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 A culture of volunteerism is one of the greatest intangible assets of Nepal. Till now the National Development Volunteering Service (NDVS), a successor of a pan­chayat-era scheme that sent grad­uate students for community work in rural areas, has been successfully offering opportunities to local youth to develop their volunteering skills. Thousands of skilled youth have been engaged in the NDVS, with a strong sense of mission and humble but effective leadership. With the country’s restructuring as a federal state, the modus ope­randi of the NDVS, a program here­tofore run by the National Planning Commission, a strategy and policy making body rather than an imple­menting one, had to change. While many details are still unknown, the NDVS has stopped operating and possibly the Ministry of Youth and Sports is taking over its work.

Even more realistically, the scope, mission and activities of the NDVS will be integrated into the National Youth Council, an autonomous apex body within the ministry in charge of implementing actions and poli­cies supporting self-empowerment of local youth.

With this development, we have an incredible opportunity to bring volunteerism to the mainstream. Yet we need to make sure that the concept of the NDVS, the idea of mobilizing skilled youth for local development, remains not only alive but also gets up-scaled.

We need to think from the per­spective of the federal system, and how each state can promote and facilitate community-led social actions. The new government units, at all levels, can play an important role in engaging youth and other members of the community for social and economic development.

The fact that a central level minis­try is now taking full responsibility for spreading and supporting volun­teering is something positive.

My preferred option would have been to turn the NDVS into a fully autonomous agency as volunteer­ism is something that can be prac­ticed by everybody regardless of age. There are several examples from around the world, including from fully federal states like the US and Australia, where a central body promoting volunteerism cooperates and co-lives with state-based agen­cies in charge of rolling out volun­teering programs in collaboration with the civil society.

Perhaps it is still premature to talk of such a big change in Nepal. We have to make the best of the opportunities arising from having the ministry take charge of volun­teerism. The National Youth Coun­cil, if properly supported by the ministry, could roll out different volunteering schemes that could be co-developed and embraced by state and other government units.

General outlines could be enriched by taking into account local needs, or local government units can be supported technically in devising their own schemes that are backstopped or financially sup­ported by the center.

One such program could be a revi­talization of the activities that until recently were undertaken by the NDVS and which offered a platform of self-development for recently graduated students. Perhaps a prob­lem with the NDVS was a lack of visibility as too many youth were still unaware of the opportunities it offered.

Now with the ministry and the National Youth Council fully in charge, there is greater scope to market and promote volunteerism, a rich and diverse phenomenon that includes both formal and informal ways of helping others or a cause.

It can be carried out through local or international NGOs or even by bilateral partners through their skilled overseas volunteers (think of KOICA, JICA, PEACE CORPS and Australian Aid Volunteers). But also, and this is really important and often neglected, through small, informal initiatives where a mother group, a parent-student associa­tion or a youth club carry out social actions based on local needs.

Recently the Ministry of Youth and Sport in collaboration with United Nation Volunteers called a meeting with all the key volunteering pro­moting agencies in the country. The goal was to understand the contri­bution of volunteerism for the real­ization of the country’s Sustainable Development Goals, assess the num­ber of volunteers engaged at local levels, and measure their impact as well as their working modality.

When all the information is put together, the ministry will roll out a ‘National Situational Analysis’ that will used as a baseline feeding into a 2019 high-level political forum called ‘Empowering People and Ensuring Inclusiveness and Equal­ity’. This will be held regionally in the Asia-Pacific but also globally at the UN Headquarter in New York.

For long, there have been discus­sions about a national network of all agencies, national and international, involved in volunteerism. But it was not possible to run such a network on continuous basis and inclusively.

Perhaps the organizations involved in the situational analysis of volunteerism in Nepal could be the constituent members of such a network under the leadership of the National Youth Council or the Ministry of Youth and Sports.

Doors should also be open for organizations mobilizing volunteers who are in different age brackets, as volunteerism should be inclusive of all, especially those who have few opportunities for self-development or those who have retired but still want to contribute. Hopefully the National Situation Analysis can be used as a launch-pad for discussions leading to a national volunteering strategy. Incorporating and using the institutional memory and exper­tise of what remains of the NDVS would facilitate the process.

The author is a co-founder of ENGAGE, an NGO partnering with youths living with disabilities

 Let’s admit it: Nepali politics is more difficult to understand than the complex calculus even for us Nepalis. If you are a foreigner, then you are probably even more confused—unless you happen to be the one who calls the shots here and knows more than what we can ever possibly know. The reason for the confusion is that we have redefined certain political concepts to suit our real­ity, and it’s not your fault that you can’t make sense of what is happening here.

Let’s jump straight to what certain political concepts mean for us.

