NEPAL: EDUCATION IN TIMES OF CRISIS

I am writing this in the midst of yet another crisis in this country

which has had more than its share of crises in recent decades. On 1
May, the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) began a protest
movement and ‘indefinite’ strike, the intention of which is to topple
the ’puppet’ government, a coalition of the Nepali Congress Party
and the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist Leninist) under
prime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal.

To strengthen their position the Maoists bused and trucked in

thousands of ‘cadres’ from the rural areas which have always been
their heartland. The predictions were that up to half a million young
men and women would come to Kathmandu to support their leaders
in a final push to establish a coalition with the Maoists as the main
party and their chairman, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, as the prime
minister. Comrade Prachanda, as he is known from his underground
years, has been PM once before – as leader of a short lived coalition
government in 2008.

The number of supporters may be short of that ambitious figure,

but it is clear that the strike to date has been a success, if stopping
all movement of vehicles, forcing all shops, businesses and offices
to remain shut, and closing all schools and colleges is a measure of
success. It is the most comprehensive strike I have ever witnessed.

Tourists are wandering about forlornly, wondering what to do and

how they will get to their next destination, while children take the
opportunity to play ‘crickets and footballs’ (according to a local
paper) on normally traffic clogged and polluted streets.

One of the Maoist actions before the strike that angered a large
section of the population was the forced closure of private and
boarding schools by the All Nepal National Independent Student
Union (Revolutionary), depriving over five and a half million children
of schooling. The dispute was supposedly over fees, but some
commentators have said that the action also allowed the Maoists to
house their combatants in these schools during the days of protest.

Private schools have developed rapidly in recent years largely

because of the myriad difficulties faced by the government sector.
Over half of Nepal’s population of 29 million is under 20, and so the
pressure on schools is huge. The country cannot decide whether
private schools are businesses that should be taxed, extortionists to
be vilified, or an essential component of the educational landscape.
While some of their names seem whimsical and inappropriate
(Mother Goose, Whiz Kids, Disneyland) these schools cater to
millions of families, are indicative of the demand for a type of
education that the government schools struggle to meet, and
deserve more rational treatment.

Nepal had about 2% literacy at about the time that Edmund Hillary
and Tenzing Norgay Sherpa climbed Everest (1953), and now has
58%, attesting to tremendous changes in society and great
investment by the nation and foreign donors. Young people have
many more opportunities than ever before, and it could be argued
that education is Nepal’s development success story.

But immense problems remain. Anyone who visits a school in a rural

area, even one that is not in a remote, inaccessible district, will see
that facilities are absolutely minimal, classes are large, textbooks
few and teachers often inadequately trained. Many children walk
for hours to reach school, and, while education is valued by parents
and society, they are often absent at harvest time, or with other
demands of family and country life, such as carrying loads to
markets which might be several days’ walk away.

Further, a very large number of children missed out on years of

schooling altogether during the long-running Maoist insurgency
which saw schools and teachers as targets (of both sides) and
teenagers as ready conscripts to the anti-government forces.

Books set in Nepal during these long, ruinous years, like ‘Palpasa
Café’ by Narayan Wagle, have among their themes the utter
sadness of villages and schools empty of young people.

”’I haven’t even given her a decent education. I feel bad about
that’, the old man said. (of a girl being conscripted by the Maoists)

‘Don’t worry father, when she joins the People’s War she’ll become
wise.’”

Manjushree Thapa in ‘Forget Kathmandu’ quotes Budha, the head

of the teachers’ union in a rural district, “‘The teachers have it the
worst,’ he said to us. ‘The Maoists force us to join their party and
donate five percent of our salaries to them. They’ll kill us if we don’t
agree.’ The Maoists had in fact killed a disproportionate number of
teachers throughout the country, teachers who had refused to go
along with their agenda. But teachers also fell victim to government
reprisal. When the district education office found out that they were
donating part of their salaries to the Maoists, it froze their salaries…
Most importantly, the war was devastating the lives of an entire
generation. ‘The older students have all fled to the district
headquarters for fear they’ll be recruited by the Maoists,’ Budha
said. ‘Or they’re afraid the security forces will kill them, taking them
for Maoists… A whole generation have seen their education
destroyed.’”
These youngsters, now in their twenties if they survived the war,
are amongst the thousands now in Kathmandu and other cities for
the protests or among the combatants still confined to UN
supervised cantonments, under the 2006 peace accords, pending
agreement between the Maoists and other parties on their
integration into the Nepali Army. The failure of negotiations on this
was one of the sparks that precipitated the current crisis.

The other factor has been the failure of all sides involved in the
Constituent Assembly to make any progress whatsoever on
development of a new constitution. From the outside it seems that
the participants are unable to leave their political feuding aside for
the benefit of a nation that desperately needs leadership.

