One cannot help but linger upon the sad fate of house speaker Krishna Bahadur Mahra who is in the public spotlight because of a House employee’s rape allegation. How all the system will react is one thing. But the fact that sex crimes are so all pervading these days- regardless of the worth of the allegations- should strike the mind as to how suddenly it is so. Both the alleged and the accuser, for one thing are family colleagues, the husband of the alleged victim also sharing the same political party. The former Maoists may be credited for bringing Maoist activism deep down into the hearth and home of the remote Nepali countryside. In course of their ‘people’s’ revolution, their mobilization of the youths in Nepali villages ripples asunder Nepali families and it is known that they have recruited school and college age students into their people’s army. Without much family supervision and with much ideological indoctrination that sex is merely a physical need, the effects of early sexual exposure on vulnerable cadre have yet to fully come public from among the rank and file of the Maoist cadre. More so, the effects of early exposure to violence on cadre rank and fil will perhaps take much longer to emerge. Societal violence and sexual extravagance have become a symptom still to be fully discussed of modern Nepali society also because the lower strata of society and the ‘weaker’ sex remain the more vulnerable and the voiceless.
Of course, an increasingly mobile youthful population deprived of traditional sources of familial and economic supervision remains outside the traditional sources of behavioral inhibition. Moreover, the exposure to sexual modernity provided by the mass and social media topped by the new modernity have eroded traditional familial values by way of which society is currently being barraged by coverage of sexual excess. Mahra on top in the political level is thus merely a symptom. It is symptomatic of a growing societal disease. The disease is one of social excess at the political level and the excess is not only in sexual behavior. It is one of excess in crime. From murder to burglary, from extortion to hooliganism, it is not quite possible to forget that this was encouraged at a widespread level throughout the countryside in the name of the people’s revolution. So when this is encouraged by the government party, this evokes state terrorism as, once again, demonstrated at Chitwan on an activist hell bent on exposing the all-pervasive levels of government corruption. That speaker Mehra should position himself to be charged of rape cannot but suggest that people in high places in that party are familiar with excess. We are in a new phase of societal excess prompted by politics. This is perhaps excused as modernism and revolutionary. But it is not. If allowed to rule rampant, state terror can rush the country into a spiral of criminality from which extricating ourselves may prove difficult in the least. No good news these days, unfortunately.
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