annual turnover of Rs 700m, Necon will probably be the first Nepali private airline to acquire a jet. The airline is now well placed to expand its turboprop fleet and make the leap to jets for the Calcutta and New Delhi trunk routes for which it has already received permission.

“We’re studying the feasibility of starting those connections,” says Radhesh Pant, adviser at Necon. “Lucknow could be the next one.”

Even so, Necon is using only half its allocated 600 seats a week to India. It hopes to make the Varanasi connection daily after it acquires a second ATR-42 later this year.

Necon competes with Indian Airlines, which uses the bigger and faster Airbus 320s in its Kathmandu-Varanasi sector. Necon is not allowed to charge less than IA, and passengers prefer the jets. Still, Pant is confident that Varanasi will work when the tourist season starts: “We are doing well, with about 60 percent occupancy. Our advantage is our punctuality and the easy embarking and disembarking.”

Another Nepali airline that wants to fly to India is Buddha Air. It has done well on domestic tourist routes with its brand new aircraft, but its 18-seater B1900Ds are too small for even Indian operations, and would need bigger planes if it is serious about flying to neighbouring countries like India or Bhutan. Birendra Basnet of Buddha Air says they want to use their B1900D for short Indian hops, and move into longer routes with jets after gaining the necessary experience.

Basnet blames the government for delays. “The government had said it would not licence new airlines for five years to give the private international airlines operating room. But at the same time it allowed them to sit on their licences. This has kept new players out.” (Upload date: August 13/00)

STATE OF THE STATE by C.K. Lal
Are we becoming another Bihar?

Nepalis like to bemoan the fact we border India’s poorest and most lawless state. And we see Nepal going the way of Bihar. So, if Nepal doesn’t want to end up as another Bihar, it may be useful to study the reasons why one of India’s richest states became its most destitute.

In an age when the only news to come out of Bihar is of chief ministers who steal money meant for livestock, or of the slaughter of low-caste peasants by landlord armies, it is difficult to believe that till the late 1960s Bihar was still one of the most progressive states in India. Then the unstoppable slide downhill to the present: the state exists, it’s on the map, elections are held, institutions are there, but nothing works. Even New Delhi calls its administration “Jungle Raj”.

Finding a fancy reason for Bihar’s entropy used to be the favourite pastime of ivory tower intellectuals at Delhi’s India International Centre. These days, even they seem to have given up on Bihar as a lost cause.

There are obvious reasons for Bihar’s sorrow: entrenched caste politics, low literacy and heavily skewed land ownership. But one major reason for Bihar’s non-functioning anarchy was the media’s decline, and the way it paralleled the decay of the state.

Bihar once had at least three quality dailies published from Patna: Aryabarta and Pradip in Hindi, and Searchlight in English, all highly respected journals that were fair and factual. Rapacious politicians not schooled in the liberal traditions of the independence struggle didn’t appreciate the media’s adversarial role. The newspapers survived for a while, but Indira Gandhi’s Emergency drove the final nail in the media’s coffin. The conscience of Bihar was sent to sleep.

Today, Patna does have local editions of big national newspapers like The Times of India, Hindustan and Aaaj, but these are business enterprises first. What they practise can best be called a kind of ‘corporate journalism,’ a style that teaches one to remain on the right side of the powers-that-be, with an occasional scoop to keep circulations up. The result is for all to see: you couldn’t tell by reading the Patna papers that the corruption every citizen of the state experiences first hand is endemic. Their body-bag headlines are from Kashmir, not an investigation into the latest massacres by the Ranvir Sena or the Maoists.

Nepali editors are sanguine that we will not meet Bihar’s fate because our post-democracy media is vibrant and alert. It is true, despite the preponderance of pamphleteers, a section of the Nepali media is indeed doing its job remarkably well.

