Heart of matter
It was not a surprise but surely a setback to read in a recent interview with a Nepalese daily Bhutan’s Information and Communication Minister Nandalal Rai saying that he sees the possibility of communal violence in the country if the government revives the Nepali language version of the state-controlled Kuensel that comes out six days a week.
I may not be a fair judge, but Rai cannot provide any evidence that Kuensel’s Nepali edition ever promoted communalism in this kingdom’s history. The paper when it started in the early 1960s was published in Nepali by two Nepali speakers. It did not invite communalism; it acted as a forum for disseminating public information and fueling economic growth.
The first language of public communication for various ethnic groups in the country is English. After that comes Nepali and then the national language Dzongkha. Thus the Nepali language has a larger market in Bhutan than Dzongkha.
Kuensel’s Nepali edition was closed years ago, yet the closure came after the 1990 eviction spree started. It was the re-energised mission of the government after the ban on the Nepali language curriculum in the south in 1990, which created a whole generation of Nepali speaking population not knowing how to read their language. Rai does not know how to speak his own Kirati language! His children might know neither Nepali nor Kirati.
Over the decades, we were called Lhotsampas, though we weren’t. Rai along with 11 other Nepali-speaking MPs in the Bhutanese parliament must revive the movement for identity; we are Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, not Lhotsampas. We speak Nepali not Lhotsamkha. Eroding language is corroding culture and wearing away identity. Nepali speakers in Bhutan not only want to live as Bhutanese but as Nepalis as well — the ethnicity that provides them the identity.
Language and culture are not sources of conflict like he assumes, they are resolutions. They bring harmony and peace, not chaos and turmoil. Language promotes unity, brotherhood and love, not enmity or hatred. Even if it is never uttered in public, Rai should have realised the fact that the 1990 angst was partly due to the government attack on language and culture.
Brought up under the strict discipline of the army barracks with Dzongkha as the only language of communication, Rai must have a well developed psyche that the Drukpas wished to inculcate in him. It is time that he changed his old thoughts at par with the change he has achieved in his role to serve the country. He was serving the Dzongkha rulers as an army man. His role as MP and elected minister has changed to serving the people.
As a representative of the Nepali-speaking population, his statement, if circulated in the southern districts, will surely create public anguish against him. Rai’s statement is not the representation of sentiments in the south. He is not only obstructing the people’s right to education in their own mother tongue as enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to which Bhutan is a signatory, but has also made them ignorant of a language that was once used in official documents.
When I translated the country’s constitution from English into Nepali and mailed it to many Nepali-speaking friends in the country, I was shocked to learn that a whole generation knew nothing about the Nepali script while they could speak it with difficulty. It was rather Drukpas who managed to read some of the stuff and responded to me. Minister Rai must feel shame that his community does not know its language while people from other communities can read it.
Rai not only holds the responsibility to widen the scope of the Nepali language but also to educate a generation who did not get to see a school in their life because of not having a No Objection Certificate (NOC) or because schools in the south were closed after 1990. The ineffective debates that we observe in parliament in Dzongkha has emphasised the need for revival of Nepali even for the use of public discourse.
Dzongkha does not have an extensive enough vocabulary to meet current demands. This was shown when drafters had to borrow words from Tibetan to write the country’s first constitution which was promulgated in 2008. Nepali has all the words related to law and technology. Dzongkha can never compete with Nepali. Thus, it is better for the government to encourage newspaper publishers to bring out Nepali editions instead of forcing them to publish Dzongkha editions which are dying due to lack of revenue and readership.
The ban on Nepali does not maintain harmony. Rather, it incites people to explode against the policy when the opportunity arrives. Giving them the right to promote their language will help people maintain harmony and understanding in society. Rai must realise it. People are waiting to read Kuensel in Nepali.