Capitalism: Do whatever you want in order to make mon­ey, even if that means building buildings and bridges that collapse within a year and roads that are full of potholes within a week. Produce and sell adulter­ated food stuff. Keep the profit margin at 2,000 or more percent provided you are always at the service of the rulers and their relatives. Don’t pay the taxes but make sure to bribe the bureau­crats, leaders and make donations to political parties.

Socialism: Support expensive medical and private schools and do nothing to upgrade the quality of public health and education. Privatize the state-owned enter­prises. Widen the rift between the haves and have-nots. Send your kids abroad and have them own gas stations or use your con­nections to get them good jobs there. Impose all sorts of taxes but spend the tax money on, well, God knows what, but definitely not on public goods—for that, seek foreign assistance and make sure the bid goes to the ones that you the rulers of the day like for “obvi­ous” reasons.

Democracy: Rig elections and keep on getting elected again and again and view that as the right to do what you please. Let even those rejected by the people assume high-level government posts. Promote your children and relatives and practice dynastic politics. Think of yourself as the new king who can do anything because you have “public sup­port”. Let the powerful have their way with everything and even get away with serious crimes, but don’t let the weak escape the long hand of the law.

Let those embezzling bil­lions go free without even with a slap on the wrist and warmly welcome them into your parties, but punish severely the unlucky ones caught taking Rs 5,000 in bribe and tout that as uphold­ing the rule of law and good governance. Believe in, to slightly paraphrase Joseph Heller, ‘Rich is the country in democratic ide­als that has plenty of poor’ (ital­ics mine) and do everything in your capacity to increase the number of poor.

Communism: Rebels who take up arms. Torture and kill class enemies. But when they are in power, shake hands with the cap­italists. Preach Marx and Mao but practice “Some animals are more equal”. Make sure the rich keeps getting richer and the poor, well, view them as the proletariat who will promote revolution abroad while toiling in the sweltering heat. Give a lengthy lecture on “the means of production”, “base and superstructure” and “fetish­ism of commodities”—even if they have no idea what all these mean and make people scratch their heads—while they wear design­er stuff from abroad, and blame capitalism for all the country’s ills. And of course, label those who disagree with them as feudal, reactionaries and rightists.

Nationalism: Be nationalists only when their position is threat­ened. Criticize the 2015 Indian blockade but forget the 1989-90 one. Ask India to blockade us when things don’t go their way and argue it is for “democracy”. View the unification of Nepal by PN Shah as capitalist and impe­rialist expansion, but praise the biggest imperialists in modern history, Lenin and Stalin, for fighting imperialism. Divide the people using ethnic politics and regionalism. Roar like a tiger in Nepal, but meow like a cat in front of foreigners.

Federalism: Build a castle in the air. That’s pretty much it.

Intellectuals: Be greedy and have no ideals. Be able to switch sides and curry favors with polit­ical leaders and foreigners by parroting their lines. Be more concerned about promoting for­eign interests in Nepal than our own interests. Every time they speak and write, use jargons such as ‘Mahendrian nationalism’ and ‘Bahunbaad’ and blame those for Nepal’s wretched fate.

People: Willingly let the leaders exploit them. Gullible. Can do without water, roads, gasoline, electricity, education and health­care and pretty much anything. Not to be taken seriously.

Foreign policy: What is that?

Freedom of expression: Say and write things that doesn’t ruffle any feathers. Be wise and self-censor. 

 A 13-year-old girl, Nirmala Pant, was raped and subsequently murdered in Kanchanpur on July 26. In the two following months, the government has time and again fallen short in booking the culprit/s. Whether it is a complacent police force or outright false accu­sations in relation to the case, the government has, till now, failed to deliver any semblance of justice to Nirmala’s family. Nirmala’s is the latest in a string of events that paints a gloomy picture on justice and impunity. For too long now, impunity has become institutionalized in Nepal under the direct protection of political par­ties and their leaders, and despite big talk of majority, stability and prosperity, it looks like impunity is here to stay.

From day one, Nirmala’s case was mal-handled by the police. According to news reports, from the day Nirmala disappeared from her friends Roshani Bam and Babita Bam’s house where she had gone to study, the police were adamantly uncooperative with her parents and neighbors.

Nirmala disappeared on July 25 from her friends’ house and her dead body was found just a day later: half-naked, and tossed in a sugarcane field not far from the scene of the crime. According to the villagers, there was heavy rainfall the night of her disappearance but Nirmala’s books that were scattered nearby were found completely dry.

The vague story that follows hints that one after another, each police official in charge of the investiga­tion took the liberty of erasing evi­dence related to the case. Before picking up the dead body from the sugarcane field, for example, the police team intentionally cleaned Nirmala’s private parts as well as her trousers. Further, Bam sisters, from whose home Nirmala disappeared, were given unusual protection by the police. Oddly, the police did not even allow Nirmala’s parents and neighbors to enter the Bam sisters’ house until police in plain uniform cut down a guava tree on their com­pound and re-painted all the rooms in the house.

