Editorial»
Illnation, diagnosis and treatment
NOV 25 - It has but become a popular cliché that we
are passing through the darkest period of our history. The process of our development has not only been disturbed but also been put in the reverse direction, back by several decades. It will take us years of hard labour, not for further development, but just to get back where we were ten years before and this at a time when our neighbours have not only become economic giants but also nuclear powers. What brought us to this pass? Where did we go wrong? Admired all over the world for our playful smiles, hospitality and simplicity, why are we today at a phase where we cannot even move about freely in our own land?
The country was poor, backward, had a hostile terrain. Therefore it was not unnatural that the development process would be slow and difficult. We had however the goodwill and friendship of the entire world. As a result, foreign aid and donations had poured in since 1950. The United States, India, Britain, Japan, China, the USSR, European nations, Australia, Pakistan and so many others nations all had given with open hands and minds. Our people were hard-working and prepared to bend their backs that much more to bring prosperity to their hearths and homes. So, what went wrong in the pace of our progress?
It is pertinent to note that our neighbours, China and India, both achieved independence around the same time as us. They had huge populations and massive poverty. Comparatively speaking they did not receive foreign aid to the extent that we did. But then how are they virtual super powers now? Both wooed in friendship by those very advanced nations that perchance take but pity on us at our plight and situation.
It is sad to recall that our national carrier the RNAC and those carriers of Thailand and Singapore, Thai Airways and SIA, all came into being nearly at the same time. While both these airlines are today amongst the best in the world and expanding, our RNAC is, as I write, limited to just two dilapidated Boeing Aircrafts, and that too, often grounded. For all practical purpose it is dead and buried. This has been the main reason for loss in the lucrative tourist trade.
It is pathetic and maddening to our sense of pride to understand why we, who have one of the world’s greatest hydropower potentialities, have yet the least electrification and the most costly electricity. If this is not shocking then I don’t know what is, because cheap electricity nationwide would have stopped deforestation and widespread electrification would have lessened our burden on imported petroleum products.
So, the question must once again be raised, ‘After all what went wrong?’
Aid money as handled by our successive governments over the past decades did not all go to the right places. In spite of whatever amount of monitoring the donors did, some people in power were shrewd enough to enrich themselves even as the population at large writhed in absolute poverty. We elected people to responsible positions both in the partyless and the multi-party systems, only to see them lose their rural roots and their sense of responsibilities to the people and places that elected them. Instead they preferred to wallow in the den of luxury and corruption that the capital soon turned out to be. These newly empowered and rich politicians soon started a cycle of give-and-take form of corruption, which soon engulfed every sector of society. Business, industry, bureaucracy were the most badly hit and the chain reaction then involved all the rest in the attitude ‘If he can get so rich, so fast, why not me?’ All that was needed was to sacrifice one’s conscience in the need for quick, easy and unaccountable wealth. So while the impoverished, ill developed masses watched in wonder, the newly rich got richer on the same scale as the spectator masses went further down the economic slide. Contract irregularities, kick-backs, bribery, under the table payments, misappropriation of government funds and every form of corruption flowered and flourished and we flowed with the tide.
Politicians with and without power, along with their relatives and cronies, and the bullies and mafias that seem to go hand-in-glove with them, all became as destructive for the nation as the three proverbial witches of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’. As these three witches do in the classic tragedy, our compatriots brewed their evil potions that would go on boiling perpetually in cauldrons whether it be the cauldron of the Panchayati era or that of the multi-party era. Into these cauldrons went all subtle destructive ingredients that poisoned the nation and choked its very life.
In this field of corruption, fertilised by this rotting manure, neglected by the farmers who should have tended their fields otherwise, with respect for their electorate and responsibility of their elected positions, the newly created Maoist leadership found just what they were looking for. Any one in this scenario could have easily mobilised the angry masses against the government and the bureaucracy, what then to speak of highly intellectual individuals. The Maoist leadership, as we know it, is in fact just that: a very well educated and intellectual group. It was no wonder that they started succeeding where the traditional politicians started losing out, and ultimately even moving out permanently from their hearths and homes, leaving the field completely unhindered to the Maoists. Nature dose not tolerate a vacuum, neither does politics.
What has happened in these past 7-8 years of the Maoists ‘People’s War’ does not need repetition here for it is all too fresh in our minds, but it will be no exaggeration to say that not a single individual nor a single individual strata of society has been left untouched in some way or the other by it. With the long drawn civil war, what was foolishly taken by the people-in-power to be but small showers at the beginning has created waves that threaten to divide the entire nation.
So, how do we rise above this terrible quagmire? Is there no hope? Cannot some solution be yet found? Or are we to give it all up as hopeless and go in search of greener pastures elsewhere in the world? So many have gone and this exodus shows no signs of abating, if the Tribhuvan International Airport and the border check posts scenes are any guides.
I strongly believe that putting an end to this nightmarish experience is not at all as difficult as it may appear. Using the same example of the cauldron, if we are to put into it absolute honesty, nationalism, our feelings for fellow citizens, our sincere desire for economic progress and a genuine commitment towards lasting peace, and if we were to stir it with pure uncorrupted selfless effort, stoked by the fire of urgency, I think we could achieve a lot, and fast. After all, we have to make up for a lot of lost time.
(To be concluded)Posted on: 2003-11-24 08:23
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