(Or Maybe Something Irrelevant)
On Monday, May 28, 35,000 schools re-opened after 12 days of shutdown! For the records, 8,000,000 children across the nation were affected.
The reason behild closure, then continuation of closure and then re-opening were all but thrash reasoning. A kind of joke!
Let first have a look at the chronology of events:
May 13 – Institutionalized Schools’ Teachers Union (ISTU) began protests that demanding the salary scale equivalent to that to government teachers and appoitment letters
May 16 – ISTU, including the Nepal Educational Republican Forum (NERF) and All Nepal National Free Students Union (Revolutionary) – two Maoists organizations – annouced shutdown of schools
Private and Boarding School Assocaition of Nepal (PABSAN) and National-PABSAN (NPABSAN) too annouced closure of schools with PABSAN president Umesh Shrestha saying that the schools neither ask fees with students during the closure nor pay the teachers
May 17 – Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala expressed concerns
May 18 – Ministry of Education formed a talk team led by spokesperson (Minister Pradeep Nepal was in Maldives participating in the anti-doping conference), NERF refused talks with non-ministerial level team
May 20 – Minister Nepal returns and in harse words says he is not able to fulfil the demands as it not educational but political (however, during closure the demands included immediate annoucement of republican state)
May 23 – NERF says it won’t sit for talks until minister apologies for what he had said
May 25 – Police brutally beat teachers during their sit-on at the ministry, they immediately annouced two-hour of transports shutdown for the afternoon
Minister and state-minister express conerns and say they were not involved
May 27 – Valley was shutdown in protest with MERF and Revolutionary taking the lead
In afternoon, Revolutionaly annouces that on request of guardians, students and NGO/INGOs they ended the school shutdown giving one-month ultimantum to ministry to fulfil their demands or face more protest
Let me ponder on some questions:
- The shutdown of schools was called by ISTU, NERF, Revolutionary, PABSAN and NPABSAN. But when Revolutionary said the shutdown ended, it ended. How? Where were ISTU, PABSAN and NPABSAN?
- The protest began demanding something. But it ended without any demands fulfilled. Why the shutdown was then for?
- Why do we find Maoists organization involved in every protest against government? And, then they always put up pure political demand (mostly immediate annoucement of republican state) and ends the protest for nothing. Why?
- How come ISTU, the main body that began the protest find themselves lost in the middle of the protest?
I don’t have answers to all. The only thing I believe is the Maoists organization try to gain three things from such protest. First, they want to establish their sister organizations as strong ones, second they want to put pressure on the government for pure political reason and third, they want to gain faith of people by ending the protest.
I am opposing the idea of school re-opening but what I pondered is why are we seeing protests (affecting the everyday administration and people) for nothing!
