Geology and Geopolitics
Nepali Times ईspecial 15 - 21 November 2024 #1235
In a process that began perhaps 65 million years ago, the Indian landmass broke off from Africa and headed north at high velocity to ram into the Eurasian coastline. The Himalaya today is the wreckage of that collision, and Nepal is smack in the middle of it.
India is still squeezing Nepal into the Chinese mainland, and therefore it is no surprise that geotectonics and geopolitics today have similar outcomes. Nepal’s Founding Grandfather Prithbi Narayan Shah, in his own pithy style, put it well 256 years ago: “Nepal is a squishy tomato between a rock and a hard place.”
Since then, it was a hallowed tradition for Jung Bahadur and others who followed him to kowtow to the North and grovel to the South. And there is an unwritten rule that Nepal’s prime minister should go to Delhi first after becoming prime minister. We don’t know who unwrote that rule, but we seem to get worried that the Indians will be miffed if a Nepali PM does not adhere to the custom.
And then Prime Ministers-in-Waiting-and-Waiting-and-Waiting keep going to Delhi even if they are not prime ministers yet. And it does not seem to matter if a person has been prime minister five times previously, the unwritten rule of making a quick dash to the Delhi Durbar on his sixth tenure still applies.
All this by background as you read the page 1 curtainraiser by Special Correspondent Shristi Karki’s on Prime Minister Oli’s proposed visit to Beijing 2-6 December (Oli’s Oscillations) apparently after he gave up waiting for an invite from Emperor Namo.
Geopolitics also figures tangentially in the page 5 report (Pokhara’s Tourism Woes) about how the daily 10-hour curfew at Kathmandu airport has hurt Nepal’s ‘Tourist Capital’. Pokhara’s new airport was built at $220 million with a loan from China, but has not seen regular flights since it was inaugurated with much fanfare two years ago. As Vishad Raj Onta reports, despite demand from its tourists and pilgrims, India has refused airlines to fly between its cities and Pokhara because it was built by the Chinese. But no Nepali nor Chinese airline flies to the city, either.
On page 9, Pinki Sris Rana profiles Nepali poet Samyak Shertok, who has won the prestigious Donald Hall Prize for Poetry for his collection ‘No Rhododendron’ which a jury member said contains ‘…abiding grief and, in that, surviving to tell and retell stories’. Born in a tiny village in Sindhupalchok, Shertok tells us that poetry is his ‘permanent home’, and you can hear him recite one of his poems, Mother Tongue: A Haunting here.
The 52nd edition of Diaspora Diaries on page 10-11 has short write-ups by seven young survivors of the Jajarkot Earthquake exactly one year ago who have gone to Malaysia to work and earn to rebuild their destroyed homes. The difference with other migrant workers is that none of them had to borrow hefty sums from loan sharks to pay recruiters and for airline tickets. Read Quake Survivors Migrate for Work to find out how they did it.
Also on those pages read 19 Days in Russia about how recruiters tricked Khagendra Khatri into joining the Russian Army, and his harrowing escape from the Ukrainian front.
Outmigration of young men has also hit recruitment into Nepal’s security forces, as Man Bahadur Basnet reports in Job Insecurity in Security Forces.
Jai Hos!
Kunda Dixit
