In four years, that is, by 1970, I had become a committed student of Nepal. My border crossing was a thing of the past by then, and I had tossed all my life’s cowries in the “juwa khaal” called Kathmandu. From my friends at the TU campus, I learnt about the political in and economic outs of Nepal, and the current news and racy rumors of goings-on and piping hot gossips doing the rounds in Kathmandu’s underground political enclaves. The town’s high society of Nepali elites and access-privileged expatriates rendezvoused nightly inside the dens of Casino Nepal in the subterranean basement of Soaltee Hotel. As a Blackjack croupier and inspector, I saw international and Nepali movers and shakers who steered the affairs and decided the fate and destiny of Nepal around the roulette wheels, in the lounge of the best-stocked bar in town, and at the three-card Flush tables. The insomniac patrons were the USAID honchos, UN experts, diplomats, international charity foundation chiefs in the region, Tibetan refugee rehabilitation specialists, development consultants and aid advisors, not talking about Vietnam Vets on R&R furloughs from Da Nang and Saigon, Royal Nepalese Army colonels, forest conservators, customs and tax officials, Foreign Ministry mandarins and chiefs of protocol, corporation chiefs, travel agency CEOs, general managers of deluxe hotels, contractors and general suppliers, brokers, goldsmiths and jewelers, importers, poultry farmers, taxi and truck transporters, Nepali Tibetan carpet exporters, and the likes – the crème de la crème of Nepal.[break]
As I said above, we were required to read social science reference books on Britain while studying English Literature in our MA curricula – such as the economic and social status of the illiterate squatters and groundlings who were the original audience of Shakespeare’s plays, among other societal portraits of the day and century in question. This essential side discipline helped me to be interested in Nepali affairs as well, and so I observed the characteristics and idiosyncrasies of my host country that Nepal had become. The volatile and pulsating politics of university students at Kirtipur campus during the day and the nocturnal world of power players and influencers gathered in Casino Nepal gave me glimpses into the diametric dimensions of Nepal as a whole. Between the two extreme worlds, I moonlighted as a menial musician, volunteering in a profession that was one of the most goddamned lots of an untouchable class of Nepali society.
Radio Nepal was broadcast on Short Wave (SW) frequencies for international listeners and on Medium Wave (MW) for Kathmandu consumers. Frequency Modulation (FM) carrier wave was something not even imagined in our days, and this would be where Radio Nepal could have revolutionized its broadcasting spectrums for an all-Nepal network with lateral linkup stations all over the country, with transmission towers on strategic hills, along the Mahabharat, Siwalik and Churia Ranges, inside the doons of the Inner Tarai, on the open Tarai flatlands and in the valleys of the interiors and hinterlands.
Sadly, this was not done while I was with Radio Nepal. It did not replenish its aging musical instruments nor did it add more modern ones to the stock, neither did it turn its rundown recording studios into state-of-the-art systems of the day, nor did it train any new musicians nor did it do anything to improve the lot of its studio staff and guest musicians – except raising our wage-per-approved-recording from five Rupees to Rs.7.50 in the entire 10 years I was there.
If radio is for infotainment and propaganda, Radio Nepal’s shortcomings were evident in both the poor musical entertainment it provided and inadequate attention paid to information dissemination. How was Nepali music doing to represent and reflect on Nepal’s “unique” Panchayat Raj through Radio Nepal? How was Radio Nepal helping to propagate the Panchayat Philosophy and the Partyless “paddhati” of Prajatantra – “the democracy based on and emanating from the sweet soil, pure air and holy waters of Mother Nepal” – which the Panchayat Polity had striven to prove as fructuous in its equity deliverance to Nepal? Well, not much to write home about on both counts, really, except quoting the king, reporting verbatim the speeches delivered by his mannequin prime minister and his copycat ministers and all the pro-regime statements and declarations made by the sycophants of the kingdom in its news broadcasts and features.
Illustration: Sworup Nhasiju
In comparison, the official Rashtriya Samachar Samiti (RSS, the national news service), and the state-controlled English-language daily newspaper, The Rising Nepal, and the Sanskrit-sauced vernacular sister Gorkhapatra daily and other government-owned magazines and periodicals did much more by publishing the profound variations on the singular theme of Nepal’s one and only indigenous Partyless Politics by such prominent Panchayat Prophets who had begun in the early ’60s. There was the Doctors Trio of Tulsi Giri, Jogendra Jha and Mishra who waxed eloquent on the Great Political Program. They were succeeded by such Panchayat Pundits in the personae of Dr Mohammed Mohsin, Pashupati SJB Rana, Malhotra, Bedanand Jha, Bishwabandhu Thapa, Pasang Goparma, Sushila Thapa, Bhadra Kumari Ghale, and by younger Turks like Dhruva Kumar Deoja and Dirgharaj Prasai. If the three older Pancha Magi of the ’60s throve in the reign and rule of King Mahendra – the founding father of Panchayat – the younger ones meta-treated the solemnity of the System in the absolutist years of his young successor, King Birendra.
