Everyday, we are served a sight of our statesmen exiting important places: President House, party offices, Mr. Sushil Koirala's house. These are men, with protuberant bellies mostly. From the push and pull of reporters, we are demanded to infer that these men are important people. What they say matter.
But we find ourselves lost to their magniloquence most of the times. Rather, I find myself appreciating, many a times, their sleek attire, lustrous cars of diverse makes and models; on the eminence granted by security personnel clad in neat dark suits running alongside the moving vehicle. How do these people finance such oppulence? In these dusty roads, filth, how do they keep themselves so neat? We wonder. Indeed, our proletarians have come a long way. In their splendor we seek our dreams. Forget about what they have to say!
However, not all is lost to our ears. Some of the recent events are incapable of being buried in the platitude of our political oratory.
1. A Nepali colonel Kumar Lama was detained in UK. He is charged with intentionally "inflicting severe pain or suffering" as a public official, says BBC. Our government has objected to the detention.
2. A Nepali journalist Dekendra Raj Thapa was killed in 2004 by Maoists. Thanks to persistence of the journalists in seeking justice, recently the perpetrators of the crime have been arrested by the police. They have apparently confessed to burying Mr. Thapa alive. Our Prime Minister has tried to stop the trial. He argues, if this process goes forward it will derail the peace process. We should forget what happened in the war.
What are we to make of all of these?
We are told, it is wrong to seek justice when someone has been tortured and buried alive. We are told, we should get our colonel back who has been arrested for war crimes. This is what it has come to: these are the moral battles of our government, of our politicians.
We had seen it coming all along. They told us, it's okay to kill for a larger purpose. We were told it was necessary to let barbaric men pin a man to a tree and torture him till his soul scrammed out of the battered body, in order to achieve justice and prosperity for all the downtrodden. Bombing a bus and burning 39 people alive, to kill 3 army personnel, was deemed a possible error in war. When our teenage girls and women were raped and killed by our tax-paid army, we were told that happens in war and that our army was fighting to protect us.
In more than a decade of blood-bath, we were visited by the darkest of the evils. Our children's innocence had been violated by the daily display of heinous atrocities in our news media. Numbed by the horror, we were speechless, motionless.
Now we are told, we need to forget that time. All those were done for a purpose. We have agreed to move forward. In strong rhetorical terms we are told, our only way is way forward.
But we ask, where are we on that purpose? What was that purpose anyways?
Mr. Prime Minister and Mr/Mrs/Ms Politicians, we might have been speechless but our memory teems with every detail of the horror that happened in that time. We beg you not to try to trample our basic intelligence and human character. The fact is clear: now that your phantasmagorical philosophies are going down the drain, you have to face the deeds of your past. You have served us void where you had told us gold would be delivered. Now that we are empty handed, we ask you why you made us witnesses to the darkness inside you?
Some of us, unfortunately, are not blessed with amnesia to the horror of violence as you seem to be endowed with. Whatever the pragmatic way out of this mess might be, we have learned a solid truth about loud voices that say violence is a justified force. Even now we hear some of you saying you are ready to take up arms once again: please know, we have been disillusioned.
But we find ourselves lost to their magniloquence most of the times. Rather, I find myself appreciating, many a times, their sleek attire, lustrous cars of diverse makes and models; on the eminence granted by security personnel clad in neat dark suits running alongside the moving vehicle. How do these people finance such oppulence? In these dusty roads, filth, how do they keep themselves so neat? We wonder. Indeed, our proletarians have come a long way. In their splendor we seek our dreams. Forget about what they have to say!
However, not all is lost to our ears. Some of the recent events are incapable of being buried in the platitude of our political oratory.
1. A Nepali colonel Kumar Lama was detained in UK. He is charged with intentionally "inflicting severe pain or suffering" as a public official, says BBC. Our government has objected to the detention.
2. A Nepali journalist Dekendra Raj Thapa was killed in 2004 by Maoists. Thanks to persistence of the journalists in seeking justice, recently the perpetrators of the crime have been arrested by the police. They have apparently confessed to burying Mr. Thapa alive. Our Prime Minister has tried to stop the trial. He argues, if this process goes forward it will derail the peace process. We should forget what happened in the war.
What are we to make of all of these?
We are told, it is wrong to seek justice when someone has been tortured and buried alive. We are told, we should get our colonel back who has been arrested for war crimes. This is what it has come to: these are the moral battles of our government, of our politicians.
We had seen it coming all along. They told us, it's okay to kill for a larger purpose. We were told it was necessary to let barbaric men pin a man to a tree and torture him till his soul scrammed out of the battered body, in order to achieve justice and prosperity for all the downtrodden. Bombing a bus and burning 39 people alive, to kill 3 army personnel, was deemed a possible error in war. When our teenage girls and women were raped and killed by our tax-paid army, we were told that happens in war and that our army was fighting to protect us.
In more than a decade of blood-bath, we were visited by the darkest of the evils. Our children's innocence had been violated by the daily display of heinous atrocities in our news media. Numbed by the horror, we were speechless, motionless.
Now we are told, we need to forget that time. All those were done for a purpose. We have agreed to move forward. In strong rhetorical terms we are told, our only way is way forward.
But we ask, where are we on that purpose? What was that purpose anyways?
Mr. Prime Minister and Mr/Mrs/Ms Politicians, we might have been speechless but our memory teems with every detail of the horror that happened in that time. We beg you not to try to trample our basic intelligence and human character. The fact is clear: now that your phantasmagorical philosophies are going down the drain, you have to face the deeds of your past. You have served us void where you had told us gold would be delivered. Now that we are empty handed, we ask you why you made us witnesses to the darkness inside you?
Some of us, unfortunately, are not blessed with amnesia to the horror of violence as you seem to be endowed with. Whatever the pragmatic way out of this mess might be, we have learned a solid truth about loud voices that say violence is a justified force. Even now we hear some of you saying you are ready to take up arms once again: please know, we have been disillusioned.
No comments:
Post a Comment