Throwback to the 80s

In Nepal, the struggle for democracy is not an event; it is a craft practiced across generations, passed like a lamp from hand to hand

- Ruchira Gupta

I began reporting from Nepal in the early 1980s, when democracy was a whispered hope and a dangerous word. Under the Panchayat system, in place since 1962, political parties were banned and the monarchy concentrated power the way a fist concentrates blood. Even arithmetic could be criminalised: if more than five people gathered, police could disperse the meeting and drag people away.

I watched it enforced in 1985 near New Road, a constable’s finger ticking off the sixth face at a tea stall as if the number itself were subversive. Those years taught me how fear turns neighbours into strangers, how a press ban deadens not only the public square but the imagination, and how unequal law breeds unequal life. Women could not inherit property; little girls were baited and brokered across borders for men who called it pleasure; boys were shipped to the dark economies of hard labour; poverty pressed people into choices that were not choices at all. Yet a struggle kept finding breath.

I interviewed leaders who were sometimes in jail, sometimes in hiding, sometimes in exile, and sometimes—when the border was porous to courage and friendship—sitting at my dining table in Forbesganj, fourteen kilometres from Nepal.

Girija Prasad Koirala spoke with a matter-of-fact cadence about strikes and repression; Ganesh Man Singh shuttled between hiding and house arrest; Mangala Devi Singh nursed the Nepali Congress women’s wing with more stamina than budget; Krishna Prasad Bhattarai brought the patience of a constitutionalist; P.L. Singh had the briskness of a street organiser; Pradeep Giri's moral clarity could slice a slogan in half; Chakra Bastola carried a seasoned caution; Durga Subedi refused to confuse romance about revolution with its real costs.