Word: nepali
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...sense of dread that haunted Nepal's trek to the polls is fading fast. "The mood is almost euphoric," says Kunda Dixit, editor of the English-language Nepali Times and a prominent democracy advocate. More than half of the registered electorate in Kathmandu voted in just the first few hours of polling. Despite a scattering of incidents-one candidate was gunned down, an eight others were killed in factional fighting-only 33 of 20,882 voting stations nationwide reported that polling was disrupted...
...people of Nepal don't really care about a republic or a monarchy," says Dixit, the Nepali Times editor. Instead, they want an end to rancorous politicking. They want a concerted program for development and the creation of new jobs within the country. A new Nepalese government also must attend to the hard, yet inescapable reality of the trauma left behind by years of civil war. Reconciliation and reconstruction is the sole agenda that the voting public cares about. It'll be up to the country's garlanded leaders to deliver...
...Those ideas resonate in Nepal, home to another sizeable Tibetan population, where Tibetans have demonstrated daily for the past week. The protests have been broken up by Nepal's police, often violently, but that doesn't bother Tenzing Wangdu, 32, who was the president of the Nepali chapter of the Tibetan Youth Congress until a few months ago, and proudly shows off welts on his upper arm and back where the police clubbed him during yesterday's protest. "Having marks on your body makes you feel like you are among our brothers in Tibet who are giving up their lives...
...democracy parties in Nepal and joined the new interim government that would rule until elections for a Constituent Assembly could take place. But the acrimonious squabbling that followed has dispelled many of the hopes raised by the success of the mass demonstrations. "We just felt so proud being Nepali then," says Sanjog Rai, a college student in Kathmandu. "The protests showed us how united we were and that feeling of brotherhood gave us real hope for a better future. Now we're stuck with politicians who have no vision and only care about keeping power...
...India, which has close ties with virtually every faction in Nepal, eventually shepherded the peace process along, forcing the main political parties to come to terms with the Maoists. China has remained a bit more circumspect, letting India flex its geopolitical muscle while building bridges with the Nepali Maoists it shunned until not long ago and beefing up its hydropower investments along Nepal's glacial rivers. As the budding superpowers expand in influence and ambition, many see Nepal falling into the crosshairs of a new "Great Game" for the 21st century...