Nepal is No Shangri-La

Henry Srebrnik, [Charlottetown, PEI] Guardian

The powerful earthquake that killed thousands of people on April 25 in Nepal drew the world’s attention to the country. Large parts of the capital, Kathmandu, were in ruins.

A Himalayan country north of India, Nepal has often been seen as an idyllic place. It was perhaps the setting for “Shangri-La,” the mystical, harmonious valley described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton.

Hilton pictured Shangri-La as an earthly paradise. The book enjoyed great popularity, and when the novel was turned into a Hollywood movie by Frank Capra, it was an instant success.

In the 1960s, Kathmandu was on the “hippie trail.” The city was seen as a panacea for the ills of Western culture. Remember the 1975 song “Katmandu” recorded by American rock artist Bob Seger?

The reality is very different. Kathmandu is overcrowded -- the city now has more than 2.5 million residents, or nearly 10 per cent of the country’s population. And Nepal’s 30 million people are mainly poor.

It is an incredibly fractured country: 125 caste and ethnic groups, and 123 languages, were reported in the 2011 national census. The two largest demographic groups are Nepali-speaking hill Chhetri (15.8 to 18 per cent) and Nepali-speaking hill Brahmin (12.7 per cent).

Some 81 per cent of Nepalese are Hindus, with Buddhists, at nine percent, and Muslims at about five percent, making up most of the remainder.

An armed revolution was launched in Nepal in 1996 by Maoist rebels who studied and admired Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong’s works and wanted to implement them.

Their goal was to abolish the country’s 240-year-old Hindu monarchy. The Maoists quickly developed a following by vowing to provide economic and political equality to the country’s marginalized communities.

Their People’s Liberation Army engaged in armed struggle for a decade, killing about 13,000 people, before the rebels laid down their weapons and decided to engage in the political process.

A mass movement demanding greater democracy led to the election of a Constituent Assembly in 2008. It removed the country’s last monarch, King Gyanendra, and declared Nepal a federal democratic republic. It then spent four years trying to write a constitution, but without success.

Between 2008 and 2011 there were four different coalition governments, led twice by the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which received a plurality of votes in the 2008 election, and twice by the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML).

In November 2013 a new Constituent Assembly was elected, in which the Nepali Congress Party won the largest share of seats and formed a coalition government with the second place CPN-UML. Sushil Koirala of the Nepali Congress Party became prime minister in February 2014.

Even so, the threat of crippling strikes by the Maoists still prevents the country from drafting a constitution. Little wonder that Nepalese have been emigrating to neighboring countries, especially India, in large numbers.