Though an investigation team from the Central Bureau of Investigation (CIB) was sent to the spot, they seemed little different from the local police. By then, locals were already on the street protesting the mishandling of Nirmala’s investigation.

In a shroud of confusion and mystery, all of a sudden, 24 days after Nirmala’s murder, the police presented 41-year-old Dilip Singh Bista as the culprit. Bista is a men­tally-ill middle- aged man, who the state figured would be the perfect scapegoat on which to pin blame. After DNA testing it was evident that Bista was not guilty. Worse still, the police has used physical and mental torture and offered a bribe to Bista to publicly accept the rape and mur­der, which he denied. The mala fide intent of the police organization and the larger state mechanism was starkly clear.

Justice and poverty

Nirmala’s has become a high-pro­file case. However, even in such a scenario, where protests have even reached as far as Kathmandu, the government and the police remain complacent. Prime Minister KP Oli seems either misinformed or ignorant on the matter. In his most recent statement from New York on the case, PM Oli said it “may take 12 years to find the culprit of Nirma­la’s rape and murder.” That is both shocking and condemnable coming from the executive head of this state.

The truth about Nirmala’s case is as clear as day: the police—and thus the state and government leadership—know exactly who is/are behind the rape and murder of this innocent girl. But given the poor socio-economic status of Nir­mala and her parents, the feeling seems to be that the latter can be silenced and that the state will con­tinue to protect the wealthier and powerful culprits.

Apart from the negative public backlash the government will face, the emotional and psychological impact on families, girls and chil­dren from cases like Nirmala’s is colossal. Collective fear of insecurity and injustice is growing.

All of this is reminiscent of the hopelessness of the victim fam­ilies of the decade-long conflict, who are still unheard and ignored after all these years. There have been many instances when justice has been denied: in the cases of Ujjain Shrestha, Maina Sunuwar, Nanda Prasad and Ganga Maya Adhikari, Sita Rai, and countless others. The latest addition to that list is Nirmala. The longer that list gets, Oli and his government must understand, the farther away from prosperity and happiness the Nepali people will be o

 This morning I bought one of those breads: a bit like a donut, a bit like a sel, from my local shop. The girl behind the counter wrapped it up in a bit of old news­paper and I happily brought it home and ate it with tea. Rewind a couple of months when I was helping out in a friend’s café in the UK. Before I could do that I had to undergo an online health and hygiene course. This is a basic requirement for anyone handling food in the UK. Strict protocol had to be adhered to even though it was only coffee, tea, and cakes, no raw food and no hot food.

I can’t help thinking about the paradox here. One country obsessed with cleanliness and one with a much more laid back attitude to the whole thing! Let’s look at the West’s obsession with hygiene. Growing up, although I certainly had to wash my hands before eating, parents in those days were not worried if chil­dren played in earthworm-infested soil, or muddy puddles.

Today I notice parents in the West are much more conscious of poten­tial hazards—not allowing small chil­dren to dig in mud, wiping down baby high chairs with specially designed disinfecting wet wipes, and preventing kids from sitting on ‘dirty’ floors.

Some have even gone as far as to take on the health services by not vaccinating their children against things like chicken pox, measles and other childhood illnesses. All in the name of ‘health’. (And yes, there are arguments for both sides and sta­tistics can always be twisted to suit any argument.) Meantime in Nepal, particularly in the countryside, chil­dren look, and are, positively cov­ered in muck of many kinds. No one seems unnecessarily worried. We can argue that this is because there is little choice. But remember, I was brought up in the UK before everything went super clean. There was a choice: my parents could have ensured when I was playing it was done in a ‘hygienic’ environment. They did not. In those days it didn’t seem to matter so much, and any­way we children were having fun!

Going back to food, I wonder why I can easily accept a newspa­per-wrapped donut from my local store, handled by the shopkeeper after she had handled my earthy potatoes, and probably a lot of grub­by money earlier, but would proba­bly balk if the waiter in an upscale restaurant touches a similar food item while putting it on my plate. To get a tiny stone in one’s bhat in a highway eatery is acceptable but a hair in one’s soup in a mid-class restaurant would have us complain­ing to the manager. Or would it?

Last year, when eating with a Nepali friend in Cambodia, he found a piece of glass in his rice. Yes, we complained, yes, the manager was called and he apologised, replacing the dish with a plate of pasta. But no, we didn’t create a huge fuss. In fact we sympathized with him that most likely the rice supplier was cheating on the weight of the sack of uncooked rice he sold to the restaurant.

I think the reason we did not complain more strongly was that this was nothing new or shocking for us. But I am sure in the West even I would have caused a bigger stir and for sure the kitchen would have been closed down while health inspectors checked every aspect of the kitchen’s daily hygiene routine.

So do those of us who got to play in the mud and the rain have a healthier lifestyle, a better immune system, and a more pragmat­ic take on cleanliness than those who did not?