Rumination & Rhapsody A Journal of Nepali Journalist Deepak Adhikari

This piece appeared in March issue of The Caravan magazine.

Nepal’s Drift

A 250-year-old nation long in thrall to one giant neighbour readies itself to play ball with another

BY DEEPAK ADHIKARI
Published: 1 March 2012

When Prithvi Narayan Shah, the 18th-century king who founded modern Nepal, defined the country as “a yam between two boulders”, he not only highlighted the nascent kingdom’s fragility, but also hinted at the intimidating presence of its two giant neighbours. Shah conquered several fiefdoms and principalities to unify Nepal, taking advantage of their petty wrangling. But even as he came upon success on the home front, he was still pitted against formidable foes in the British Empire and the Qing Dynasty. Shah’s metaphor has formed the core of Nepal’s strategic relations with its neighbours.

Flanked by India to the south, east and west and China to the north, the Himalayan nation has historically acted as a buffer state. The majestic mountains form a natural barrier between Nepal and China. But an assertive China, having arrived on the global stage with a bang, is leaving its footprints all over South Asia, and nowhere more prominently than Nepal. In building roads, investing in hydropower and telecoms, and signing multi-billion dollar aid packages, China is often treading on India’s toes in Nepal—and its increasing geo-political influence in the region is making India anxious. With both countries competing for Nepal’s attention, there is a consensus in Kathmandu that the country must take advantage of the newly ardent courtship.

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It must have been during the early 1980s. I neither remember the date nor the name of the teacher who almost changed my life. Well, sort of.

I was studying in the newly opened Mechi English School, first private school in the tiny town of Phidim in eastern hills. My father, a school teacher himself, enrolled me in it. I don’t even remember the grade I was in. But once I completed grade one, I outgrew its classes: the school would not upgrade beyond grade one. (Now it’s a high school). Long before, the school was relocated to Gadhi Danda overlooking Phidim bazar. I was transferred to a government-run school.

To my and my classmates’ surprise, a peace corps volunteer teacher gave me marks that were higher than that of the first boy of the class, Rabindra Bhattarai.

I was second in the class and thought that I will never “win” Rabindra. But the American teacher thought that my drawing of a grapevine (if memory serves) was so impressive that I scored higher than Rabindra’s. What the American teacher’s move did to me was to boost my morale. And, it was no small matter in such a small town.

Childhood is a time of intense rivalry and envy. In retrospect, things like these seem mundane, but then it was a big deal. Rabindra, who most likely doesn’t remember this, has now settled in Phidim after a couple of failed attempts at studying science in Kathmandu. He runs the family business.

Sadly, a few years ago, I heard that the principal of the school (we used to fear him a lot because he would punish with severe beatings) died on a bike accident near Mane Bhanjhyang on his way to Darjeeling. His wife now runs the school.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank my friend Dinesh Wagle, whose fine piece (in Nepali) on the resumption of peace corps volunteer in Nepal published in the Saturday edition of Kantipur, reminded me of this.

Links: A peace corps volunteer who chronicled her experience of living in Phidim (scroll half way through the piece to find Phidim).

A profile at The New Yorker (subscription required) on Rajeev Goyal, a peace corps volunteer who served in Nepal by another former peace corps volunteer Peter Hessler.

By Deepak Adhikari

In mid-November, I along with AFP photographer Prakash Mathema traveled to Shaktikhor in south-central Nepal to cover the “regrouping” of Maoist ex-combatants. The survey of 3,000 combatants in the PLA Third Division cantonment was completed in late November.

Out of total 19,600 ex-combatants, more than 2500 didn’t turn up for the survey, which sparked criticism from the opposition parties. Total 7,286 ex-fighters have opted for the voluntary retirement package and only six have chosen rehabilitation, which includes vocational training and foreign employment. The remaining former fighters want to join Nepal Army, which has offered to integrate only 65,00 of them. The logistics of the re-integration process are still being worked out.

This feature was originally published by AFP on December 13, 2011. Click this link to read it.

Nepal’s Maoists reveal wartime scars

SHAKTIKHOR CANTONMENT, Nepal — As Man Bahadur Chhetri contemplates life away from the squalid camp in which he has languished with hundreds of comrades for five years, his thoughts turn to the horrors of war.

Chhetri is among 19,000 Maoist fighters who have been confined to makeshift rural cantonments since Nepal’s ten-year insurgency ended in 2006, as rival political factions argued over what to do with the fighters in peacetime.

But his life is about to change, for the veteran of many bloody battles will ditch his uniform for civilian clothing after a landmark peace deal offering the fighters jobs in the regular army or help to reintegrate into society.

