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There are two ways of looking at the post-2006 political journey of Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’. In one reading, he has matured as a political leader and is more aware of the opportunities and risks of competitive demo­cratic politics. He now regrets his decision as prime minister to fire the then army chief Rookmangud Katawal in 2009. Another cardinal sin was to make China instead of India his first foreign stop as prime minister. As a result of these two decisions, he had to resign after only nine months in office. Come September 2018, Dahal is a changed person. As the co-chairman of the all-powerful Nepal Communist Party this time he made sure he went to India first, and during his over an hour-long chat with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, assured the latter that should he be the prime minister again, he would be more mindful of India’s interests. During his four-day India sojourn (Sept 15-18), he also dropped plenty of hints that he expected KP Sharma Oli to in time vacate either of the two posts: the prime min­ister or the party chairman.

But as PM Oli makes one after another blunder, Dahal has been rather cau­tious about coming to the defense of his own gov­ernment, something that has miffed the prime minister. In this reading, Dahal seems to have matured as a politician as he now looks to avoid the kind of impetuousness that marred his early entry into mainstream politician.

But there is also an alternative reading. In this, Dahal has betrayed the cause for which he waged a long and bloody insurgency that led to the death of over 17,000 Nepalis. From a firebrand revolutionary he has turned into yet another Nepali politician who will do everything to ascend the ladder of power. While he was once capable of openly excoriating the ‘hegemonic and imperialistic’ India, consequences be damned, these days he is ultra-careful not to antagonize the southern neighbor, whose help is mandatory to get back to the top of Nepali politics. In the process he has also abandoned marginalized groups like Madhesis and Janajatis, whose collective cause he once championed.

As he heads to China after completing his India tour, power equations will be top on his mind. Operating under the shadow of a powerful prime minister, and biding his time, Dahal’s political legacy, meanwhile, hangs by a thread.

 The chairperson and his deputy at Banke dis­trict’s Rapti Sonari rural municipality have not talked to each other for six months. The reason for their mutual dislike was a dispute over who should get to ride a municipal vehicle. In August 2017, the munic­ipality chairperson Lahu Ram Tharu was given a car for which the municipality had to pay a monthly rent of Rs 110,000. Another Rs 30,000-35,000 a month was spent on petrol while an addi­tional Rs 5,000 was set aside for repairs.

Deputy chairperson Dhani Kumari Khatri complained that she was unable to ride in a car, even though it was paid for by taxpayer money. Last year, the municipality wanted to buy a vehicle. But Khatri insisted that two vehi­cles should be bought instead of one, and the procurement plan was shelved.

On August 1, Khatri com­plained with the Minister for federal affairs Lalbabu Pandit that she was having a hard time getting around to mon­itor development programs without a vehicle. “The deputy chairperson refused to sign official papers until a vehicle was arranged for her,” says an officer at the rural municipal­ity. A vehicle was eventually procured at a monthly rent of Rs 110,000, with another Rs 40,000 set aside for petrol.

“They initially discrimi­nated against me because I am a woman. But now that I am getting the same amounts of rent and petrol, equality has been achieved,” Khatri says.

The rural municipality is spending over Rs 300,000 a month on two vehicles, which are used as private vehicles by the chairperson and deputy chairperson. Chief adminis­trative officer of Rapti Sonari rural municipality Topendra Bahadur KC informs that the process to buy a new vehicle worth Rs 5 million has been started as the rents are prov­ing to be high. “A new vehi­cle will be bought within a month,” he says.

It is not just Rapti’s Sonari rural municipality where money is spent recklessly on rented vehicles. The chairpersons of Narainapur and Janaki rural municipal­ities are also spending over Rs 100,000 each on rented vehicles. The same is the case in Janaki rural municipality.

Nepalgunj sub-metropoli­tan’s Chief Dr. Dhawal Sham­sher Rana, Deputy Chairper­son Uma Thapa Magar and Chief Administrative Officer Toyanarayan Subedi also ride government vehicles. Munici­pal officer Sharad Kumar Pau­del informs that Rs 4.5 million a year is set aside for petrol. Likewise, Kohalpur municipal­ity has set aside Rs 1.65 million for petrol for its vehicles.

Frugal officials too

There are also people’s rep­resentatives who are more frugal. Khajura rural munic­ipality’s Chairperson Kis­mat Kumar Kakshyapati and Bajainath rural municipality’s Chairperson Man Bahadur Ruchal ride their personal vehicles. Both of them how­ever claim fuel cost. “I use my own motorcycle to serve the public. The motorcycle serves me just fine. Why do I need a car?” he asks.

When I was a kid, I hated being escorted to places. My parents asked my younger brother, one who was both physically and emotionally incapable of handling the situation even if we run into trouble, to escort me to places because having a male companion would somehow make me safer. I always wanted to be old enough to do everything on my own. But now that I’ve matured, growing up as a girl in this society has been nothing short of unending paranoia. The things that I wanted to do when I was a kid, like taking a public vehi­cle, walking on the streets or even taking a lift on my own, takes a huge chunk of courage nowadays.

The constant eve-teasing and sex­ual harassment have further wors­ened the paranoia. Eve-teasing is the most common act of public vio­lence—an unimaginative euphemism for the glares, whistles, hoots, “acci­dental” brushing-past, intentional grabbing, groping and pinching. We’ve now reached a point when we no longer feel safe on the streets but are rather habituated to the vul­gar comments, indecent proposals, unwelcome gestures, and attempts at physical contact.

