The story does not lie, and neither do these photographs.
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| A village woman prepares morning meal |
During
the first half of the 1990’s, political dissent and the struggle for power led
a political party to go underground, and rise up in 1996 with arms pushing a
violent insurgency movement that the state found rather impossible to deal with.
It launched at least two secret operations that led to the arrest, execution
and disappearance of hundreds of innocent people. The revolutionaries pushed
their atrocities to the limits, setting up parallel governments and passing
penalties to the people who dissented with their philosophies.
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| Locals celebrate the festivities |
Deep in
the hearts of the Himalayan mountains, the rebels forced the poor people into
involuntary recruitments and loaded their hands with .303 rifles. Those who
differed in their ideologies were either brutally killed or else forced into
exile from their native settlements. The state on the other hand, carried out
its operations in a most unjustified manner: it forced the people to make false
statements and then executed them in secrecy. It then lied later to the
international community as to the whereabouts of the potential victims. Families
and relatives waited for their loved ones with a firm belief that they would
sooner or later return to their homes; but who knew where they were taken
during the wee hours, blindfolded, kicked, raped, beaten, and then buried
alive, or dumped to the scavengers…
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| A villager carries firewood on his back |
During
this chaos, the nation went into an undeclared civil war: the state passed
arbitrary laws that gave its forces unprecedented powers to search all
households at all hours, and, at the same time, no rights for the common people
to even file a complaint or register a case in court. Very soon, people were
robbed at gunpoint within their own households during the middle of the night;
many were taken to unknown locations never to be returned again. The rebels set
fires to most state infrastructures, attacked and ran down security set-ups out
of the capital, confiscated arms in the process, and fought against the state
with the very weapon that they managed to carry away during their previous
raids.
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| Porters with medical supplies |
The
people that never had enough to buy even a few tablets of paracetamol, the cheapest among the medicines, (read
acetaminophen if you are in North America) to get rid of fever and pain, became
pushed to breaking points.
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| NandaKala comes with a gangrene |
There is TB they have to face, and wounds and tears and cuts, snake bites and bone fractures, malnutrition and even death! A humanitarian organization provided free health
facilities for many, and in the shadow of its medical services, the most
helpless of people shared their stories. But there are rules and regulations
that govern the system in a most bizarre and the most unacceptable way: morally, culturally,
ethically.
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| NandaKala with her arm amputated |
If any
justifiable story was written of the few incidences depicting the plight of a
people at that time, then they were carried in the nation’s daily newspapers. And
whatever filtered through across the nation’s boundaries to the outside world
was more of a distorted image than a reality.
You can
now read the full story of humanity’s side: of helplessness, of heartbreak, and
of the inevitable as it happened in one corner. But there is more to it: you
can find the most bizarre, most unbelievable, and also the most humbling of
events and incidences from the lives people have lived.
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| SetiMaya (right) cries with a villager |
Even
more, there is humour and laughter and fun at the most unlikely of
circumstances. Need solid proof? Look at the photographs that accompany these texts. These images have not been released to this scale before. (There are
also a few among you who would testify as to the full story, no doubt about
that. Without taking names, I can tell, you probably were there!)
A
patient who knows there is probably no cure for her illness, an ostracized housewife whose arm needs to be surgically cut thrice sees
the wound never heal, an old man who has a cancerous outgrowth, a baby that dies during the hours of midnight...
Could
you have gone through this all? Could you have faced all this? Could you have
stood in the shoes of those helpless and endured? The
album with some selected photographs related to the story is available
on-line at
https://picasaweb.google.com/101109100381658727344/APeopleSStory?authuser=0&feat=directlink Please do not forget to take a look.
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| SetiMaya probably knows there is no cure |
(All photographs by the author. A few may have previously appeared on-line way back in 2007.)
