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By Devendra Gautam

Parched fields and a shower of pledges

How do parched paddy fields of the country look like from thousands of feet above? 

Do they look like a proper grain basket with a key role in ensuring food security and averting a famine year after year after year in an impoverished country reeling progressively under corruption, mal-governance, the rule of law and chronic political instability with each passing year, under a clique?  

Lush green? Brimming with crops like paddy? Does it look like the proverbial Ramrajya or the ideal state in the socialist-communist lingo? 

Our chief executive knows better as he conducted an aerial inspection of the parched fields one fine afternoon and landed on the barren flatlands of Mahottari with a shower of promises, including the pledge to immediately install 500 deep boring units in Madhesh. 

By the way, how immediate is immediate enough for the Nepali officialdom? Well, all this is subject to interpretation, isn’t it?  

Only the chief executive well-versed in all kinds of knowledge under the sun and beyond—from the Veds to communist-socialist literature to AI to IOT—knows better. 

Anyway, let’s hope his actions speak louder than his words, which are loud enough already.  


An afterthought: With an unchecked extraction of sand and boulders from the Chure hills along with deforestation, how well will the wells of the once fertile plains well up? 

Swollen brooks, perilous crossings

While the southern plains of the country crave for water, rivers and brooks are flowing in spate in the Hills (please don’t share this gem of information with our leaders and bureaucrats, for the moment they come to know about these lifelines, they will give them away, robbing the plains, the hills and the Himalayas of more of their lifelines). A short video of some people trying to take a pregnant woman across the river, perhaps to some health facility, on a raft made of inflated tyres and other materials is going viral on social media. 

This, even as years have gone by since the current chief executive pledged to make Nepal ‘tuin-free’ by building bridges across the rivers throughout the country with such dangerous means of crossing rivers and rivulets hung like thinly-carved lifelines on the palms of those whose daily life is a struggle against a looming death that casts its long shadow everywhere. 

One wonders if even a tuin would be a great help for a people seeking to cross a swollen river on a poorly-made raft. 

Alas, such perilous crossings hardly make headlines for our self-styled mainstream media. 

Meanwhile in Surkhet district, Dhaniram Acharya (55) and his wife Dhankumari Acharya (50) of Neware, Virendrangar municipality-12 died after getting electric shock in their homestead at 10.45 am on Friday while operating an electric grass-cutting machine. They were rushed to the Karnali provincial hospital in Kalagaun, only to be pronounced dead at 11.15 am. 

This incident perhaps shows increased vulnerability of aging people left in the country to fend for themselves, while lakhs of youths sweat it out in dirty, difficult and dangerous conditions throughout the world. Still, through every annual budget, the government pledges to create jobs within the country and a gullible people believe one more time. 

No wonder that this land of the brave and the home of the free is faring worse and worse with each passing day. 

Unparalleled audacity

These days, aliens are showing bravado even as a meek and weak offspring of the soil keep watching, albeit helplessly. 

A video circulating on social media shows three people misbehaving with a team of people’s representatives and staff from Vyas municipality, Tanahun district, in the course of inspection. 

In particular, one young chap is heard badmouthing an aged official during the inspection of the Pintu grocery store in Vyas municipality-3, on Wednesday, while local people look on. 

The three turn out to be Indian nationals Messrs Jawahit Shah and Raju Shah and Mrs Mayadevi Shah, reportedly from Motihari, Bihar, and they are currently in a five-day custody for further investigation on the charge of misdemeanour. 

This kind of audacity in Nepal speaks a lot at a time of reports that married women of Nepali origins are most likely to be disenfranchised right before Bihar assembly elections. 

Given the way things are in our dear country, it will be no wonder if the offenders go scot-free before this piece gets published, with vice-regal intervention.

But are these matters of earthshaking importance in an earthquake-prone country? Perhaps not. 

How about a former president, who has been hogging the headlines for some days?

A comeback?

On July 25, the former head of the state held a press conference in the Capital in the presence of mediapersons packed like sardines in a tin can amid reports that the leadership of the party with which she has been associated for about 40 years (deducting her years in the high office that is supposedly a non-political position) has refused even to renew her membership, throwing cold water on her aspirations to return to active politics. 

At the event, she pointed out that no one can deny her the opportunity to serve the country and the people through the party plank just like that, given the role of thousands of leaders and cadres like her in building the party, countering certain leaders’ assertions that it is not morally right for a former head of the state to seek to return party politics. 

While the leader has expressed her determination to remain active through the plank of her party created through blood, sweat and toil of multitudes, what if the leadership shuts the door on her? It will be no surprise if it does, given that the party has veered miles and miles off the path that her husband and ideologue, whom Newsweek once described as the Karl Marx living in Nepal, showed in the 90s.

What will she do if that happens? Form a new political party by bringing together likeminded cadres and leaders, and channelizing her energies into general elections that are about two years away? 

Above all, what are the key objectives of her comeback? Her husband, the then general secretary of the party with which she has a decades-long association, was against the Mahakali Treaty, but the party played a key role in its ratification through a manufactured consent in the Parliament along with other key parties represented in it, making a mockery of the sovereign body. The current government under the leadership of her party appears bent on treading on the forbidden, treasonous path as the chief executive has stood resolutely in favour of the treaty and promised to steer ahead the Pancheshwor project. 

Will she seek to chart out a different path, prioritising the use of Nepal’s rivers for inland navigation, irrigation, water supply, fisheries, hydropower generation and domestic ecological gains by seeking revisions of treasonous deals over the Koshi, Gandaki, Mahakali and the like?

Also, there are several conspiracy theories suggesting that her husband and the chief of the party’s organization department were killed in Dasdhunga, Chitwan, in a ‘road accident’ as part of a grand design against Nepal on May 16, 1993 and that the royal massacre of June 1, 2001 was the next chapter of that design. 

Her party has repeatedly come to power by cashing in on the legacy of the two leaders and promising a free, fair and transparent investigation into the May 16 case. 

How will the former president deal with some of the burning issues mentioned above if she manages to return to power as, say, the chief executive of the country through a popular vote?

This question, yours truly thinks, should not be kept hanging in the air for long.