TIED TO THE RED POLE: THE STATE OF JUSTICE IN NEPAL Sushma Joshi Eureka Street journal, Melbourne, Australia (2006); Hands in Outreach newsletter, 2006 On March 23, 2005, the Kathmandu Post, one of Nepal’s leading daily English newspapers, ran a front-page story titled ‘Red Pole’ reduces crime, misconduct, written by Shankar Kharel. According to the story, the Area Reformation Committee in Ward 2 of Itahari Municipality had devised a novel way to reduce “misconduct” and crimes. They tied up people who had committed a crime to a red pole in a public place, publicly humiliated them in front of the community, and got them to renounce their behavior. This story could be filed among the dozens of other quirky, odd, or downright laughable stories found in the Nepali media. While some readers might have caught echoes of the public humiliations practiced in medieval Europe, or more recently in Mao’s China, most of the middle class in Kathmandu probably gave the news item a quick gl...
The civil wars of the twenty-first century: Sushma Joshi's slightly twisted perspective of the universe.