However, the Nepali media has to grow out of its herd mentality, to question what appears to be self-evident, and not to be manipulated and motivated. For instance, many in the media rubbished the citizenship bill without even examining the contents carefully. The fact that the proposed act was a bipartisan exercise that came with stringent procedures and contained ample provisions to prosecute those found guilty of granting citizenship certificates illegally has been all but ignored.

Then there was the reporting over the Laxmanpur Barrage. The barrage has been under construction for quite some time, but the issue was raked up just when the Prime Minister was packing to leave for New Delhi. The press reports appeared investigative but in the end played right into the hands of those who wanted to poison the atmosphere before the visit. The prompt and tough rebuttal from the Indian Embassy proved just that. To give due credit, some in media ridiculed one lawmaker’s suggestion that the barrage be demolished. But others failed to see through such populist bluster.

By being unprofessional, by not protecting its independence, by not safeguarding its adversarial role, the Nepali media will contribute to democracy’s slow demise. The Nepali press has to ask ‘why’ every time a vested interest group offers a facile answer to ‘what’, and question every planted half-truth.

Former chief justice of the Supreme Court, Vishwanath Upadhyaya, holds that much of the Nepali press is sub-standard. He has a point, but can he show us one section of Kathmandu society, that can be held up as a model for the press to emulate? A society gets the media it deserves, I suppose. But an accountable and committed media can also mould a society in its own image.

There are other safeguards against degenerating into another Bihar, but for Nepal an energetic and independent press is the most obvious one. (Upload date: August 13/00)

What India wants from Nepal

India’s bureaucracy always talks tough, but once again politicians bring relations back on track

RAJENDRA DAHAL in NEW DELHI

Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala went to New Delhi, not hoping for much. His only worry was that bilateral relations should not get worse due to his visit, and that it would not stir a hornet’s nest back home. On that score, he was successful.

Girija and Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee are about the same age and as usual they hit it off in Hindi. But after the formality of the banquets were over last week, the bureaucracies took over and got down to brass tacks. What does Nepal’s sovereignty entail, how much can Nepal assert its independence vis-a-vis India? Very fundamental questions.

This time India had done its homework well on trade, security, and the 1950 Indo-Nepal Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Days before the visit, academics, ex-diplomats who had served in Kathmandu, and Indian-Nepali political figures from Sikkim, Assam, Darjeeling and Dehra Dun were brought to New Delhi to analyse the implications of the treaty.

The meeting and visit coincided with a realisation here that India had gone too far in exaggerating the ISI threat from across the open border in Nepal. Indian public opinion was manipulated so effectively in the aftermath of the hijacking to portray Nepal’s open border as a backdoor for terrorists, that New Delhi now had to show it was doing something about it.

India was caught in its own trap. For despite security concerns, there are major geopolitical and trade benefits for India from the open border. Hence the pre-visit meeting of Indian-Nepalis to discuss the treaty and the open border.

Participants at the meeting, which included Sikkim’s Chief Minister Pawan Chamling and a representative of Subhas Ghising from Darjeeling, analysed what would happen if either side gave the mandated one-year notice to abrogate the treaty. Chamling didn’t seem to think much would happen, an open border with Nepal would not affect his state. Ghising’s group, on the other hand, predictably wanted the treaty scrapped because it allows Nepalis to live in India which goes against Ghising’s project to designate Indian-Nepalis as “Gorkhali”.

For India, there are several disadvantages of closing the border:

•   It will put Nepal at a geopolitical equidistance between India and China, since the Himalaya is no longer the physical obstacle it traditionally has been

•   Since Indian business profits vastly from having Nepal as an extension of its own market, closing the border would allow cheaper Chinese products to flood Nepal

•   Nepalis of Indian origin dominate the Nepal economy, a closed border would hamper their business

•   Even with a closed border, there is no guarantee that ISI activities in Nepal will cease.

