South Asia and the West: a sober analysis

Women have travelled a long way from the kitchen. Now it seems that middle-aged ladies are taking over the world. Take the two Athenas who have recently blazed a trail across South Asia, leaving lines of fawning officials in their wake: Joanna Lumley and Hillary Clinton.

First off, Hillary’s heavenly descent – sorry, visit – to India earlier this month. The sour-faced hag gifted Hindustan a full four days of her time. She reassured the grateful nation that the new, ever so progressive administration of Barack Obama – the first African-American President (!!!), in case you hadn’t been told by the BBC – was committed to building on the bilateral (what a ghastly word) relations successfully established during the dark and evil Bush years. Most of all in nuclear and defence ‘cooperation’ – by which read ‘baying poodle status’ – but also in the lesser areas of education, agriculture, healthcare and women’s rights.

Later on, as a parting treat, she hectored the developing country on their obligation to cooperate in the fight against climate change – or rather, bankrupt themselves in meeting Obama’s draconian new carbon reduction targets. But, perhaps due to its historic experience of colonialism, India has refused to take this eco-imperialism lying down. The Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, bluntly stated that India would accept no binding emission cuts, because they would interfere with its development goals. (For all the Bright New India propaganda you hear in the West, India still has more desperately poor people – living on less than 1.25 US dollars a day – than exist in the entire African continent.)

Industrialisation, urbanisation, increased mobility, and all else that led to the levels of wealth we (still) enjoy in the West, are, of course, anathema to fighting global warming. It is therefore the unspoken wish of the Al Gore Army – fed on romantic notions of nature-attuned self-sufficiency; erring rather too close to Pol Pot, something of a proto-Green himself – that people-heavy nations such as India remain backward, immobile and overwhelmingly rural. For them, the sight of sky-scrapers shooting up in Bombay spells imminent ecological doom, rather than increased prosperity. The misanthropy behind this view of human progress seems to be entirely lost on the Western liberal press.

But I digress; now on to Kathmandu, which last week played host to the infinitely more delectable Joanna Lumley. The English national treasure arrived last Sunday to be received by hundreds of Gurkhas and general enthusiasts at the Tribhuvan international airport, wielding signs reading ‘Joanna Lumley, daughter of Nepal’ and ‘here comes goddess Joanna.’ Nothing like a patrician white lady to get the natives excited.

To this spirited welcome she retorted with the Gurkha battle cry – Ayo Gurkhali! – and then delivered a speech filled with such tender sentiments as, ‘My friends of Nepal, I am your family, coming to Nepal for the first time.’ Next she did tea successively with the prime minister, the president and the foreign minister, before venturing on to Pokhara to meet with some notable Gurkha chums or somesuch. Photos of her on arrival, draped in garlands and spouting forth, were lavished over the front page of every paper – although Himal, being a highbrow monthly magazine for deeply serious persons, has deigned not to take note. Nonetheless, her campaign was rather remarkable: her victory – that all Gurkha veterans with four years' service can now settle in the UK – was snatched right from the jaws of a belligerent government. It was certainly a pleasure to witness a husky blonde woman socking it to that dour fat man, Gordon Brown.

Now, I hate to be a bitch about the whole thing – really I do – but something’s been left out of the Gurkha debate in Britain: Nepal itself. Let’s take a little look at history; see what happens. The Gurkhas were co-opted into the Indian Army – the British-run forces in India, the vast majority of which were Indians drawn from the warrior castes – after their defeat in the Anglo-Gurhka Wars of the early nineteenth century. The British may have won, and the Gurkhas did lose substantial territory to the east and west of present day Nepal – for instance, the still highly anglicised hill-stations of Shimla and Darjeeling and their surrounding hills. But the campaign was long and grueling; the British seriously underestimated the courage and ferocity of their opponents. And so impressed were the British that, afterwards, they offered the Gurkhas generous pay to join their forces in the subcontinent. So, from former enemies the British were to gain one of their most formidable allies – just like the Sikhs after them.

But, faced with its bravest and greatest leaving for lucrative foreign employment, Nepal only allowed this co-option on the principle of mutual benefit. It was understood that both Nepal and British India would be enriched by the process. For, after a lifetime of loyal service to the British, the Gurkhas would return to their villages with their army pensions. These villages would receive a sudden injection of wealth; the veterans would use their pensions to buy books and chairs for the local school, facilitate a clean water supply, repair the village temple, and generally better their communities. In a country where the government has next to no presence in the remote villages – from which they have historically been recruited, and often from the most impoverished ethnic groups – retired Gurkhas are an invaluable asset. Mothers are often only willing to let their young sons leave for far off lands to serve, with the possibility that they will never see them again, because they know it will benefit their communities in the long run. If the new settlement option is taken up in a big way, rural Nepal stands to lose out – massively. A wealth drain, no less, guaranteeing further impoverishment. The principle of mutual benefit has effectively been buried.

Now, I’m not suggesting for a moment that Lumley is wrong in asserting the right of retired Gurkhas to settle in Britain. It is unfair that the Gurkhas were denied a retirement option handed to any Commonwealth soldier. That much is clear; and Lumley’s victory over the British government is heroic in its own way. She is still an excellent human being and all that – one I think we’d all be glad to have a gin and tonic with. But the issue is infinitely more complex than the British press has painted it. And that the interest of Nepal has been ignored – studiously or otherwise – is all too typical of our coverage of third world countries; take the adoption fad in Africa. Also unfortunate, and just as unnoticed, is the shift that the Gurkhas have undergone in the public imagination: from fearless fighters, they have now become frail old men, desperately in need of ‘our’ help.

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Last weekend I took to the bicycle. Why hadn’t I done so before? It is an excellent way to see the Kathmandu Valley – quite possibly the best. On Saturday, I rented a yellow beast with all the right gears from the centre of Thamel – and off I peddled to the far horizon. I tried to enter the Nagargunj forest reserve, just north of the city; I was informed by a gruff army officer – with barely disguised pleasure – that it had just shut for the day. So, not overly put out, I headed further north into the wooded hills. I intended to visit the village of Kakani, but missed the turning and kept heading on the road north. Eventually I turned back, concluding that I wouldn’t reach Tibet by nightfall. So, I didn’t really reach or visit anywhere, but all way the scenery was – how shall put it – sublime.

On Sunday, after Suresh-the-servant-boy’s morning visit, I headed straight back to the bike-rental stand, and set out to explore the southern valley. I tried being clever – rarely a good idea – and took the winding backroads in leaving the city, ingeniously avoiding the main arteries with their honking buses and smoke-belching lorries. But to little success. My sense of direction died soon after I got caught up in the narrow lanes of Patan. Time and time again I ended up back on the ring road; I couldn’t escape the hideous thing – I think there’s a life lesson here. Eventually, after asking a kindly old man with an excellent moustache in a corner shop, I figured out which way was south and got the hell out of the city.

The relief on entering the countryside, with its marshy paddy fields and bent-backed peasants, was immediate. The steep hillsides greeted me like old chums. I got as far as Bungamati, a pretty village whose plentiful hammer-and-sickle graffiti betrayed an allegiance to the Maoists. A mighty chili harvest had clearly just taken place. The locals were busy threading them together with strands of hemp for drying; they dangled from windowsills like long lines of scarlet seaweed. The local school had just ended for the day, and I narrowly avoided mowing down a procession of smartly dressed schoolkids as I threaded the stone alleyways. From Bungamati I crossed the Bagmati River on a sagging bridge and, after a trial-by-fire of disintegrated pathways, joined a tarmac road (!) that led me back to Kathmandu. All told, a fine day in the country.

So, see you lot again in (about) a week.