Nepal's lively media
By Inder Malhotra Posted Sat, Sep 1 2001
The massacre of Nepal’s royal family at the beginning of June has turned the spotlight on not only the Himalayan kingdom, but also its media. The latter share the limelight for emotional coverage of the tragedy and even more so because of the arrest of the editor of the largest-circulation newspaper Kantipur, for publishing an allegedly treasonous article on the killings. The article by Baburam Bhattarai, leader of the Maoists, who spearheaded an insurgency in 30 of Nepal’s 75 districts, put the blame for the massacre on a conspiracy by India in collusion with the United States. The article also appealed to the army not to obey the present regime.
There is, however, another and more pertinent reason to focus on the Nepali media: its sheer newness. A pluralistic and expanding slew of newspapers and journals in that remote country dates back to 1990 when King Birendra, now slain, accepted the popular demand for turning Nepal into a multiparty democracy and the monarchy itself into a constitutional one. Before 1990 the newspapers sold only between 10,000 and 15,000 copies at the most. That number has doubled.
The constitution of democratic Nepal, promulgated in November 1990, guarantees freedom of expression and provides adequate safeguards against censorship or seizure of printing presses. Nepal’s enterprising journalists have used the opportunity to the best of their ability despite handicaps such as the country’s low literacy rate, lack of communications in a mountainous land and, above all, a crippling shortage of funds.
However, freedom of expression is confined to the print media. The electronic media, Radio Nepal (started in 1952) and Nepal TV (set up in 1985 and accessible to 44 percent of the population), are wholly government-owned. The government also owns two daily newspapers, Gorkhapatra in Nepali and Rising Nepal in English. But their circulation is less than 20,000, which is half that of privately owned newspapers, like the Kantipur and Himal Khabarpatrika, which have made their mark during the last five years or so. Nepal’s sole news agency, the Rashtriya Samachar Sangh (The National News Agency), is also a government monopoly. In a welcome initiative, the government has allowed eight private FM radio channels, some of them owned by newspapers, to operate, but they must confine themselves to entertainment. A move to permit a businessman, Jamim Shah, who is already the kingdom’s principal cable operator, to have a private satellite-TV channel fell through, however, because of the government’s “misgivings,” according to official sources.
Against this backdrop the print media have made impressive progress. Nearly 314 publications—dailies, biweeklies, weeklies—are published regularly and another 985 have registered themselves with the government. Nearly 99 percent of all publications are in the Nepali language—there are only 12 in English and four in Hindi, a language common to north India and southern Nepal; close to two-thirds of them are concentrated in the Kathmandu valley centered on the national capital. Sales are necessarily low, Kantipur’s 40,000 being the largest circulation. In remote regions, sales can be paltry.
With limited advertisements, the financial crunch has driven most publications to seek subsidy from political parties and even from rival factions in the same party, which are, of course, happy to oblige. The cozy nexus between political parties and newspapers, destructive of independence and objectivity, has thus become the bane of the Nepali print media. Both Nepali and foreign sources in Kathmandu also acknowledge, on condition of anonymity, the flow of foreign funds into Nepali media. The Indian government is convinced that Pakistan funds some virulently anti-Indian publications although the claim is unproven. Some foreign NGOs are also said to be acting as conduits for funds. The only redeeming feature of the baleful link between politics and journalism is that the entire political spectrum from the extreme right to the extreme left, including the Maoists, is represented on the media scene. Three hundred is, after all, a large number in a country of 20 million. But then there surely is a mismatch between quantity and quality.
Kanak Mani Dixit is the influential editor of Kathmandu’s Himal Publishing House, which brings out a Nepali daily, a weekly tabloid and a monthly in English devoted to South Asia. He told a public meeting in New Delhi, “only five broadsheet newspapers and even fewer tabloids” mattered in his country. These are the Kantipur group, Himal group, the Samachar Patrika group, the Himalaya Times group and the Space Time Dainik. A retired Indian diplomat who served in Nepal for many years is even more dismissive. He complains that most Nepali tabloids and magazines are hardly read except when “they decide to make mischief.” He is referring to anti-Indian riots that swept Nepal earlier this year when an obscure Nepali paper attributed to an Indian film actor anti-Nepal remarks that the poor fellow had never made.
Anti-Indian sentiment has also intruded in the sensational and hitherto unprecedented case of Kantipur’s editor, Yuvraj Ghimire. Along with two business executives of his paper, he was arrested for publishing the article by the Maoist leader. Ghimire, now on bail and thus editing his newspaper, has appeared in the court more than once. But the hearing of the case against him is inconclusive and can take months, if not longer, to be completed. Its outcome cannot but have an important bearing on the future of Nepali press.