The slight 28-year-old sits with dozens of highly-trained guerrillas under a tent at the Shaktikhor cantonment in Chitwan, southern Nepal, recalling the hardships of the last 15 years.

Chhetri joined the Maoists when he was barely 15 and lost an elder brother, cousin and uncle to the conflict.

Six years ago his best friend was killed in a battle with the Nepalese army that left at least 50 Maoist fighters dead in the country’s remote hills.

“We were firing and advancing. But when I looked back, I saw that my friend had fallen. I felt like the sky was falling,” he says.

“Our comrades passed his body to one another in successive human chains. Shrapnel hit my head and later I realised that my left leg was also hit by a bullet,” he recalls, adding that blood was pouring from the wounds.

“I fell unconscious. My friends took me away for medical treatment.”

Chhetri and his colleagues have bided their time in a ramshackle township of tiny tin-roofed wooden and concrete houses while their future was put on ice by five years of wrangling between Nepal’s powerbrokers.

Around 40 share a kitchen, taking turns to cook with basic rations. They sleep in sparse living quarters, six to a room, and have little but volleyball, table-tennis and chess to help them pass the time.

Their daily duties revolve around morning exercise, guarding the entrances and watching towers, for which they receive a monthly stipend of 6,500 rupees ($80).

But the rules governing their confinement to the cantonment has been loosely enforced and the cadres are often seen wandering outside. Some venture out to nearby town of Narayangadh or even as far as Kathmandu.

The war ended when the Maoists struck a deal with parliamentary parties in 2006 and organised nationwide protests that forced the king to step down.

They went on to win elections two years later and abolish the country’s 240-year-old monarchy.

Under the final peace accord struck between the Maoists and the three other major political parties last month, Chhetri and his comrades are being offered places in the army they fought for a decade.

The alternatives are a retirement package of up to 800,000 rupees ($10,000) or rehabilitation that includes vocational training but no government cash.

“After discussions with my family, I made up my mind to go for voluntary retirement,” Chhetri told AFP.

As former fighters describe their reasons for joining the Maoists, a picture emerges of a country riven by a rigid caste system, abject poverty and gender discrimination.

Forty percent of camp inmates are women. One of them, Tulku Syangtan, 22, was first persuaded to join up by the Maoists’ avowed goal of ending violence against women.

“Traditionally, women are perceived as weak and dependent on others. I wanted to prove that we are at a par with men,” she said, adding that she had decided to integrate into the regular army.

But former rebels voice concerns that not much has changed in the country since the war and their aspiration to end inequalities and lift millions out of poverty remains a distant dream.

Sunita Gautam, 30, a battalion commander, has opted to join the national army she once fought against, but is angry over the way integration has been conducted.

“The United Nations Mission in Nepal has already verified us as combatants. But the peace deal says we have to fulfill the criteria set by the Nepalese Army to qualify for integration,” she says. “We are not satisfied with this.”

Gautam is proud to have fought during the “people’s war”, which she says helped her better understand her country and the contradictions inherent in society.

“We had high hopes when we joined the party,” she says. “But the country has not moved ahead as per our expectations.”

This appeared in The Kathmandu Post today.

The Body Bazaar

By Deepak Adhikari

A year ago, I made a trip to a few villages in Kavre. My aim was to talk to the villagers who had sold their kidneys. Exact figures on kidney donors are hard to come by but it’s a known fact that hundreds of villagers in Hokse, Jyamdi, Panchkhal have been lured into selling their organs. The poor are promised handsome monetary rewards but often end up being cheated. And the local authorities—short in manpower and passing the buck to Kathmandu, because most traffickers live in the relative anonymity of capital—conveniently ignore the illegal trade.

I was reminded of this while reading Scott Carney’s non-fiction debut The Red Market: On the Trail of the World’s Organ Brokers, Bone Thieves, Blood Farmers and Child Traffickers. Carney, an American investigative journalist with a decade of reporting experience in India, has written a gripping account of the global body bazaar, a thriving multi-billion dollar illegal industry, which is little explored but undeniable.

Carney’s narrative takes us to several countries, starting with his first foray into human anatomy. In India, overseeing a tour of American students, he is thrust into handling a dead body when one of his students dies in Bodh Gaya. The shocking experience acts as an impetus for him to explore the interface between the human body and its treatment.

In Tsunami Nagar in Tamil Nadu, there had been a boom in organ sales in the period following the 2004 tsunami, where kidney procurers had seen fit to take advantage of the people displaced. Carney talks about how residents of Kidneyville or Kidneyvakkam continue to fall prey to middlemen supplying organs to Indian as well as foreign patients called “transplant tourists”, who travel to India both for cheaper cost of surgery and readily available organs.