In an interview with The Times of India just before his visit, Prime Minister Koirala let it drop that India could go ahead and close the border if it wanted to. “It is impossible for Nepal to close the border, but if India wants the border fenced, we have no objection. It will also serve Nepal’s interest,” he told the paper. The supposedly chance remark pre-empted the conclusions of the New Delhi meeting on the 1950 treaty.

The first sentence the Indian prime minister spoke as he greeted Koirala at the steps of Rashtrapati Bhavan were: “The open border is the foundation of India-Nepal friendship.” In Nepal, however, there is much more ambivalence about the open border: it is an economic safety valve allowing the free flow of Nepalis to work in India (at least 1.5 million people at any given time). There is two-way traffic at the open border: cheap manpower from northern Bihar and even Orissa move in for seasonal work in Nepal.

But it is this same border that has distorted the Nepali economy by fostering smuggling as a national past-time over the years, harming healthy industrial growth. The open border has also fostered an almost complete economic dependence on India, which New Delhi can use to put the squeeze, as it did in the 1988-89 blockade.

Koirala’s visit was low key in the Indian media, and overshadowed by the Kashmir massacres and the kidnapping of a famous film actor in Bangalore. But relations have stopped sliding, new channels of communication have been opened so that things don’t reach similar crisis points again.

One lesson learnt from this year’s deterioration in Nepal-India relations was the role played by an ill-informed section of the Indian media that willingly used planted material calculated to wreck ties. The ‘Nepal Gameplan’ leak was rejected by most professional journalists, and only India Today carried it verbatim, but that was enough to cause damage.

On issues like hydropower exports, it is clear that India’s priorities are not the same as Nepal’s. On Kalapani, Nepal’s leadership is still not sure whether there was a secret deal or not in 1961 to allow India to place troops in Kalapani.

The Indo-Nepal joint communiqué was delayed by 24 hours not because of security issues, or the ISI, or even by Kalapani, but by Indian bureaucratic reluctance to admit that there had been submergence in Nepal. In the end, it was Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh and Foreign Secretary Lalit Man Singh who leaned on the Indian negotiators to accept inundation had taken place.

At last count, there were more than 35 bilateral committees looking at all aspects of Nepal-India ties. No one knows what these committees do, whether they meet or not, or if they do, what they resolve. No wonder, then, that small tiffs get magnified into hysteria. Now, India and Nepal have set up a “super commission” headed by foreign ministers.

The visit made both India and Nepal realise that the ground reality is totally transformed since 1950. India is no longer newly free, and Nepal is no longer an oligarchy. The visit rebuilt a crumbling foundation for two mature neighbouring democracies to treat each other with dignity, equity and justice.  (Upload date: August 10/00)

CFIT
A NEPALI TIMES ANALYSIS

Another plane. Another helicopter-borne rescue. Another news bulletin that begins “There were no survivors when a Nepali airliner on a domestic flight slammed into a mountain…”

It follows like a well-practiced ritual: the grim task of picking up the remains, the horrific wait of grieving relatives at the post-mortem ward of Bir Hospital, the condolence notices in the week’s papers with pictures of the youthful crew in uniform, a vague investigation report one year later that blames “human error”.

How long can this go on?

There is no doubt that something is seriously unsafe about flying in Nepal. That was evident after the double tragedy in the monsoon of 1992 when two Airbus 310s slammed into mountains while preparing to land in Kathmandu within two months of each other. A total of 270 people were killed.

The planes were either seriously off course or below assigned altitude. A radar was installed after the crashes. But it didn’t prevent the crash of a cargo jet last year. The reason, according to the investigation report, was that there was no one at the radar control when the plane took off because a change of shifts was taking place.

Nepal’s domestic aviation is now averaging four accidents every year. Nearly all of them are technically “controlled flight into terrain” (CFIT) when a perfectly good plane flies into a mountain during poor visibility.

