For Nepal, a brutal return to a feudal past

Randeep Ramesh in Pokhara
Saturday February 5, 2005
The Guardian

When his captors threatened to throw Dhruv Karki into the flashing white swirls of the river Seti, the student activist thought his life was over. Blindfolded and having been beaten with a rifle butt over the past four hours in an army camp in western Nepal, Dhruv was mentally and physically exhausted.
His tormentors demanded to know the whereabouts of Maoists in the university campus, accusing him of lying when he said he did not know.

Eventually Dhruv was marched down some stairs and thrown into a room half-filled with dust.

There he found 60 other protesters who had dared challenge the king of Nepal's state of emergency.

It is four days since King Gyanendra used sweeping dictatorial powers to close down newspapers and censor broadcasts in the mountain state. The new royalist government has also cut telephone lines and shut down internet links, cutting off the Himalayan kingdom from the outside world.

Freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the freedom to assemble peacefully and the right to privacy have all been suspended.

Yesterday paramilitary forces rounded up political leaders in the country's capital, Kathmandu, in what appears a concerted effort to silence critics of the coup d'etat.

The crackdown against former members of the government and opposition groups confirms what many observers fear: a quick and brutal snuffing out of dissent.

Sitting in his family's house, Dhruv, 27, said that after King Gyanendra announced that he had sacked the government and introduced martial law, hundreds of students gathered outside Prithwi Narayan campus in the picturesque tourist town of Pokhara and shouted anti-royal slogans and "long live democracy".

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