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After 26 years, 55-year-old Laxu Rokaya of Punar­bas municipality-5 still misses her husband, and hopes he will return one day. Man Bahadur, who had gone to India in 1993 in search of work, had disappeared with­out a trace. Rokaya has since neither heard from him nor received any news about his whereabouts. Her father-in-law had gone in search of his son in India, but couldn’t locate him. Rokaya was eight months pregnant when her husband left. She found some solace after the birth of her son though. Before him, she had two daughters, Amrit and Janaki, both of whom are now married and taking care of their own homes.

There are hundreds of men from the far-west who have gone missing after they went to India looking for jobs

Rokaya raised her only son by herself, and expected him to take care of her in her old age. But when he was 17, her son suddenly fell sick and died. Rokaya now has no prop­erty and no family support. “I lost both my son and my life partner,” she says, sobbing.

We kept in touch for the first 2-3 months. But there was no contact thereafter Lali BK

Lali BK of the municipality has a similar story. It has been 27 years since her husband Pratap went to India in search of work. “We kept in touch for the first 2-3 months. But there was no contact thereafter,” she says. She still hopes for Pratap’s return. Their daugh­ter Saraswoti was just a year old when he left. BK, who was married when she was 20, recalls, “I had to suffer domestic abuse after he went missing. I bore all that and made sure my daughter got an education.”

BK says she did not get any property from her in-laws and so had to go work in Lebanon to ensure decent education for her daughter. Now, Saras­woti, who is her only support, works as a midwife in Laljhadi rural municipality.

There are hundreds of men from the far-west who have gone missing after they went to India looking for jobs. Their families are tense and this phenomena has created legal complications, too, say in divi­sion of property.

With the main breadwin­ner in the family missing, they are deprived of social security allowance and other state services as well. In case of those who died while working in India, their families back home have got­ten no compensations from the employers.

Prakash Madai, a senior program manager at the National Environment and Equity Development Society (NEEDS), who specializes in safe migration, says, “Since we do not know whether the missing people are dead, the families cannot register their death. This in turn gives rise to countless legal hassles.” According to a NEEDS project, 209 people have gone miss­ing in India from Kanchanpur and Doti districts alone. Madai says the government needs to work to make employment in India more systematic.

Deepak Chandra Bhatt, a professor at the Far-western University, also urges the government to gather data of missing people and to make employment in India safer for Nepalis.

“The state should treat those who go to work in India as being employed abroad, just like they treat those headed to the Middle East,” he says. There is an age-old tradition of people from Far-West and Kar­nali provinces going to India for employment. But there are no exact data on how many have gone.

Some reckon the media has overdone Nirmala Pant rape-and-murder. There are seemingly other vital issues, including other similar cases. Such distraction would be dangerous. The 13-year-old native of Kanchanpur district who was brutally raped and murdered is no more an isolated victim. She is rather an emblem of the state’s apathy to even the most-pressing concerns of its people. Nirmala’s bereaved parents have met just about every influential politician and bureaucrat, including the prime minister, to press for justice. More important, hundreds of thousands have protested to put pressure on the government.

If Nirmala’s parents are still denied justice, there is little hope that a common Nepali, who has no such support, will tomorrow get justice in a similar case. As our main story this week illustrates (See Page 7), Nirmala’s friends and family are still traumatized. Local girls dread going to school alone. The whole of Bhimdatta municipality is steeped in fear. Yet the police, whose role has been dubious from the start, is nowhere close to apprehending the real culprits, even as it has paraded a few fake ones.

A young girl was raped and murdered in broad daylight, and in an area within easy reach of local police and army installations, and yet the investigators seem clueless. One thing is clear: some powerful people want to protect the real culprits. It remains to be seen whether the prime minister too wants to protect them or whether he stamps his authority to credibly assure people that the government cares about them.

 Laxmi Badu, a ninth grader at the local Saraswati Higher Second­ary School, has been repeating the same thing again and again to every prying journalist. A classmate of Nirmala Pant, whose half-naked dead body was found in a sugarcane field in Bhimdatta municipality of far-western Nepal on July 26, Badu says she is still “deathly scared” while passing through the sugarcane field en route to school. These days Badu walks that road only in the company of her little brother. “I used to walk fearlessly, but no more,” she says.

Manisha, the elder sister of Nirma­la, says she does not feel like study­ing any more. “I had never heard of something so horrific. It has affected me deeply,” she says.

“Whether I am eating or doing my homework, I cannot stop thinking about Nirmala and what happened to her,” she adds. “I still cannot sleep at night.”

The three Pant sisters were sepa­rated by two years each. The eldest, Manisha, is 15, Nirmala was 13, and the youngest, Saraswati, is just 11. As their parents are now in Kath­mandu to lobby for quick resolution of the case and punishment for the culprits, the two remaining sisters are now under the case of their step-mother, Laxmi.

“They have taken it hard. The three sisters were inseparable,” Laxmi says.

Parwati Nath, an eleventh grader at the Siddanath Amar Higher Secondary School, is also petrified of venturing out alone. “I used to freely roam about with­out a worry, but after hearing of repeated incidents of rapes and murders of women and girls, I am really scared,” she says.

It is not just the school-going girls who are under stress. Their parents are as worried. “After what hap­pened to Nirmala the whole climate is steeped in fear,” says Dhanan­jaya Joshi, a teacher at Siddanath. “Parents are now having second thought about sending their wards to school.” He says he too is worried whenever his children are out.

“Many students now refuse to come to school,” says Jagannath Pandey of Saraswa­ti School, Nirmala’s alma mater. “My reading is that they will continue to be fearful unless Nirmala’s murderers are apprehend­ed and punished.”

In fact, most of the local students who have to cross the sugarcane field near the local Nimbukheda Riv­er en route have stopped coming to school. “We were supposed to take new admissions for Grade XI but after the Nirmala incident no new student has come,” Pandey says.

In the words of Puhspa Chand of Bhimdatta-6, also a teacher at Siddhanath School, and a parent of two, “children fear what hap­pened to Nirmala may next happen to them.”

It is not reassuring that since Nir­mala’s rape and murder, other sim­ilar cases have come to light in Kan­chanpur. For instance one Rajendra Bista of Beldandi rural municipality was apprehended on Sept 15 on charge of raping two minors. In yet another disturbing incidence, a father was sent to prison for raping his 12-year-old daughter.

“Instead of going down, the number of these disturbing crim­inal activities is increasing,” says Punam Singh Chand, an advocate and human rights activist. “The state should be more responsible. That said only collectively can we fight this scourge”