The following crashes of domestic flights in recent years can be attributed to CFIT:

July 2000               RNAC                Twin Otter     Hit mountain, 25 killed
Dec.1999               Skyline Airways  Twin Otter     Hit mountain in cloud, 10 killed
Oct. 1999               Necon Air          HS 748          Hit telecom tower, 15 killed 
November 1998     RNAC                Pilatus PorterHit mountain off Namche1 killed
August 1998           Lumbini Air         Twin Otter    Hit mountain off Pokhara 18 killed 
July 1993               Everest Air          Dornier 228  Hit mountain Bharatpur 18 killed
December 1984     RNAC                 Twin Otter    Hit mountain Tumlingtar 15 killed

Flying in Nepal, in one of the most vertical countries on earth, is regarded as challenging at the best of times. Along most domestic air routes, the terrain rises steeply from 1000 m to 8,000 metres within a horizontal distance of barely 20 km.

It is during the monsoons, when clouds hide the mountains, that things get particularly tricky. While being trained to fly in Nepal, rookie pilots are warned not to fly into clouds because “they have rocks in them”.

Pilots need to have their wits about them, especially when they are below the assigned safe altitude for that sector or deviating to avoid weather. As the record shows, there is almost no chance of surviving a CFIT, and in most of the accidents everyone on board has been killed.

“During the monsoon, you better know exactly where you are when how high you are allowed to be,” says one veteran Nepali pilot who started outin DC-3s in the 1960s. “Flying in the Himalaya there is no room for error. It is unforgiving terrain.”

It is when pilots are not trained properly on new routes, or when they do not follow guidelines for course heading and altitude that there is danger of slamming into a mountain. Or, in some cases, a contributing factor is that overloaded planes are not able to maintain proper climb rates.

Pilots are extra careful when landing at Nepal’s most-infamous airports like Lukla, Phaplu or Dolpo which some pilots compare to landing on an aircraft carrier with a tilted deck. Very few of crashes have occurred at those airports, and even when there are mishaps, there haven’t been fatalities.

However, it is during cruise, or while descending to land that planes have most often flown into mountainsides. The Necon Air crash that killed 15 last year clipped a telecommunication tower at the western end of the Valley, and was flying through a cloud. The Lumbini Air plane took the wrong turn northwest of Pokhara and ended up hitting a cliff in cloud.

The pilot of an Everest Air flight to Bharatpur in 1993 thought he had cleared the mountains when he hadn’t, and hit a last hill in cloud.

According to air traffic controllers in Dhangadi this seems to be exactly what happened to “Bravo Papa” last week. The pilot radioed that he had cleared the last ridge and was coming in to land on runway 09, he seems to have been off course and hit the summit of the cloud-shrouded Chure Hills.

In any other country, such a high rate of fatalities per passenger mile flown would have been cause for alarm. In Nepal, there is an almost blasé attitude about accidents. It is mostly blamed on “dasa” (fate), whereas air safety planners should be looking at ways to minimise CFIT risk.

There is talk that the department is thinking of making it mandatory to install a sophisticated forward-looking ground proximity warning system of the kind installed in fighter jets. But this equipment is so expensive that most domestic airlines will not be able to afford them.

After every crash, our tourism ministers have a new drill: first announce an investigation, then tour the crash site in the presence of TV. One minister even began a tradition last year of televised “surprise” checks of aircraft on the tarmac.

All air-crash stories have ended with customary announcement of the investigation team’s report after which everything goes back to normal: no heads roll, no negligent company or official gets disciplined. Another lesson not learnt. (Upload date: July 9/00)

Music therapy for chaotic Kathmandu

The unique voice of 94FM is gathering a cult following in this sacred valley.

Salil Subedi and Min Bajracharya

Sometimes it’s mistaken for Radio Nepal’s morning religion programme since it begins its daily broadcast with an “Om Shanti” mantra. But then follows a steady stream of music for the soul, which could only mean you’ve stumbled upon one of the best-kept secrets of Kathmandu’s airwaves: Himalayan Broadcasting Corporation 94FM.

