Submit your Article

There are nine categories of endangerment from ‘extinct’ to ‘not evaluated’. The latter meaning there is no concern of endangerment. While this species is not yet on the ‘endangered’ list it appears to be very much on the ‘vulnerable’ list. We might ask ourselves when this species moved from being of no concern to being ‘vulnerable’. A quick Google check is quite an eye opener; for it all started in 2017 with a nine-year-old American boy!

Milo Cress, nine, started the cam­paign against… plastic straws! Since then many large companies and even major cities have banned this invasive species. July 2018 saw Seat­tle banning plastic straws and in January of this year Washington DC followed suit. With McDonalds, Starbucks and some airlines phasing plastic straws out, could its days be numbered?

More than a year ago I also took a stand and started requesting cafes not to give me a plastic straw. I brought from the UK packets of metal straws which I handed out to friends. At that time there were very few cafes in Kathmandu doing away with the multi-coloured, attractive, yet non-essential, plastic tubes. Since we like-minded friends all drink in Curilo Café, the wait­ress there was very quick to pick up on this and started offering the plastic straw alongside, not inside, drinks. You could then decline if you wanted to.

As far as I know Soma Café was the first to ban plastic straws altogether. Since then more and more cafes and restaurants around town are using paper or metal straws. This week I bought a drink from KFC and they provided a very clumsy paper straw. But paper nevertheless. Mankind has been using straws since around 3,000 BC. In Nepal tongba has always been served with bam­boo straws; I have yet to see it served with a plastic straw. So maybe the habit of using natural straws just needs to be reinstated.

I guess we have all seen the video of the rescued sea turtle that had a plastic straw pulled from its nose. I think that, along with numerous videos of islands of plastic floating on the world’s oceans, has really brought home how effective human­kind has become at destroying the planet. But with no ocean in Nepal, and with fires containing plastic burning pretty much 24/7 around town, why have we in Kathmandu simultaneously and without col­lusion decided to send the plastic straw into extinction?

It’s a question I don’t have the answer to. I know for me, I have reduced my use of plastic bags considerably but do still accept some. They, terrible as they are, have a reusable purpose as a gar­bage collector, a wet swimsuit bag, or container for potentially leaky items. But the plastic straw has no value whatsoever when its three minute life span is complete. Yet some people, children in particu­lar, do like the excitement of draw­ing a drink up through a tube. If you think back, wasn’t it only on special occasions you got a straw in your drink? Definitely a ‘good time’ apparatus!

Enter, or should I say, re-en­ter the paper straw! Paper straws have been around a long time but they used to instantly turn soggy. Or were chewed up by young kids within moments. But today the paper straw has becoming stronger and more viral!

Naturally, banning of plastic straws is not going to save the planet or reduce the ocean’s plastic islands. It is only the tip of the iceberg. But, since it seems mainly the younger generations that are killing off this species, maybe the plastic straw is the gateway to more personal, then community, then country-wide restrictions on single-use plastics. Let’s hope this vulnerable species continues its journey to endanger­ment then ultimately to extinction!

 A friend of mine who used to work for ICIMOD said to me: “You should write an op-ed about how we always respond to disasters when they occur, but we never plan for them proactively. An earthquake cannot be pre­dicted, but floods happen year­ly. Why don’t we have policies and implementation to stop this? The government is ready with relief materials and helicopter rescues. But they have no policies or implementation to prevent disasters.” Why, indeed? Is it that the polit­ical elites know that disasters are profitable moments to bring in generous amounts of state fund­ing and international aid? Com­mentators have talked about the “Bihar Flood Mafia,” who thrive on this mismanagement of the rivers and who look forward to the yearly flood of funds that fol­lows the inundation and breakage of barricades. Writer P. Sainath explored this disaster capitalism more in his book ‘Everyone Loves a Good Drought’.

We know the Tarai is a flood-plain which floods annually. Himalayan rivers, swollen from the Asar-Shravan rains, burst their bounds and spread over the land, bringing with them disaster as well as the rich alluvial bounty of the monsoon. Before the Sixties, the rush of this water was held back by the Char-Kosay Jhadi, the jungles which lay on the border between India and Nepal. Like Shiva’s locks which held back the mighty Ganga as she burst forth her bounds, the tangled roots of the jungle held back the water, absorbed it, and controlled the volume.

With DDT came the end of mos­quitoes and malaria. People start­ed to move down to the Tarai in droves, decimating the jungles. With the forests went the tigers. As the big cats disappeared, so did a cascade of species that lived inside dense jungles.

