Hundreds of Political Prisoners in Nepali Prisons

While the pro-monarchy prime minister and ministers have been celebrating their heyday in power in the name of people’s movement of April 2006, hundreds of political prisoners jailed under different tags have been spending their torturous years in Nepal. Bhanubhakta Acharya, a Maoist political prisoner in the Central Jail of Kathmandu has been on an indefinite hunger strike from 15 June demanding for the immediate release of political prisoners from all prisons of Nepal. According to him, there are more than 100 Maoist political prisoners in different regional prisons. Besides there is the lack of knowledge about the political prisoners unaffiliated to any political parties. Human rights groups of Nepal state that it has become difficult for them to advocate specifically for the release of political prisoners because many have doubtedly been imprisoned under different other criminal tags. Hundreds of prisoners kept under different criminal tags in many districts of Nepal have been demanding for their immediate release.

The Ministry of Home Affairs has not been able to supply any particular details as to the number of political prisoners in the country. The Home officials often boast that Nepal rarely does have prisoners of political conscience and if any such case is reported they would take an immediate action. Human rights workers state their difficulty reporting about such unidentified political prisoners. Despite the existence of dozens of human rights organizations in Nepal, they have not produced any specific statistics of political prisoners.

The government daily newspaper the Gorkhapatra published today has drawn the attention of the government itself to the continued undemocratic detention of political workers even after one year of the fall of the autocratic regime.

Almost 10 million Nepalis took out to the streets continuously up to 19 days and demanded an immediate abolition of monarchy. To save feudal monarchy, the US Administration and the Indian ruling class persuaded the Nepali Congress headed by Girija Prasad Koirala, the Nepali Congress headed by Sher Bahadur Deuba and the Emalay headed by Madhav Kumar Nepal to accept the reinstitution of the dissolved House. King reinstituted the House just when millions of people were heading towards the royal palace to end the monarchy and declare republic.

After the House was restored, the first thing done by it was to make a disguised democrat Girija Prasad Koirala the new prime minister, who took oath not from the parliament but from the feudal monarch. He then made the restored House declare the king’s successors. This was completely against the mandate of the movement that wanted to do away with monarchy.

Maoists state that although they have honestly entered the peace process by depositing their weapons and guerrilla fighters in the UN-monitored cantonments, the other rival parties have been playing underhand games to wipe out their existence in the country. The Maoists have time and again urged the previously ruling political parties to show ideological broadness in terms of long-term national well being. When their youth wing members requested the security forces to capture criminals based on authentic information, the state slighted it. Consequently, they began to capture criminals themselves. Then the criminals, too, have turned on them. On later days, they have faced more attacks from armed criminal groups. Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala has reportedly met several leaders of the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (MJF), an armed group that massacred 29 unarmed Maoist party workers on 20 March in Rautahat district. Human rights field reports indicated that none of them was killed in a clash. Several women were murdered after rape and torture. However, the government has not arrested anybody from the MJF so far. Instead, Prime Minister Koirala two days ago met the second leaders of the armed group Kishor Bishwas and Laxman Karna in his official quarter and talked about how to teach Maoists a lesson on coming days. Prime Minister Koirala, political analysts point out, does not want to let Maoists flourish no matter how democratic and liberal they become. Those familiar with the prime minister’s psychology guarantee that all he does in the name of coalition and cooperation with leftists is aimed at destroying Nepal’s Marxist and socialist forces. While the prime minister seems busy exercising on how to strengthen his own hereditary rule (his son and daughter are powerful leaders in his party on the queue to succeed him like Gandhi family members did in India in the past), the national agenda of the constituent assembly and state restructuring have got little prime ministerial attention.

Similarly, while the government has been concentrating how to wipe the influence of Maoists among the majority of grassroot rural and urban masses, many political prisoners have not got attention even from mass media that call themselves the “voice of the voiceless”.

Most surprisingly, the Maoist participants in the government themselves have been helpless in the matter of their own political prisoners. The Maoist ministers say that the prime minister and other related ministers evade their complaints and proposals under different personal and institutional pretexts.

Due to the existing culture of corruption, inactivity and evasiveness to which the Maoists’ rival parties are well-used, Maoists, the new entrants, have not been able to convince the optimistic people about their accountability after their entry into the government.

ENDS

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