From the inside, too. As an astute observer, Kunda Dixit, noted in

the Nepali Times, ‘It shouldn’t come as any surprise to our political
leadership and elected representatives that the Nepali people are
sick and tired of their inability to build on the success of the pro-
democracy movement and move the peace process forward’.
Widespread disillusionment is ‘accompanied by a gnawing fear that
politicians have squandered the gains of the past four years and the
country is headed back to conflict.’

The fact that the Maoists have not entirely distanced themselves
from ‘khukuri rattling’ (Dixit, a reference to the famed Ghurkha
knife), a fondness for revolutionary rhetoric (‘bourgeois
compradors’) and, worse, a brazen campaign of extortion of
businesses, small and large, and educational institutions across the
country to fund their campaign and feed their combatants, appear
to have lost them valuable support and compromised the credibility
of their claim to the democratic high ground.

But their opponents in politics have shown themselves to be

incompetent and short sighted, and equally as responsible for the
crisis. The political classes have traditionally reached their positions
through caste and connections, and it shows. It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that Nepalis have been let down by their own systems,
institutions and leaders.

Meanwhile Nepalis with the ability and wherewithal try to leave. In

recent years very large numbers have come to Australia for tertiary
education, as well as to the UK and the United States (the traditional
destination of the elites). While it might seem damaging to the
country’s future to have so many of its best young students leave
for overseas, and to have them migrate permanently if they qualify,
the benefits are the remittances of cash sent home which may fund
a younger sibling’s schooling or a new business, and the fact that,
wherever they are, well-qualified Nepalis will contribute something
to their country’s future. They will return as entrepreneurs, as
professionals, as tourists; if they remain abroad they act as
ambassadors for Nepal, raising the country’s profile and making a
significant symbolic contribution.

The pressure to leave has become so great that both Australia and
Britain have introduced more stringent requirements for education
visas. It was not the fault of Nepalis that Australian state and federal
governments have had no coherent strategy for the international
education sector, a situation that allowed numbers of unscrupulous
and unqualified people to operate colleges and agencies in an
environment where the migration system favoured hairdressing and
cooking as trades over qualifications that were more demanding.
Nepalese people move towards opportunities like water flowing
down a system of channels. When one is blocked they will find
another.

This perseverance and adaptability is a great national characteristic.

Everyday, as I walk to the college where I teach, I pass the Danish
embassy. There is always a queue waiting to apply for visas. They
will go to Denmark, learn Danish and study or work.

As the anthropologist, Dor Bahadur Bista, noted in his seminal, if

controversial, book, ‘Fatalism and Development’, the challenging
geography of Nepal and the extraordinary ethnic diversity of its
people produces ‘a strong commitment to productive labour, a
high capacity for endurance, efficient cooperative organisational
styles, and a high adaptive propensity at individual and social
levels’.

This means that given the opportunity of education, Nepalis will

make the most of it. I teach in a hotel management college. The
students are middle class, with reasonable English, and most are
looking forward to further study and work abroad. Their schooling
has clearly not been very rigorous, nor has it given them much
capacity for analysis and research. What is remarkable, however,
is that the ethnic diversity of my classes, as shown in the students’
names and appearance, indicates great and continuing social
mobility and adaptability.

Sherpas, whose origins are the distant high mountains, Tamangs

from the central hills, Rais and Limbus from the east, Gurungs and
Magars from the mid-west, all districts where even today roads are
few and far between, as well as Bahuns, Chhetris and other caste
Hindus from villages and towns everywhere, Tibetans, and a variety
of peoples from the plains bordering India, join the established
Newars of Kathmandu Valley in a shared ambition.

This mobility attests to the value of education, even if it takes place

in a remote village school, the hard work and vision of parents and
grandparents, and the capacity of Nepalis to take an opportunity
and run with it.

Murray Laurence

Epilogue

The Maoists called off their 'indefinite strike' after one week when it
became clear that the masses in Kathmandu were not about to rise
in support. In fact a 'peace rally' was staged in the ancient heart of
the city that attracted tens of thousands of people, not necessarily
hostile to the Maoists but to politicians on all sides for their failure
to achieve anything of lasting value during the two years since the
demise of the monarchy. The people of Nepal were then left
wondering whether the term of their elected Constituent Assembly
would be extended before the deadline of 28 May, as it was amply
clear that no constitution would appear before then. The Maoists, as
well as the leaders of the other main parties, were oracular during
this hiatus, and it was not until five minutes to midnight on the 28th
that the collective leadership announced that they had agreed to a
one-year extension.

With such brinksmanship, these politicians once again treated the

Nepali people with disdain. As well, the 27 May anniversary of
Buddha's birth in Lumbini, Nepal, 2554 years ago, gave these
same suspects an opportunity to cash in on the festivities, so
adding to a 'strange days' atmosphere which brought into focus
the short-term cynicism of the country's present day leaders.