Recently it was World Tiger Day. Someone who goes by the moni­ker “Amulya Sir” tweeted a pho­tograph of King Tribhuwan by a dead tiger, and asked the question (I am paraphrasing his words): “Do you know why the tigers were more protected then, despite the hunting?” Then he answered his own question: “Because the habitat of the tiger was not frag­mented as it is now.” The Tarai was a long impenetrable corridor teeming with trees and wildlife where tigers thrived, alongside an ecological treasure-house of other species. Jungles absorbed the river’s overflow, acting as a natural checkdam and barrage for the villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. With the end of the jun­gles came the end of the tigers, but it was also the beginning of the misery of humans who saw their settlements washed away each year, with no Shiva locks to hold back raging torrents.

Is the answer then the slow revival of jungles as they once existed in this vast East-West cor­ridor of the Nepal Tarai? If people find life untenable in these areas due to annual “habitat loss,” per­haps the way forward could be to re-stitch together the land into one long wildlife corridor. Osten­sibly we would be saving the tiger, but it would also provide a natural barricade for human settlements downstream. The government would have to provide compensa­tion and resettle those who have to move into safe areas.

Loktantra has brought with it disasters we had not foreseen— bulldozers breaking down peepal trees and resting places (chautari), guthi temples and lands being absorbed by profiteers, even the land underneath the Prime Min­ister’s office itself being stolen and sold. If everything is for sale, what will remain in thirty years’ time for those who come after us? If the land on which rice grows is decimated by concrete apartment buildings, what will we eat when there is another food shortage or an Indian blockade? While we have the political freedom to speak out now, is the environ­mental destruction so great that life itself may become untenable in a few decades?

Saving the tiger seems like a poor cause to champion when Nepal is rift apart by human traf­ficking and slavery of migrant laborers in the Gulf. And yet as I look at the map and saw a pro­posed railway would lead straight from the Chinese border to Sur­khet, close to our last remaining wildlife reserves, I cannot help but wonder if the tiger’s destiny is tied with our own. If we allow this railway, opening the flood of wildlife traffickers and poachers that are sure to follow, what will be left?

If the last remaining tiger is killed for his penis or his bones (supposed to have aphrodisiac properties and coveted by patri­archal Chinese men who most likely never experienced the intense bonding between a male and a female that comes with love and respect between partners), then what kind of Nepal will we be left with?

Loktantra has viewed every­thing—agricultural land, guthi temples, migrant workers, Lok Sewa appointments, road con­tracts, drinking water, public transport, airports and airlines— as commodities to be exploited for capitalist gain. Nothing is seen as national resources to be stew­arded and preserved for future generations. There is little social­ism and even less democratic thinking in our leaders as they sit at throne-like coffee tables and receive supplicants like mafia Godfathers, while dispensing lar­gesse. Needless to say, such a system cannot in the long run be in charge of stewarding a nation-state, which requires self-sacrifice and long-term vision.

 Continued from the previous column…

In the early days of their corpora­tion, both the CPC and the KMT were sincere. Mao Zedong, for example, was secretary of the cen­tral bureau of the CPC and acting head of the KMT’s central propa­ganda department. In order to build a strong revolutionary army, the KMT established the Whampoa mil­itary academy in 1924 with the help of the CPC. Zhou Enlai, the newly returned leader of the European branch of the CPC, served as a politi­cal instructor in Whampoa, teaching a course in political economy. As the political basis for opposing imperial­ism and warlordism was the same, members of the CPC and the KMT called each other comrades.

The cooperation between the CPC and the KMT created a great revolu­tionary power. In 1925, the revolu­tionary government of Guangzhou defeated the warlords of Guangdong province, making Guangdong the new base of revolutionary forces. In 1926, the 100,000 revolutionary troops led by the KMT and CPC began a war to eliminate warlords in the north. Starting from southern China, they liberated large areas of central and northern China in nine months. In 1927, the revolu­tionary army took over the conces­sion of the British colonists in Hubei province. In this process, the CPC mobilized the masses to provide logistics to the revolutionary army. The underground organization of CPC also organized labor unions in warlord-ruled areas to launch labor movements in support of the revolu­tionary army.

But the seed of instability had sprouted years earlier. Sun Yat-sen died of liver cancer in Beijing in March 1925. After his death, infight­ing started in the KMT. The increas­ingly close relationship between the CPC and the left wing of the KMT aroused the resentment of the KMT’s right wing. At the same time, ideological differences between the CPC and the KMT began to emerge.

The KMT was a bourgeois party, representing the interests of the urban bourgeoisie and the rural landlords. Although the KMT and the CPC shared the same political desire to drive away imperialist forces and warlords, the commu­nist party still needed to safeguard the interests of the working class in the cities and carry out land owner­ship reform in the countryside. As a result, the gap between the KMT and the CPC widened.