According to a small survey done by The Annapurna Express, 93 out of 100 women surveyed reported facing some form of sexual harass­ment, and 88 of them said the expe­rience affected them. A full 94 per­cent of the women surveyed had been verbally or physically abused, and felt threatened and unsafe every time they ventured out.

The society condones these tendencies. It’s beyond me how a country with a Hindu majority, one of the few religions that deify the female form, could turn a blind eye to women’s daily harassment. The country that celebrates the feminin­ity of women has designed its soci­ety in such a way that women wish they were born a different gender. 95 percent of surveyed women blamed the patriarchal societal norms for this state of affairs and yet it is the women who are blamed and brutalized.

The eve-teasing and the cat-calling that men think is funny, is not. Wom­en are being hysterical, humorless, and oversensitive, they say. This might be seen as something basic, but honestly it can also be terri­fying. I suspect when voice is not raised against this kind of harass­ment and abuse, it turns into some­thing more brutal like molestation or rape itself.

Following a recent wave of rapes and murders, mostly of minors, a section of the society is clam­oring for death penalty for the cul­prits. The public anger at state inac­tion is perhaps justified and it is not hard to empathize with those who would like to see the perpe­trators of this heinous crime given the ultimate punishment.

“Every person shall have the right to live with dignity,” says Article 16 of the new constitution. Rapes most certainly violate this fundamental right of each and every Nepali. But, again, the same Article also stipulates that “No law shall be made providing for the death penalty to any one”. This brings us to an important question: Is death penalty justified, both ethically and legally?

People who speak in the favor of capital punishment for rapists strongly believe in its capacity to act as a deterrent; the laws must be so strong that they instill a strong fear in the minds of poten­tial criminals. “When you know taking this poison will kill you, you will avoid it at all costs,” says Sabitri Subedi, a native of Bara district who has become perhaps the most vocal advocate of death penalty for rap­ists. “I do not see any other alterna­tive. A person committing a heinous crime like rape does not deserve the safety from public stigma and scruti­ny that a prison sentence provides.” Subedi says she has closely known countless rape victims and has inter­nalized their trauma. It was the rape and murder of six-year-old Puja Saha of Bara in 2015 that inspired her to take up their cause, she adds.

The other reason the advocates of death penalty cite is lack of trust in the existing justice-delivery sys­tem. Nepali Congress federal law­maker Uma Regmi has also been asking for capital punishment for murder after rape. She says traditionally anti-rape laws have been poorly implemented. A new law states that anyone found guilty of murdering an individual after rape will get life imprisonment, and even jail term for rapes has been increased from 15 years to 20 years. But implementation is again questionable. “If there was faith in the existing justice-delivery mech­anism, we would not be pushing for harsher punishment,” she says. “When the authorities cannot find the culprits, or they try to cover up for those in positions of power and deny justice to the victims, it is only natural that the demand for capital punishment gets stronger and stronger.”

The case against

Nepal is one of 106 countries that has abolished death penalty and one of 142 countries that have not sent anyone to death in the past 10 years. Today only a small num­ber of countries continue with the practice, and even some of them are now are working towards a moratorium on death penalty.

Moreover, a 2007 United Nations resolution on moratori­um on death penalty, of which Nepal is a signatory, calls upon all countries to put temporary prohibition on death penal­ty while working for its aboli­tion. It also urges states which have abolished death penal­ty not to reintroduce it. But like all the UN resolutions it is not binding.

Those against capital punish­ment in Nepal are also in favor of rule of law but, at the same time, they believe even more in every individual’s inalienable right to life. Manju Khatiwada, head of the ‘Gen­der and Inclusion’ division of the National Human Rights Commis­sion, says that instead of demanding capital punishment, existing laws should be implemented to bring justice to the victims.

There is no credible evidence that death penalty deters crime more effectively than a lengthy prison term, she adds. After working closely with the victims of rape in different parts of the country, she says sentencing the culprits to death will not bring any consolation to the victims’ family. “The focus should instead be on the victims’ social rehabilita­tion and reintegration”.

There are practical hurdles to the implementation of capital punish­ment as well. While asking for capi­tal punishment for rapists, lawmak­er Regmi said “right culprits” should be found and sentenced to death. But according to constitutional law­yer Bipin Adhikari, to arrive at the “right culprit” the prosecution must prove beyond reasonable doubt that the defendant is guilty. “But as our investigate system is flawed there are high chances that the provision of death sentence might be abused,” he cautions. Death penalty is irre­versible, adds Khatiwada, so if there is a mistake in identifying the cul­prit, someone else might have to pay for it with their life, as has happened in many other countries.

Adhikari and Khatiwada both agree that there are underlying reasons behind increasing cases of rapes which cannot be solved by sentencing culprits to death. They demand that the society look into these reasons and come up with solutions accordingly. There are for instance problems related to dis­crimination, the stigma associated with reporting these crimes, flawed justice system and corruption in investigation. The pro-death Subedi pointed out lack of proper toilets in the rural areas as a reason; Regmi, the lawmaker, cited the problem of alcoholism and drug abuse as also responsible for increasing rapes.

As Nandita Rao, an Indian law­yer, writes about the demand for death penalty for rapists in India: “It is not the severity of the pun­ishment but the certainty and uniformity of it which will reduce crime.” Perhaps fewer voices in Nepal would be in favor of death penalty if we could only imple­ment existing laws and reduce the stigma attached to rape victims coming out