Off the Record 094: The rot runs deep
Issue 094 • 12 May 2023
It’s May 12, 2023, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
You can read Off the Record for free by visiting this link to receive this newsletter in your inbox every Friday.
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from a Kathmandu giddy with excitement. It’s been a rollercoaster of a week, with former ministers and bureaucrats arrested. Arrested! Imagine that. Not just implicated or investigated but actually taken into custody by the police. And these weren’t even politicians fallen into disgrace or those who’d outlived their usefulness to the party leaderships. These are active politicians, influential ones. But I’m getting ahead of myself. More on this in the deep dive.
This week began on a bizarre note as images of a Member of Parliament going topless in the House began to spread through social media. Independent parliamentarian Amresh Kumar Singh, formerly of the Nepali Congress, began to strip just a little while after Parliament began on Monday. Singh later explained that the House Speaker did not allow him time to speak in an attempt to stifle parliamentary debate on the ongoing allegations of corruption in the Bhutanese refugee scandal. Thus, he resorted to his very unique form of ‘protest’. Singh went independent after being denied an election ticket by his long-time party, the Nepali Congress. And since then, he’s become a maverick of sorts, speaking out against corruption and the top leadership of the mainstream political parties. This has endeared him to the public, placing him among the new crop of politicians who’re challenging the status quo. But lest we forget, Singh himself was a part of that status quo for a long time.
More shenanigans in Parliament as billionaire Binod Chaudhary, an elected Member of Parliament from the Congress party, has been placed on the Finance Committee of the House of Representatives. The Finance Committee oversees the work of the Finance Ministry and conducts various investigations into finance-related issues. What’s interesting is the Committee is supposed to look into numerous cases that involve Chaudhary himself, like the Bansbari land grab and the stashing of money in offshore tax havens. According to the news portal Ukaalo, Chaudhary isn’t even the only one with a conflict of interest. Gokul Baskota, Janardan Sharma, and Bikram Pandey sit on the Public Accounts Committee, which is tasked with overseeing public expenditure. All three of them have been accused of corruption — Baskota in the 70 crore scandal, Sharma in the scandal over the budget, and Pandey in the Sikta irrigation canal scandal. The Ukaalo article goes on to list a great many other such conflicts of interests with Members of Parliament basically overseeing sectors where they have their own investment. High-profile scandals aside, this is the kind of institutional and policy corruption that is less eye-catching but equally important to expose.
Then, before the week had ended, an expose by Setopati dropped, implicating the agriculture beed Madan Rai in a series of instances of harassment, abuse, and indecent exposure. Rai’s behavior is frankly disgusting. The 75-year-old agriculture ‘expert’ is well-known for his foul mouth but the incidents detailed in the report go so far beyond. According to former and current students at Khotang’s Jana Jagriti Secondary School, which Rai’s foundation operates, Rai would often molest young girls, grabbing their chests while they performed routine tasks. He would expose himself to them often and talk incessantly about sex. Two young girls even allege that he asked them to sleep with him and that he would teach them about sex. What’s more, when confronted about the abuse by Setopati, Rai openly admitted to it and said that he was willing to go to jail for it. You can read the article and even watch a video where Rai uses foul language, talks about sex to clearly underage children, and exposes himself to them. Makes me want to vomit.
Rai was arrested on Friday.
Finally, before we get to the deep dive, one small comment. A few days ago, a Twitter account stupidly and shamelessly called out Sumana Shrestha, a Member of Parliament from the Rastriya Swatantra Party, for her attire. Here’s the tweet and what she was wearing:
Is there anything at all wrong with what she’s wearing? But course, she’s a woman and people will seize any opportunity to create controversy over something as innocuous as a shirt and coat combo. I thought this was a one-off tweet from a deranged person until I happened to see a few others supporting him and agreeing that Shrestha should’ve worn something else, preferably the ‘national dress’. What hypocrisy. Men wear suits all the time and nobody bats an eye. An MP disrobes in Parliament and people support him but a woman from a new party dares to dress adequately and she’s attacked. And Shrestha at that too, one of the most transparent and hardworking MPs in recent memory. The misogyny, like corruption, runs deep and strong in Nepal.
Now, on to deep dive.
The deep dive: The rot goes deep
Some of those involved in the Bhutanese refugee scandal (l-r): Bal Krishna Khand, Top Bahadur Rayamajhi, Tek Narayan Pandey, Arzu Rana Deuba, although it must be said that Rana Deuba’s involvement has not been substantiated.
On Wednesday, the Nepal Police arrested Nepali Congress politician Bal Krishna Khand. Khand is no disgraced politician. He was most recently the Home Minister and is reportedly a close confidante of Nepali Congress President and five-time prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba. By all measures, he is a powerful man with powerful connections. The very fact that Khand was arrested was something of a watershed moment, one that Nepalis celebrated on social media.
It’s not so much that Khand is exceedingly corrupt or that he is a hated figure. Most people I’ve spoken to actually seem to like him. It’s more so that a person of his stature was even arrested, a sign that perhaps, the rule of law is finally being applied to the rich and powerful too. Earlier last week, when an arrest warrant was issued for Top Bahadur Rayamajhi, also a former minister and UML party bigwig, there was restrained jubilation. With Khand’s arrest, the joy is palpable.
So what exactly happened here? What’s Khand accused of? Well, allow me to explain.
Let’s begin at the very beginning, back to the 1990s. Since the late 80s and ramping up in the early 90s, the Bhutanese government began to slowly but steadily expel much of its Nepali-speaking population The government of the day introduced numerous laws that prioritized ethnic Bhutanese identity, i.e. Bhutanese language, clothing, religion, practices, and all but made it impossible for those other than that identity to obtain, or even retain, Bhutanese citizenship. Those deemed illegal aliens were summarily expelled from the country.
These laws were targeted toward the ethnic Nepali Bhutanese population, called lhotsampas, who had been migrating to Bhutan since the 1800s. The Bhutanese government was afraid that the growing ethnic Nepali population would dilute the Bhutanese identity and thus, embarked on oppression and forced assimilation of the lhotsampas. When the ethnic Nepalis began to protest, the crackdown only got worse. There are reports of rapes, torture, and eventual ethnic cleansing. By the mid-1990s, over 120,000 lhotsampas were evicted from their homes and forced to leave the country. These lhotsampas made their way to Nepal, even though Nepal doesn’t share a border with Bhutan. India, which lies in the middle, actively facilitated this exodus from Bhutan to Nepal.
The Nepal government housed these Bhutanese refugees in camps in eastern Nepal, primarily in Jhapa. They languished in those camps for over a decade, even as Bhutan won over the world with its facile ‘gross national happiness’ campaign. Nepal pressed Bhutan to repatriate its citizens but Bhutan refused outright and continues to refuse to even acknowledge that it kicked out nearly 35% of its population. Eventually, UNHCR and International Organization for Migration worked out a plan to resettle the refugees in third countries like the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands. By 2019, more than 110,000 refugees had been resettled in these countries.
However, nearly 7,000 refugees remained in the camps, either because they refused third-country resettlement or were found ineligible. It was at this time, in 2019, that the Nepal government constituted a ‘task force’ to look into the status of refugees who remained and identify those who would still be eligible for resettlement. And it was right here that a bunch of unscrupulous Nepalis found a quick and easy way to make a large amount of cash. They began to solicit millions of rupees from interested Nepalis, promising to send them to the United States as Bhutanese refugees. Those who paid would be enlisted in the task force report as refugees and recommended for repatriation to the US. 875 Nepalis are believed to have been duped like this, each paying upwards of Rs 500,000 to 1 million.
It is unclear how many of these ‘fake refugees’, if any, were resettled in the West, but some of those who paid but weren’t resettled eventually filed a police complaint, in 2022, alleging that they’d been scammed. The police were reportedly investigating but it was only after a story by reported Devendra Bhattarai landed on Kantipur’s front page that the case really got legs. The scuttlebutt around town is that a certain foreign embassy also began to place pressure on the administration to see this case through but that seems to be a lot of hearsay. There’s this article that seems to want to tackle the issue but says a whole lot of nothing and proceeds only to talk up the United States. For the record, UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, has clarified that the US resettlement program ended in 2016 and it will not be resettling any more refugees.
In any case, once the issue began to gain some traction, the police began to investigate and make arrests. Over the past two weeks, a dozen people have been arrested in connection with the case. In Nepal, the police arrest individuals once they have enough reasonable belief that the person is definitely involved. They present the person in question before a judge and ask for a few days in custody to collect evidence and properly build the case. Then, the individual is presented before the court again as charges are formally filed.
Those arrested so far include Keshav Dulal, the alleged ringleader and former personal secretary to Koirala family scion and former foreign minister Sujata Koirala; Sanu Bhandari and Tanka Man Gurung, two other leaders of the gang; Indrajit Rai, advisor to former home minister Ram Bahadur Thapa; former Home Secretary Tek Narayan Pandey; Sandeep Rayamajhi, son of UML secretary Top Bahadur Rayamajhi; Narendra KC, personal aide to former home minister Bal Krishna Khand, and former home minister Bal Krishna Khand himself. Arrest warrants have also been issued for Top Bahadur Rayamjhi himself, the UML secretary and former deputy prime minister, but Rayamajhi has gone into hiding, emailing the Parliament to say that he is ‘sick’; and for Prateek Thapa, son of Ram Bahadur Thapa and Niraj Rai, song of Indrajit Rai.
The primary accused in this case — Keshav Dulal, Sanu Bhandari, Tanka Man Gurung, Sandesh Sharma, and Sagar Rai — have reportedly spilled the beans on their political benefactors, providing the police with audio records, phone logs, and messages. It was based on this evidence that the police went after high-profile individuals like Rayamajhi and Khand. An audio clip has also been doing the rounds on the media where two male individuals can be heard discussing how they had dropped off millions in cash to Manju Khand, wife of Bal Krishna Khand, and Arzu Rana Deuba, wife of five-time prime minister and Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba. Arzu has gone on the offensive, calling the audio fake and filing a police complaint alleging slander.
News has also emerged now that the mobile phones of both Khand and Tek Narayan Pandey were found to have been ‘formatted’. The police are attempting to recover the data and when that happens, call logs and messages will hopefully shed more light on who else is involved in this scam. If Arzu herself is found to be involved, it will create a furor the likes of which Nepal has possibly never seen before. Deuba will not allow his wife to be jailed and his party will probably fall in line to defend their ‘bhauju’. If that happens then we’ll really see the mettle of firebreathing young turks like Gagan Thapa and Bishwaprakash Sharma.
So far, none of the top party leadership seems to be interfering in the investigation despite Rayamajhi being a UML secretary and Khand being an influential Congress politician. Although KP Sharma Oli, chair of the UML, made an initial attempt to defend his party secretary, he’s since suspended Rayamajhi from the party. The three top politicians — Dahal, Deuba, and Oli — held an hours-long meeting on Wednesday and although they say that they did not discuss the ongoing scandal, who really believes them? They must have reached some sort of conclusion on how to proceed and if people like Rayamajhi and Khand are worth sacrificing. If they are abandoned by the party, which appears likely, then they too will spill the beans on people higher up. And who knows who that will include? Arzu Deuba? KP Oli? Sher Bahadur himself?
I really would not want to be Prime Minister Dahal right now but I must say, kudos to him and Home Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha. The police cannot have moved to arrest such powerful politicians without the explicit go-ahead from the Home Minister. And Shrestha would not have given the go-ahead without consulting with his party boss, Dahal. The two of them must have decided at some point to let the case proceed, damn the consequences. Of course, none of their party members have been implicated yet so perhaps they calculated that this case would harm the UML and the Congress more than it would them, at least in the long run. Or maybe they decided that it was time they lived up to the ideals that they once espoused. I’d like to believe it’s the latter.
This is an interesting juncture that we are currently at. If the Nepali Congress pulls out of government as a result of Khand’s arrest, then it’s curtains for Dahal. There’s no way he can cobble together another coalition, especially with the UML miffed at him too over Rayamajhi’s arrest. But times are different now and perhaps this is the moment when the traditional parties realize that they cannot continue with business as usual anymore. The parties are more squeezed than ever before, with the ascendance of independent candidates and the Rastriya Swatantra Party. Armed with social media, the public is more vigilant and more willing than ever to punish those found wanting. Any interference in the case could mean that the party is signing its death warrant for the next polls. Maybe that is why the case has continued for as long as it has.
Then there’s also the issue of Nepal’s image internationally. Despite being a largely peaceful country with few links to organized crime or terrorism, our passport ranks lower than North Korea’s. That’s because Nepalis overstay their visas or quickly become illegal aliens once they are in foreign lands. Scams like these will only serve to further scrutinize the Nepali passport and applications for visas. Already, we are treated like cattle at Western embassies, humiliated and degraded (I’m looking at you America). Scandals involving faking refugee status will only make things worse.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It’s still very likely that Rayamajhi and Khand and the influential ones will be cleared by the courts or eventually released without charge. Or that the case will be handed over to the Commission for the Invesgitation of Abuse of Authority, which is currently being led by Prem Kumar Rai, who is also believed to be involved in this case as he was Home Secretary at the time of the scamming. Maybe a few will be sacrificial lambs while the more powerful get off. But maybe not, maybe this will be a watershed moment. I’d like to look back on this case five, ten years from now as the moment when corruption was punished, when powerful politicians began to be held accountable for their actions, when the rule of law finally prevailed. I know that’s a lot of wishful thinking but hey, a man can dream.
That’s all for this week. Off the Record will (probably) be back in your inboxes next Friday. I shall see you then, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
If you enjoyed today’s newsletter, please consider sharing it with others who might enjoy weekly updates from Nepal or consider becoming a paid subscriber.
Thanks for reading Off the Record! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.