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KATHMANDU, FEBRUARY 23
Yesterday was an apocalypse!
I was with my dad on the way home when we got occluded by the fences of the police on the road. A 3 pm Baneshwor road, whose normal would have been a bustling turnout, yesterday was a lunacy filled with chaos.
The Nepal Police on one side, on their mark and the rioters on the other, tossing the second best national weapon of our country. The slogan of the entire riot was "MCC murdabad" or was it? Something that started as a protest had turned into violence. And see, here's a thing about this very situation – until the protest stays, the agenda stays, the instant it turns into violence, the agenda gets lost in translation.
I was observing the entire damn show. The rioters, blowing the shankha like their gills depended on it. The police, legit scared. And there were many people trying to hide themselves.
A woman, frantically running in a green saree covering her eyes filled with terror and tears because of the gases being bounced back and forth.
And the worst was, when they overthrew the police, there was a kid in the middle of the road, destroying the tubes along with five other men probably in their mid-30s.
The side of the road I was on was where I felt as safe as home for a while. Until the people there started taking shots at the police. The streets were polluted to an outrage no sooner, again. They started throwing stones, the police began to chase. My dad ran away with the crowd all the time shouting my name, and I was hiding myself without a fault with this one guy, in particular, who'd provoke the already provoked crowd to a point where they got possessed. When I asked him not to uptake it any further, I got told off with the most disdain egoistic tone that I wouldn't have been able to retaliate against.
The debate going on is like turning on the mixer without the lid on. It starts and then it turns into an unnecessary mess. In the crowd, I saw the youth in their majority participating for a national cause, but the thing was, at that very moment, you could clearly see them getting the kick out of bashing the cops or tossing the shields or destroying public property. It was as if the main agenda was but just a long lost cause.
When it's people who hold something as powerful as an education marching on the streets, is it really an achievement if everything is resulting in a threat rather than an impact? What are we questioning, the sheer idea of a civilization or a lack of government diplomacy? It's been decades since democracy knocked and entered, but it's still somewhat struggling to settle.
A version of this article appears in the print on February 24, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
