Not A Fond-Tale From Post-Quake-Nepal
By Farooque Chowdhury
09 May, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Affrighting assumptions and imaginations of an earthquake goes to sleep as time passes after the quake that hit Nepal last month. But scars of the earthquake are still there in the lives of thousands of people in Nepal as they are struggling in a system of insecurity, of which poverty is a part. These will live for indefinite period. It happens in poor societies overwhelmed with misgovernance with a façade of fairness.
A few press reports and an article from Nepal present the picture, at least a partial one. But, this is the picture of countries in the fringe of the global system. A quake devastated Haiti or a mudslide flattened Afghan locality or a quake destroyed Nepal village make no difference. Even, at times, natural disaster-hit communities in the metropolis of the world system are no exception as was exposed in the US.
Om Astha Rai reported from Sindhupalchok (“Pangtang in pain”, Nepali Times, May 7, 2015):
“Prem Bahadur Biswokarma, 43, does not have time to cultivate his corn plants that are wilting away and getting infested by unwanted weeds.” The April 25 earthquake destroyed Prem Bahadur’s house in Pangtang village of Sindhupalchok district, and he is digging up the rubble of his home trying to retrieve belongings, building makeshift tents and running around to receive relief materials. “I don’t have time to care for crops,” he says. “In a time of crisis like this, rebuilding our house and managing food is more important than anything else.”
Farming in Pangtang has virtually come to a halt as most of the villagers are busy trying to manage food and shelter. It will, it can be assumed, cause a severe crisis in the near-future. But it’s like a Hobson’s choice.
Om Astha Rai’s report tells:
“No one is seen working on terraced corn fields. Everyone is busy building temporary shelters or waiting for helicopters to drop relief aid.” Biswokarma, a villager, said: “We don’t have time and energy to cultivate crops.”
The report digs further:
“Even if some villagers want to start working on the fields, they do not have the necessary equipments. Their ploughs, hoes, sickles and other tools are buried under the huge mounds of mud, stones and timber. And they cannot make these tools any time soon as Pangtang’s only furnace, owned by Biswokarma, is destroyed.
“The Pangtang villagers worry more about planting rice, due to lack of seeds, than cultivating their wilting corn plants.”
Rudra Prasad Adhikari, 62, farmer, informed all the villagers have lost their seeds. “We used to borrow seeds from others during a crisis in the past,” said Rudra Prasad. “But now the crisis has befallen every one, we have all lost our corn, paddy and millet seeds, and this time we cannot borrow it from anyone.”
The earthquake, as Om Astha Rai’s report finds, has destroyed all hand mills, water mills and an electric mill. It’s making it difficult to grind food grains. This makes them dependent on food being dropped by helicopters. They’ll have nothing to eat once the food dropping is stopped. The seasonally-isolated village Pangtang’s roads are accessible only during the dry season. The monsoon, only weeks ahead, will find the roads blocked by landslides. So, bringing in foods by road will not be possible.
Eric Munch’s report from Gorkha (“The forgotten and forsaken”, Nepali Times, May 7, 2015) said the fact of indifference: “Two weeks after the earthquake, global media attention is gradually losing its focus on Nepal.”
Eric adds: Gorkha and Lamjung which were right at the epicenter remains in the shadows.
The report described:
“On these mountains, villages after villages have been reduced to rubble. Everyone has lost a relative, a friend or a neighbor, or all of them. The villagers can tell stories about each landslide, each collapsed household and who lies beneath them.” In Kulgaun, barely a house is standing. In Pokhari, only tin roofs are visible among piles of bricks and rocks. Only a door is standing in a school while the walls and the roof collapsed all around it.
The report mentions roads badly damaged by landslides, and no roads to some of the most affected villages, and adds: “Through alternative routes, several convoys carrying relief packages have managed to reach these villages, although irregularly. Most of them being the result of relatively small initiatives, they target small communities, often chosen with what can seem to be very arbitrary criteria, based on the results of a preliminary needs assessment mission and the insurance that the village in question hasn’t already received sufficient help from anyone else.”
It’s a description of unplanned-badly organized relief operation:
“[I]t seems as if some organizations just picked a village at random and decided to help them, some villages receiving aid from multiple sources while others are simply left behind.
