At the height of the royal-military dictatorship, the Maoists tortured and killed Dekendra Thapa of Surkhet. Since he had been associated with the government news agency and had emceed during a field visit of Chairman-King Gyanendra Shah, Dekendra was an “enemy of the people” in the eyes of Maoist cadres. Almost nine years after the tragedy, some of those boys have come of age and recovered their senses. They have confessed their crime.
One ex-Maoist cadre claimed that the journalist was still breathing when he was buried. Insurgency, like war, is a dehumanizing affair. Recourse to violence snaps the cord of emotion that binds one living being with another. In a snapshot doing the rounds on the web, the accused—nay, the guilty, since they have admitted to have committed the crime—look like ordinary youngsters who could be found whiling away their time at teashops anywhere in the mid-western mountains. With little education, little self-respect, no jobs and no hope, such youths are orphans of modernization.[break]
Having nothing to sell and very little to buy, jobless youths are outcasts of market economy. The development industry treats them with disdain because they demand their share in the national loot. For the state, they are an embarrassing liability. No wonder, there is so much anger in these boys who find that there is simply no outlet for the surge of adrenaline that comes naturally at a certain age. They are the biggest crop of the countryside.
Many of these lost youths readily fall into the hands of militant groups. Maoist apparatchiks were astute in giving them guns with the legitimating ideology of ‘revolution’ and turning them into killing machines.
The insurgency has been shelved. The revolution is over. Guns have gone where they had originally come from. Adolescents have aged, often much beyond their years, in utter frustration. There is still no job, no respect and no hope. It is courageous of the boys involved in the torture and murder of Dekendra to admit their crime. In Victor Hugo’s classic on French Revolution, a revolutionary accepts the sword of justice with a defiant statement: “When the guilty acknowledges his fault, he saves the only thing worth saving—honor.”
But is justice merely a legitimate form of revenge?
The kin of Dekendra want justice. Journalists of Kathmandu want vengeance for the murder of one of their tribesman. For the last few weeks, scribes of all hues have been shedding and bleeding ink. Unfortunately for them, there is no provision of death penalty in Nepal. The guilty cannot be tortured and buried alive in retaliation. Criminals could be taken to court and then the law would take its own course. The course of law in Nepal, however, merits some deliberation. There must have been some reason kangaroo courts of the Maoists were wildly popular for more than a decade.
Different folks
Ijahar Pamariya of Sarlahi was a wage laborer. He was returning from the day’s work in the fields of a local landowner when keepers of the law beat him to death with big batons. Ijahar was believed to be 50—nobody keeps record of the age of the poor—and life was probably a continuous struggle. Death released him from his sufferings. Justice? The police refuse to accept that they killed a worker passing by some peaceful protestors blocking a road.
There is nobody even to shed tears for Ijhar Pamariya. The Human Rights industry lost all interest once they realized that the case had failed to attract attention of the national media and thus had little chance of being a remunerative engagement. In its very first issue, the Terai Human Rights Journal has recorded the case for posterity.
Prashant Pandey, perhaps in his twenties, was a paramedic operating a medicine shop in Jhulinipur of Rupandehi District. He is lucky to have come out alive from police custody. Ravi Thakur, the indomitable person behind the Madhesh Human Rights (MAHURI) Home pursued his case. The court cleared him of all charges. However, Prashant had been tortured so badly that he is mentally disturbed. Local doctors have determined that he lost his reproductive capacities probably because he was forcibly made to pee on live electric heaters while in custody. In all his innocence, Prashant appears like a dead man walking. Pushpa Panday, mother of the victim and a brave woman, wants to spend whatever resources she has in treating her son rather than do the rounds of the courts in search of justice.
After an engaging debate in Plato’s Republic about the “might makes right” proposition, Socrates admits in all humility: “The result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor I can say the just man is happy or unhappy.”
If justice be a chimera, happiness a daydream, and sorrow the only reality, how does one cope with the challenges of living? Krishna says that to respond to one’s calling without expectation of rewards is the right way to live. The Buddha ordains detachment from illusions and single-minded devotion to Nirvana. The scriptures of various religions prescribe doing good to others and proscribe inflicting pain upon anyone. There are millions of treatises on how one should live. Coping with life, however, is a process without prescription.
Different strokes
The author, consultant and economist Albert O. Hirschman (1915-2012) thought he could offer fresh insights into the old question. Over a long career, he had held academic posts at Yale, Columbia, and Harvard. Unlike topflight specialists who hesitate to step out of their areas of expertise, Prof. Hirschman took great delight in trespassing into unfamiliar territories and crossing boundaries of disciplines. In the early Seventies, he came up with the idea of voice, exit and loyalty in an eponymous book.
The central theme of the treatise is simple. Voice is the method of influencing power games that characterize everyday life. Citizens speak, write and vote. Consumers make choices and claim rights. Insurgents take up guns for “the propaganda of the deed.” When unable to make a difference, people have the option of changing their party, product or location. Migration is an easy way but death is the ultimate exit. Albert Camus called suicide the central question of human existence.
Photo: Bijay Rai
Voice does not always work, and exit is not an easy option. That is when one has to get on with life. Loyalty—to have the faith to believe that “every little thing gonna be all right”—is the method the vast majority of humanity uses to survive. In a way, Hirschman’s thesis adds the modern option to the humus primus instinct of “fight or flight” in the face of danger.
Religions, laws, books, television, newspapers and games are appurtenances of fortitude. From the high priests on their pristine perches to the lowly scribes scavenging the gutters for scoops and from a politico in his motorcade to a player jogging through the street in his shorts, each one is merely an entertainer in the circus called life. Were it not for them, revenge would be the norm rather than the exception, and the Hobbesian anarchy of “war of all against all” would prevail.
Reconciliation through recording, reparation and rehabilitation is the pathway of peace towards justice. Or so say the proponents of restorative justice. Had justice been that simple to achieve, war and conflicts would not have been the permanent feature of world history. “Non-violence is the highest virtue,” intones Lord Krishna, and adds without blinking in the very next sentence of the same verse, “And so is righteous violence.” As long as the concept of “righteous violence” would survive, cruelty in the name of righting the wrongs of others would continue to go round in circles.
The highest virtue then is neither voice nor exit but fortitude and forbearance. Unfortunately, none of the utopian ideologies—Capitalism, Liberalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism or any other –ism—believe in the inevitability of suffering.
Meanwhile, voice may not change reality, but it helps release frustrations and decrease guilt. Perhaps the hue and cry over the nearly a decade-old case of Dekendra’s murder is the noise of the purgatory for media persons who were silent throughout the armed insurgency but discovered their voice as soon as the Maoists came into peaceful politics. The designs of destiny are impossible to understand.
The writer is one of the widely read political analysts in Nepal.
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