A deep bass voice, so soothing it seems the speaker is in a trance,  wakes you up: “Sacred Valley: Shakti Radio.” This is one radio station where you will not be assaulted while still half-asleep by mindless teenage banter, panel discussions involving some of the most violently boring individuals in the valley, or a cacophony of pop.

This is one station that is – what is the word we’re looking for – so mellifluous, so relaxing that it should be prescribed for people with hypertension. Rx: Two hours of Shakti Radio in the morning before meals.

HBC 94FM is the latest FM station in Kathmandu Valley to take advantage of the government’s liberalised policy towards private radio broadcasters. While Radio Nepal rules the waves with its nationwide on the AM bands, there are now six private FM stations in Kathmandu. Most of them are indistinguishable from each other, but 94FM stands out with its unique voice, lack of chatter and its superb music selection.

The only other “different” FM in Kathmandu is Radio Sagarmatha 102.4FM, which is Nepal’s – and possibly South Asia’s – only station that has an avowed public service mandate.

But 94FM is in a totally different realm. From its studios in Arubari in Boudha, where the all-seeing eyes of the Buddha look down, Fred Cagan gets the day’s music selection ready: classical Indian and Western, spiritual, meaningful contemporary, world music, indigenous flute and drums, blues and jazz.

Says Cagan: "Our daily broadcast is like the flow of the river and in that pure river we put small boats, different programs, to take you for a ride to a different world. We don't want to jampack the river and that is why we sail calmly, reaching out to every other flow of life.

HBC started broadcasting on New Year’s Day this April, but now has a growing cult following among Nepali music-lovers and the Valley’s expatriate community. The station has already had its share of drama: one early morning three weeks ago the studio spontaneously combusted from all the shakti stored inside. Investigations later showed it was a short circuit probably from the load of broadcasting live the budget. But some did not totally discount a warning to the station from on high to just stick to music. 

The station’s slightly quirky aim, as mentioned in its brochure, is to convey “the treasures of the rich culture, spirit, medicine, knowledge, geomancy and sacred arts of the Himalayas. Sound in prayer and chanting, music and dance, evoke conscious expansion and understanding.” This is mushy stuff, and may put off some would-be listeners.

HBC is the brainchild of Italian musician and amateur philosopher, Claudio Rocchi, who came to Kathmandu and found it so peaceful, that he decided to locate his peace radio here. Rocchi, has been deeply influenced by the spiritualism of the subcontinent and among other things set up the Radio Krishna Centrale, and FM network for the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Says Rocchi: “Our target is to bring everyone doing FM in Kathmandu together, we want to at least sit around the same table.” Easier said than done, given the cutthroat competition between the commercial broadcasters in Kathmandu. “But,” Rocchi says with characteristic calm, “the word competition does not exist in our dictionary. We believe in cooperation and implementation.”

HBC has so far been broadcasting 20 hours a day: 4 AM to midnight, with a slight change in the mood of the music for the morning, day and evening hours. The signals are relayed by microwave from Boudha to the transmitters behind Swyambhunath and then beamed down to the Valley.

It greets early morning listeners with spiritually oriented morning prayers and meditation music. The bhajans, chants and sufi rhythms are ecumenical—not religion, per se, but pure consciousness.

Lately, a few weekly spiritual talk programs are being aired with
anchors like Swami Chandresh and Dudh Baba who are termed  'Soul-Js', an alternative to the yak-yak-yak of RJs. As Cagan puts it:  “We hope the programmes will help the people of Kathmandu open their inner eyes and make them aware of their responsibilities in the society."

As the morning wears on, and the sun climbs higher in the sky, 94FM fades into a selected mix of eastern, western and Nepali folk melodies. HBC says it will release few more programmes on its broadcast 'river' in the coming months. "Very soon we will be inviting young Nepali musicians and upcoming talents to share their view through our station," says Sanjay Chettri from his production desk.

By afternoon, the station has graduated to Dylan Dai and his Ramblin’ and Gam