As would be expected, we saw a clear dichotomy between the old status quo-ists and the new dynamists. When Prime Minister Kirti Nidhi Bista once said that the Panchayat Principle was not bound to any rigid “full stop-ism” and when Dr Harka Gurung read his subject specialist’s economic development paper on the need for “decentralization” in Nepal, the old status quo guards stirred up in protest against the romantic adventurism of Bista, Gurung and their ilk while young progressive minds jumped and cheered them up for a new Panchayat as a timely juggernaut for a new dynamism.
So, by the time I left Radio Nepal in 1976, the Panchayat Raj was 16 years old, and a new king was on the throne. In the new reign, there were already speculations that a Panchayat Reformation was on the anvil but the enterprise was already being sabotaged by multiple Counter Reformation manipulators among the cross-purposed Panchas. Conception and abortion were happening in tandem. King Birendra, the First Pancha, was more confused than amused by what were transpiring right under his royal nose. The new elements were all homegrown, which High Harvard and Elite Eton had not trained him to anticipate on his own home turf.
Even more internecine conflicts ensued between the old opinionated diehards and progressive pragmatists. Both the pioneer Panchas and the latter-day Panchayat Pundits and Punks stood their respective grounds; and the King Umpire remained indecisive inside the opaquely curtained Narayanhiti Raj Durbar. One coterie spearheaded by Surya Bahadur Thapa and Dr Prakash Chandra Lohani decried the “parkhal” (wall) erected for obstructing the Palace from the People. The people in question were Nepalis but variously defined as “praja” by absolutist monarchist schemers, “janata” or “deshbasi” or “nagarik” by muted federal democratic republican dreamers in the socialist and communist camps – God forbid such egalitarian concepts in those days! – or simply “raiti,” or cowed subjects, indentured slaves or serfs by the king’s courtiers and aristocrats of Old Nepal. Later, Surya Bahadur Thapa would even anticipate a certain “bhumigat giroha” (underground Mafia) for raising a Berlin Wall between the government and the governed, Meanwhile, he promptly sat down for a prolonged hunger strike while also courting arrest.
The grumble was partly true because Panchayat originally meant and was an “ayat” or “ayog,” council, of “pancha,” or five. The Council of Five was a grassroots rule of law functionary at the primary level, in the village itself. Thus, power and authority were delegated to the farthest lateral unit in a most decentralized manner, and this democratic system was ancient in practice. But in the Panchayat System of Nepal, all powers and authority were being centralized in the king – his durbar, throne, crown, and scepter completing the inanimate composition of the Council of Five. His Royal Council was merely a façade and the elected Council of Ministers was headed by the king’s handpicked prime minister.
The Panchayat Purdah was even more openly revealed to me when I was inducted as a senior research assistant by INAS – the Institute of Nepal and Asian Studies, now known as CNAS, the Centre for Nepal and Asian Studies – for its two-year project called the Bibliography Project of Panchayat, the Political System of Nepal, coinciding with and commemorating the tenth anniversary of the polity. It was undertaken when Dr Prayag Raj Sharma was the Dean of INAS, and the bibliography team leader was SB Thakur; among the senior researchers were Daman Raj Tuladhar and Thakur Lal Manandhar.
By the way, the shoebox index cards we accumulated for the Bibliography Project must still be at CNAS under a Dewey Classification System, if not consigned to flames in the Kathmandu Spring of 1990. As far as I remember, some Canadian scholars earned their Ph Ds by tooling with the corpus we had compiled.
All these ragamuffin antics for respective vested interests (read conflicts of interests) among the Panchas led King Birendra to declare the historic Panchayat Referendum some years later.
But I am again being fast forward here, by some six years. So the reels must be rewound to 1970, the year earmarking the first tenth anniversary of the Panchayat Path. The system of the soil was ten years old and it had survived typical Nepali infant mortality specter by another five years! This called for celebrations, by Lord Shiva!
To be continued in the next edition of The Week.
The writer is the copy chief at The Week and can be contacted at pjkarthak@gmail.com
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