“The army occasionally drops care packages directly from helicopters, but it is far from bringing anything more than temporary relief to whoever gets to it first. Helicopters come and go incessantly, carrying out the same type of operations, only with more accuracy.”
The situation is pushing people to take initiative in style available to them as the report cites attempts by locals — “frustrated by the lack of help — at diverting convoys from their initial target and take the supplies for themselves by coercion or theft. Armed forces personnel in Balua even mentioned a case in which villagers burnt down supplies when they were told that they would benefit another village. Also, it is not uncommon to see groups arrive with supplies that do not correspond to what the affected people need the most.”
“Attention tends to fade away, but problems remain, each passing day bringing its lot of new challenges to these people”, adds the report.
Bhrikuti Rai’s report (“Sindhupalchok’s sorrow, The hard-hit district is losing hope despite being so close to the capital”, Nepali Times, 8-14 May 2015) doesn’t tell a different story as it finds:
“Every settlement, every bazaar, every village along” the Arnike Highway that goes towards the Chinese border at Kodari “has been flattened.”
“In town after town, even ten days after the earthquake hit, people are moving about as if in a daze – trying to dig for dead relatives and belongings. The prosperous and once thriving highway markets have been reduced to mounds of bricks and timber.”
Sindhupalchok is the worst hit district, and Sanga Chok is one of the worst hit areas in the district.
The report cites villagers:
“We haven’t received any relief material so far and are running out of food supplies we had managed to gather in the last week.”
“[N]ot even a single tent was given to us. How will we survive now”?
As witness to the quake, a street full of collapsed houses, crushed vehicles and power lines dangling dangerously low lies in the village.
The villagers, the report says, are angry as the state has been slow to respond. A local official “has been hiding this whole week”. The villagers found some relief efforts moving after they “tried hurting” another official “physically”.
Situation in a few remote areas of Sindhupalchok “remain even [direr] with people still trapped under the debris in many places. Three people were rescued alive in Sindhupalchok on Monday, nine days after the quake.” The village Gunsa is completely destroyed.
Hospitals bear signs of limits Bhrikuti Rai writes: “Big hospitals like the 750 bed Nepal Medical College in Kathmandu is turning away patients since it doesn’t have enough tents to treat patients outside its cracked building.
At Dhulikhel, doctors and paramedics are there. But the hospital is “running out of stock of essential medicines, surgical materials. Beds and blankets are required. School students in Kathmandu are providing thousands of gauzes for the Dhulikhel Hosptial, says the report.
Bhrikuti Rai found 72 persons from a number of families were sharing a few tents along a highway.
Mallika Aryal’s report – “Aftershocks in a migrant economy, Villages without men struggle to cope with the aftermath of the earthquake” (Nepali Times, 8-14 May 2015) – discusses another aspect of the disaster: Effectively single women. Their husbands are stuck working abroad and the women have to play the role of men.
More than 2.2 million Nepalis work abroad, and the vast majority of them are men. Their remittances totaled $4 billion last year, accounting for more than 20 per cent of Nepal’s GDP.
The report cites Benju Rai. Her husband works in Malaysia. She says: “Coming back means he will lose his daily wage, which is more important to us now than ever.” They borrowed money to build a house in the village of Thailchok in Sindhupalchok. “Their home, along with everything else the family had worked so hard to build, is now a useless pile of rubble.”
Others in the area have similar stories as up to 90 per cent of the houses have been destroyed in Sindhupalchok: “Our house is gone, our cow sheds are gone, our grains are gone, we have nothing left”.
The report adds:
“Banks will not provide loans to migrant workers without proper paperwork and collateral. So people like Rai and Danwar, are forced to access informal channels – private lenders who charge interest rates as high as 35 per cent and are unlikely to waive them, even in the aftermath of a devastating earthquake.
“She, and so many others like her, are now homeless and saddled with debts they only have a chance of repaying if their husbands stay abroad, rather than returning to help.
“Without their menfolk, the wives of migrant workers are at a distinct disadvantage. At lunchtime in a makeshift camp in Kathmandu, survivors line up for free food – men first, then children and finally women.”