Between April and July 1927, the KMT rightists, represented by Chiang Kai-shek and Wang Ching-wei, launched two sudden cam­paigns to kill communists. Within a few months, tens of thousands of communist party members and pro-communist revolutionaries were killed or persecuted. The coop­eration between the KMT and the CPC broke down completely.

The bloody slaughter taught the communists that they must have a revolutionary army of their own. On 1 August, 1927, Zhou Enlai launched an uprising in Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi province. On August 7, the central committee of CPC held an emergency meeting, at which Mao proposed that “the power to rule comes from guns”. On 9 Septem­ber, 1927, Mao led the workers’ and peasants’ uprising in border areas of Hunan and Jiangxi provinces. On September 29, Mao established the leadership of the CPC over the army. On October 27, his troops arrived at Jing Gang mountain, creating the first revolutionary base under the CPC leadership. After that, in Janu­ary 1928, Zhu De (later command­er-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army) launched a peasant upris­ing in southern Hunan province. In April 1928, the troops of south­ern Hunan uprising and Nanchang uprising arrived at the Jing Gang mountain base.

From October 1927 to Janu­ary 1930, Mao wrote three arti­cles—“Why can China’s red regime exist?”, “Struggle in Jing gang moun­tain” and “A single spark can start a prairie fire”—marking the starting of the theory of the revolutionary road. The goal was for the countryside to encircle the city.

Meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek gradually gained the upper hand in the internal struggles of the KMT. Zhang Zuolin, the leader of China’s most powerful military warlord, was assassinated by the Japanese in June 1928 after rejecting Japanese demands to expand their colonial interests in northeast China. Zhang Xueliang, Zhang Zuolin’s son, was extremely angry and at the end of 1928 he declared northeast China subordinate to the nationalist gov­ernment of Chiang Kai-shek. From then on, Chiang Kai-shek ostensi­bly completed the reunification of China.

The CPC and the KMT (which later went on to rule Taiwan) completed their journey from being comrades to enemies.

After the Narendra Modi gov­ernment in India dramati­cally changed the status of Jammu and Kashmir in the first week of August, it expected a show of support from neighbor­ing and friendly countries. Clear­ly Kathmandu was caught in a diplomatic dilemma as the issue involved three countries with which Nepal has friendly ties. It also complicated the issue further as Nepal is the current chair of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC). As such, Pakistan expected a ges­ture of solidarity from Nepal—or at least a statement that showed concern.While the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) rightly kept a stud­ied silence over the issue to avoid offending either of the two par­ties involved, the fear was that the party apparatus, particularly of the ruling CPN, would issue a statement that could create anoth­er difficult diplomatic incident for the country. Such a fear was not irrational, given how insen­sitive the CPN’s sister wings have been to the country’s interest over Venezuela.

There has been some brain­storming over Nepal’s foreign pol­icy and protocols in the past—par­ticularly to bring party apparatus on the same page, but it seems to have done very little in streamlin­ing the process or ensuring com­pliance with the protocols.

More heat than light

In 2014, the Institute of Foreign Affairs conducted a seminar for the representatives of political parties to orient them on ‘Prin­ciples and Strategies of Nepal’s Foreign Policy and Protocol’, yet the discussion produced more heat than light. Participants com­plained that the seminar lacked focus, and the event quickly descended into a competition of sorts over who knows more than whom. Unfortunately, that is the usual sight in most conferences and seminars held in Kathmandu on Nepal’s foreign policy.

The constitution reiterates Nepal’s faith in the UN Charter, Panchasheel and non-aligned principles, and eschews refer­ence to special relations, yet these are abstract ideas that cannot be easily translated into action­able strategies, particularly in the context of a renewed cold war that involves our neighbor to the north. While Panchasheel does offer some room to anchor to our foreign policy posture in most cases, it is not always easy to operationalize our neutrality when an incident involves two neighboring countries with dia­metrically opposite views. The MOFA’s own guiding principle does not go very far from the constitutional directive: Nepal shall pursue its relations with neighbours based on sovereign equality and reciprocity, but the country shall not align one neigh­bor against another.

Internal issue

On the Kashmir issue, it would be problematic to even say that Nepal does not comment on the internal affairs of another coun­try. What India considers internal is an issue Pakistan has sought to internationalize for seven decades.

Besides the competence of dip­lomatic personnel, Nepal clearly has two challenges to address: to operationalize broad foreign pol­icy principles into clear action­able strategies; and to bring party officials on the same page. This can only be done by creating a robust research and debate cul­ture in the country. Given how rapidly the geopolitical landscape evolves in this day and age, a static approach cannot address the challenges inherent to being a small power in a vibrant and complex neighborhood