Outdated Modernism

Editorial

Our recently ‘republicanized’ Avant-Garde activists have yet to be told that describing chinky-eyed, flat-nosed people as ‘Mongols’ has long been discarded by their Western democratisers as derogatory. The correct term is Tibeto-Burman although there is India-China politics in the continuing use of the M-word in the Indian northeast where Burmese ethnicity is distinguishable from the Chinese or Tibetan ethnicity, the Chinese continue to claim the land and the Mongolian hordes could well have invaded the area since there is historical evidence that they destroyed Pagan in Myanmar (Burma). The Tibetan origins of the population on the Indian side of the Tibetan plateau in the Indian northwest are not denied them although there are Turkic Central Asian and Uyghur mixtures too. This is perhaps because the Western fringes of the Tibetan plateau share the population, nevertheless, so much space must be taken up here on the Mongol issue

It is obviously because Nepali politics tends to take it up off and on and it has again. The reason is obvious.

Our politics has not been paying for the past three decades of multiparty democracy. Having agitated for three decades of the Panchayat system for a multiparty system which was finally delivered by King Birendra in 1990, the yields to the country were so ominous that the multiparty democracy had to yield to a Maoist revolution ushering in republican Nepal. The total constitutional exercise virtually stalemated within a decade of political modernists in Nepal have to move on. Although issues such as the Nepali flag would only naturally have come forth in charges environ were proposals to change the name of the country, perhaps political calculations of over-reach prevented a follow-through. Now it seems a necessity. After all, the Maoists had gone around organizing on ethnocentric lines distributing states to locals. The Tarai parties blunted the move outright and the academic realization that the distribution of ethnicity was such that no single ethnic group predominated in the country fizzled the move. But politics must continue and our modernists must be the vanguard.

Nevertheless, it is time such modernists be exposed for what they are. Since Nepal is Nepal and the Nepali flag is what it is, how would we be modern by changing the flag? Granted that the traditional values it represented may not sync with a section of our modernists. This section must be exposed for what they are. They are by no means modernists in the real sense of the term but represent a parochial section that is bankrupt in their concept of modernism. It is this bankruptcy that has been continually failing national politics and this failure compels them to survive on radicalization. Unfortunately, this is a temptation for foreign investments wanting to thrive on the destabilization of Nepal. For too long has the country ignored the need to pursue the sources of the political purse. This has cost us dare and will continue to do so unless immediate measures are taken to correct it.

People’s Review Print Edition