Human organ trafficking has transcended geographical boundaries. In China, you find surgeons extracting body organs from prison-inmates. In Brazil, organ smuggling is rampant. In the predominantly Muslim Iran, where selling kidneys is legal, experts have argued that it has led to commodification of the organ.

Kidney trade is but a tiny part of Carney’s research. In one section, he also discusses his visit to a bone factory in West Bengal where a third generation bone trader, Mukti Biswas, entrusted with the village cemetery, robs graves. He writes: “He would drag the deceased from the flames as soon as the family left.” Human skeletons are in high demand in medical institutes in the West.

The book’s scope is wide; from the heinous blood farming, in which migrants, including Nepalis, are detained for months in sheds, to benign human trades such as adoption and hair harvesting, Carney valiantly probes the supply side of the transaction.

In a chapter aptly titled ‘Black Gold’, he traces the journey of hair harvested from the Hindu devotees in Tirupati, India, which ends up in the US and Europe to feed into a half-billion-dollar beauty industry.

‘Meet the Parents’ is a touching story of a kidnapped kid who was adopted by American parents. Carney travels to their suburban home and meets the adoptive parents who seem reluctant to discuss the issue.

Another exploration of the body trade takes him to Cyprus—a country with more fertility clinics per capita than any other country—where desperate childless parents from Israel and Europe buy eggs from Russian and Ukrainian donors (prized for their fair skin), arranged by local entrepreneurs. “Over the past decade the global demand for human eggs has grown exponentially and without clear guidelines, proliferating…a fertility industry that has become multi-billion dollar behemoth,” Carney writes, “Cyprus is an egg bazaar that capitalizes on both sides of the supply-and-demand equation. Internationalization has made oversight laughable.”

In India, the Oprah Winfrey-endorsed Akanksha Infertility Clinic supplies surrogate mothers, who are kept in dismal conditions during their pregnancy. The parents—mostly foreigners—pay US $14,000 for their services but the surrogate mothers get less than half of this, the profits instead going to the people who run the clinic.

The area Carney has set out to explore is an intersection of medical science and morality; there is a thin line separating these two. The advances in science have brought about unprecedented progress in health care and medicine. But, at the same time, it has led to rampant commercialisation. Carney, trained as an anthropologist, is well aware of these ethical dilemmas and explores them with aplomb.

At the end of an investigation stretching over several countries, the author poses a number of difficult questions: Do we care about the people who supply the body parts as long as we don’t know where they come from? Carney attacks our blissful ignorance. He asks: “Is it even possible to set up a system that minimizes damage across all the red markets?”

The answers are not easy. As long as there are people in the developing world willing to sell their organs due to poverty and people in the developed world making a beeline for their purchase, the cycle is likely to continue. But we need journalists like Carney to shake us from our complacency and remind us about the magnitude and implications of the body trade.

Is Nepal’s new Maoist prime minister up to the challenge?

Deepak Adhikari
The moribund peace process in Nepal has been given a new lease of life with the election of a former Maoist rebel, Baburam Bhattarai, to the post of prime minister. Garlanded and smeared in vermillion powder immediately after his election to the helm of power on August 28, 2011, a jubilant Bhattarai announced his priorities loud and clear: under his leadership, Nepal would complete its five-year-old peace process by integrating former Maoist fighters into the state forces, writing the long-overdue constitution and providing the deprived populace with relief packages. Widely perceived as an intellectual with an impeccable public and political image, Bhattarai, 57, is regarded as the most popular politician in Nepal.

Sure enough, within days of his election, the stalled peace process gained momentum with the handover of weapons containers held in Maoist combatant cantonments to the Army Integration Special Committee (AISC), which has been given the task of merging the combatants into the state forces. Similarly, a series of meetings with opposition parties on drafting a constitution has lent credence to the fact that he has the will and strategy to bail the country out of a political crisis. But, given the complex nature of Nepali politics, Bhattarai, a doctorate from the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in India, is not in for a smooth ride.

The move to hand over the keys of the weapons containers met with stiff opposition from within his own party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) (UNCPM), which had launched a decade-long insurgency to establish a communist regime before joining the peace process in November 2006. Dubbing the move a “capitulation to the regressive forces”, Mohan Baidya, aka Kiran, who leads the so-called hard-line faction in the party, put up a tough fight. Despite his resistance, the keys were handed over to officials of the AISC on 1 September. But the move generated a backlash due to Baidya’s strong support base in the party. His faction has begun campaigns against the move: they staged protests in Kathmandu the following day, blocking vehicles during the morning rushhour.

Read more in the Caravan magazine: