Naked Nepal: The Blog

By Edwin Koo

27 May 2010

How much is your life, or death, worth?

That was the question on the minds of Cabinet members who passed a bill on Tuesday “approving” 2,000 more “martyrs”, when the constitution, due on 28 May, is still in limbo.

Here’s what the Minister of Land Reforms and Management actually said:

“They are not genuine martyrs, but the government has decided to respect them as martyrs and their family would get Rs. 100,000 each ($1430).”

Actually, what he was trying to say was: “These guys? They’re actually half-baked martyrs.  In fact, We’re not really sure if they died for a cause, but what the heck, they died during the conflict years, so let’s give the families some money. And we’ll call them ‘general martyrs’.”

According to the high level task-force under the same Cabinet, the real McCoys are called “ideal martyrs”, whose families are entitled to Rs. 1 million ($14,300). The difference with “general martyrs”, it seems, is that “ideal martyrs” died either in detention or torture, rather than by an accidental blow or a stray bullet.

Whether it’s Rs 100,000 or 1 million, it’s a lot of money in Nepal. The average income for a middle-class wage-earner ranges between Rs 10,000-15,000 ($143-$214), and that’s the rate in Kathmandu. Many in the villages live on less than $1 a day.

It’s all well and good that the country’s politicians are concerned for their dead countrymen’s families. After all, the death of a bread-winner can be a serious blow to the survival of a family.

But what was disturbing is the fact that “the new martyrs are persons mainly associated with the Nepali Congress, CPN-UML, Madhesi Janadhikar Forum and Tarai Madhes Democratic Party”.

When the Maoists were in power, the comrades showed an equal amount of zeal in crowning martyrs. They had declared 8,000 dead comrades martyrs. The other parties raised their arms in opposition. Now, the very same politicians who had objected to using state resources to reward martyrdom, are playing the same game.

If we really wanted to split the hair and examine the semantics of “martyr“, it actually stems from the Greek word for “witness” and involves dying for refusing to renounce one’s belief.

Merriam-Webster dictionary defines martyrdom as “the suffering of death on account of adherence to a cause and especially to one’s religious faith” and Cambridge defines it as “when someone suffers or is killed for their beliefs”. Nowhere in the definition suggests an expectation of a reward for death.

History has made many martyrs. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Saint Peter… the list goes on. They all died for their beliefs, without expecting any rewards – at least not in the monetary sense.

So, what are you telling your future generations about martyrdom? That there is a Rs 1 million-reward waiting for you at the end of your life? Or that you can put a value on one’s life, or death? Or that a “martyr” can be bought for the right price?  All these are pretty dangerous ideas to push in a country half the youths are unemployed.

The truth of the fact behind all this “martyr” business is probably simple. That each political party is working so hard to propose their own martyrs can only point one way – this is yet another profiteering racket by the greedy power-mongers, trying to line their already-fat pockets – with the blood of the dead.

The musical-chair game of becoming the government is in an unstable flux, and each political party is simply milking their time in power, for what it is worth. Haggling over who’s a martyr and who’s not, simply put, is more profitable than haggling over the details of the new constitution.

In the meantime, I seriously hope the kids don’t grow up aspiring to take up a new career option called the “ideal martyr”.

A banner shows the portraits of the fallen Maoists, who have attained "martyr" status.