The report cites Ashmita Sapokta from the local NGO Women’s Rehabilitation Centre: “This is the way our society is. It is always men who get priority, even in times like these. Women eat at the end, usually whatever is left after men and children eat. There’s discrimination even in a time of crisis.”
Now, comes one of the most important issues: Governance.
Kunda Dixit, publisher of Nepali Times and author of several books on people and politics in Nepal writes (“Needed: A Marshall Plan”, Nepali Times, May 5, 2015):
“In all the criticism about the slow government response to the 25 April earthquake, what many forget is that governance in Nepal was a disaster zone even before the earthquake. Slow delivery of services, lack of coordination, mismanagement, ad hoc decisions and corruption have been the hallmarks of our soft state. Despite the restoration of democracy and regular elections, accountability has somehow always fallen between the cracks. Leaders who traditionally thrived on patronage have felt no need for performance-based legitimacy.”
A reality of governance is exposed. Kunda Dixit exposes further:
“[W]hat we saw were politicians and bureaucrats showing the same inertia and lethargy as they have during ‘normal’ times. They pushed paper, waited for rubber stamps and ‘clearance from higher-up authorities’ as if it was just another humdrum day in our banana republic. … [T]he bureaucratic delays in the initial days after the quake cost lives. The earthquake killed people, red tape killed many of the survivors.”
The story of politicians emerges in his article:
“Then there are the politicians. There are? We haven’t seen them since the earthquake.
“Here in post-earthquake Nepal we didn’t even see many examples of leaders exhibiting the energy to even do token relief. The Prime Minister toured Sindhupalchok by air 10 days after the earthquake, Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal has been holed up in a secluded villa in Man Bhavan for the past week, and only briefly gate-crashed a relief distribution event organised by the Guru Dwara. The President, it must be said, shunned media attention and made low-key personal visits to ruins of Kathmandu’s historic heart.”
The complexity in the situation also emerges as Kunda Dixit writes:
“And when the politicians and the government did act decisively, it was to spread even more hopelessness and confusion.
“The Central Bank issued a dreadful statement that all earthquake aid had to be channeled through the Prime Minister’s Disaster Relief Fund (‘otherwise they will be seized’) that immediately halted most emergency cash donations from abroad. … Then some wiseguy in government said we don’t need any more aid. Not to be outdone, another smartass told foreign rescue workers ‘we don’t need you anymore we can handle it ourselves’. The government is the subject of ridicule across the world”.
He describes the difficult situation:
“Nepal has turned into a no-man’s land because of overseas out migration. Village after village devastated by the earthquake have only women, children and the elderly.”
Societies that supply labor to the world market house similar communities. That’s a story of exploitation and deception. Earnings by hard labor are proudly propagated as self-performance while the issue of appropriation of labor is shrouded so that the act doesn’t get exposed. It’s not exposed even by those that claim to be standing for people.
The tales are not fond, and the tales are not unknown in the world system. These are the regular stories everyday being encountered in societies. A disaster brings these to front. Disasters that are being created everyday in the areas of environment and ecology, deaths that are being produced everyday in the system of inequality are no less brief in duration, no less short in width, nor light in weight, not less in number.
As an opposite reaction of the disasters, a few persons’ pockets are lined. Contracts, supplies, constructions create opportunities to increase money. Patrons and persons with patronage, a small clique, reap the opportunity. It’s – reaping profit – a disaster-business, it’s – getting thieves or billionaires – a “development-business”.
Only a mobilized people, a continuous process of supervision by people could have stalled the process of plunder. But that needs organization and leadership from among the ranks of the people. But what can one do when leadership turns drunk in talk shops? No alternative is there other than exposing and throwing out the vis comica, comic power, of leadership intoxicated in talk shops, other than building up new leadership.
But hope is there as Bhrikuti Rai reports: “Despite the death and despair all around Chautara residents have shown generosity and resilience by opening doors to neighbors and providing food to the needy.”
It’s the hope and strength of collective, and it survives, and it doesn’t get demolished. It survives in Nepal, it survives in Bangladesh, it survives in all lands. Neither plunders nor stupified by xerafins from talk shops nor inaction nor scar of a quake defeat this hope and strength.
Farooque Chowdhury contributes from Dhaka.
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