Was it just to indict Gurung who had legally bought the land at Baluwatar and paid taxes?
A fortnight after the District Attorney Office (DAO), A Kathmandu filed a case of forgery of government documents at the Kathmandu District Court (KDC) against 289 individuals in the Lalita Niwas land grab scam, the KDC has released 17 people arrested in its connection on bail and one another on a general date. Since forgery of government documents, if convicted, carries a prison sentence of one year, they could not be remanded to judicial custody. The bail amount sought by the court varies from a low of Rs 330,000 to a high of Rs 24.6 million from Min Bahadur Gurung, the owner of the Bhatbhateni Supermarket chain. Although the 18 were arrested two months ago under anti-forgery and organised crime charges, the latter charge was dropped by the DAO, sparing them up to five years' imprisonment if convicted. The defendants - who include another 21 persons who are already deceased - are accused of falsifying government documents to transfer 143 ropanis of government-owned land into private ownership over a period of 30 years.
The Lalita Niwas scam is one of the three big scandals to rock the country in recent months involving high-profile people - the other two scams being the fake Bhutanese refugee scandal and the smuggling of gold weighing a quintal. Despite the tall talk by the Prime Minister and the home minister that no one, regardless of their position in society, would be spared, the government has gone all out to shield those people whose decisions were instrumental in the transfer of the Lalita Niwas land. No case has been filed against former prime ministers Baburam Bhattarai and Madhav Kumar Nepal, whose four Cabinet decisions between April 2010 and October 12 paved the way for the transfer of the Baluwatar land into private property. Those who have been indicted include a former deputy prime minister, four former ministers, six former secretaries, an incumbent secretary and a joint-secretary along with dozens of government employees, middle-men, land mafia and businessmen.
People are questioning how just it is to indict Gurung, owner of Bhatbhateni supermarket, among others, when he had legally bought the land at Baluwatar and paid the due taxes to the government? The government never bothered to invalidate the appellate court verdict in 2000 that ruled Lalita Niwas land was individual property and the tenants working on the land had right to half the share of the property as provided for by law. The Central Investigation Bureau (CIB) has not indicted the Rana family members who claimed ownership of the 143 ropanis of land and sold them as private property. Unlike in the past, the CIB claims it has collected enough evidences this time to prove the wrongdoing on the part of the accused. So can the government hope to get back all the land that has now been transferred into individual property? It remains to be seen how the court will decide on the case when it has been politicised with the police naming the former prime ministers Bhattarai and Nepal as mere witnesses to the case in their report and not indicting them. The way this case is handled will foretell how the other two big scams will be treated, although they have international ramifications.
Uterine prolapse
Many Dalit women from 400 families at Muktikot Village in Swamikartik Khapar Rural Municipality in Bajura district are suffering from uterine prolapse. But they are compelled to hide their disease due to lack of access to medication and timely treatment from the nearest health centres, which do not have any facility to cure it. It is shocking to learn that such a large number of women in their forties have to live with the disease for years.
Local health officials said the problem behind the disease is that they give birth to multiple children without leaving any gap between two children. Early marriage, hard work just after delivery, poor diet and rest as well as lack of health awareness are blamed for the problem of uterine prolapse, which is common in most women in rural parts of the country. Even if the women are diagnosed with the disease in time, they do not have the money or easy access to a health facility from where they can get timely medical treatment. Medical facility for uterine prolapse is available only in the federal capital and other cities, where the Dalit women cannot afford to travel for medical treatment. So, the local level must come up with the needed health facility for those suffering from the disease.
A version of this article appears in the print on September 12, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.
