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During his meetings with senior American offi­cials, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Nepali Minister for Foreign Affairs Pradeep Gyawali repeatedly urged his American counterparts to stop viewing Nepal through Indian lens. The perception in Nepal that the US sees Nepal through Indian prism was strengthened during the five months of the blockade when many Nepalis felt that the Americans were not vocal enough about India’s inhumane treatment of its small neighbor. With the Americans renaming ‘Asia-Pacific’ as ‘Indo-Pacific’, in a clear preference for India over an expan­sionist China in the Indian Ocean, and given recent US-China trade frictions, it is easy for smaller South Asian countries to believe the Americans have somehow ‘exported’ their regional policy to India. Interestingly, in its defense, the Americans say they would not have as strong diplomatic and security presence in Nepal if they had outsourced their Nepal strategy to India. That is true. The American diplomatic presence in Nepal is huge (though no one knows how big). Perhaps the same is true of its security presence.

The security establishment in the US, and the CIA in particular, has always seen Nepal as an important buffer between India and China, a convenient outpost from which they can closely monitor the maneuvering of these two regional giants. (Close geographical proximity is priceless even in the age of drones.) Given Nepal’s advan­tageous geostrategic position, they would be foolish not to. That the Americans mostly prefer to remain low-key is a different matter.

But they do sometimes throw their weight around. For instance, the US Embassy put a spanner on the plan of the Poverty Alleviation Fund to develop the 14 districts abutting Tibet with Chinese money. They also promised alternative sources of funding. The relationship between the US and Nepal armies has never been stronger and the Americans in the future may not be shy about leveraging this for geopolitical gains. This in turn calls for a carefully calibrated Nepal policy.

Voters these days don’t elect leaders to protect the human rights of people halfway across the world. They vote for Trumps and Mays and Modis of the world so that their borders and their livelihoods are safe and secure. For this it is vital that countries be largely self-reliant. For one-party China, the show of sovereign strength abroad is even more important for domestic stability.

Pompeo and the Americans need no reminders. They per­haps know exactly what they are doing in Nepal.

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.

With the post-quake funds promised by foreign donors not coming, many earthquake victims have been left in a lurch. Most of them have gotten the first installment. But then the Office of the Auditor General stopped the payment of subsequent installments. The funds have not been released even after the National Reconstruction Authority district chapter sent orders for payment to the financial comptroller office, Okhaldhunga.

“There is no money to give out,” informs Rajan Fuyal, the chief of the comptroller office.

Even though 13,000 of the 19,000 households have received all three installments, around 6,000 households have not gotten even the second installment.

The situation has become worrisome for those relying on loans to rebuild their homes. Prativa Nepali, a resident of Chisankhugadhi, complains that without the money coming from the government, she has been forced to borrow at high interests, resulting in “a huge financial burden on the family.”

No employees to approve post-quake funds

PRADIP C. RAI  | Bhojpur

Rabin Tamang says he has not received money even though he applied for it in August

There has been a delay in releasing funds for earthquake victims due to lack  of employees to approve final disbursement.

Even though the data of around 600 earthquake victim families has already been collected and sent to the Department of Urban Development and Building Construction (DUDBC) in Dhankuta, there is no one to release the funds at the department.

Rabin Tamang of Bhojpur municipality complains that he has not received any money even though he filed an application for the third installment of post-quake funds back in August.

“I have been forced to rebuild by taking out loans and the interests continue to mount with every passing day. I have lost hope that I will ever get the third installment.”

The government body responsible for collecting information about earthquake victims sent the details of the 600 families to the DUDBC office in Dhankuta back in September. “We can only wait until the Dhankuta office approves the funds,” says the body’s chief Rajan Raj Reddy.

Says Rajendra Khatiwoda, a DUDBC employee, “The old employees handing reconstruction have been transferred but their replacements have not arrived yet.”

One widely accepted reason for the poor showing of Nepali Congress in the 2017 elections was the manifest failure of party president Sher Bahadur Deuba to make his foot-soldiers, all shocked by the sudden left merger, believe that the party could still do well. The old problem of factionalism in Congress was compounded by Deuba’s inabil­ity to come up with a credible electoral slogan to challenge the twin communist agendas of ‘stability’ and ‘prosperity’. Now ahead of the meeting of NC Mahasamiti, the party’s second most-powerful body, scheduled for Dec 14-18, Deuba seems to be hanging on for dear life. Senior leader Ram Chan­dra Poudel, General Secretary Shashank Koirala, Krishna Prasad Sitaula, Prakash Man Singh—they are all miffed at what they see as Deuba’s go-alone mentality. Deuba’s unilateral appointment of Bijaya Kumar Gachchadar, someone who has only recently joined the party, as vice-president seemed to be the last straw. One thing these forever feuding leaders now agree on is that Deuba must go, at any cost.

They are all jockeying for a favorable position in lieu of the national general convention, the party’s supreme legislative and electoral body, slated for March 2020. Among other things, the general conven­tion will elect a new lead­ership. But that is still some way off. Right now, the focus should be on giving final shape to a new statute that will help the party restructure in line with the federal setup. When that draft is finalized, it will have to be endorsed by the Mahasamiti. Yet as the battle between the ‘establishment’ and ‘anti-establishment’ factions intensifies, the taskforce formed to finalize the draft has not even been able to meet regularly. This tardy progress on the statute could in turn further delay the Mahasamiti meet.

Opportunism characterizes all politicians to an extent. Yet it is shocking to see how little the party leadership has learned from their drubbing in the last elections. Amid their little personal battles, a hard truth seems to have escaped them: it will be impossible for Congress to win an election unless one, it can clearly articulate its vision of the new fed­eral Nepal and two, unless people know how the party will tackle their bread-and-butter issues. Deuba’s failure on these two fronts cost them the last set of elections. And yet none of the senior Congress leaders who are challenging Deuba has thus far shown any inclination, or imagination, to suggest that they are any better.