A special Report by ICC
02/28/2013 Washington D.C. (International Christian Concern) – After finally permitting Christians to bury their dead in Nepal, the former Hindu nation is showing signs of change with a pattern of religious lenience that other restrictive nations would do well to follow.
For many years, Christians in Nepal were not allowed to bury their dead because the country was a Hindu kingdom. Many Christian families had to travel across the border to neighboring India, if they wanted to give their deceased family members a proper Christian burial.
In early 2011, the Pashupati Area Development Trust (PADT) prevented Christians from burying their dead in the Shleshmantak jungle in Kathmandu. The Trust, which manages a vast area of land in and around the Pashupatinath Temple, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, had argued that burial is an activity considered impure in Hindu religion, and hence such activities should be banned on its premises.
In response, people from the Kirat ethnic group and the Christian community began protesting against the government, demanding an alternative burial space. The Federation of National Christian Nepal (FNCN) organized a series of protest programs demanding the provision of burial grounds for Christians.
Pluralism
In a positive turn of events, the government recognized the reasonability of the Church’s demands. This month, it was reported that a 16-member task force, headed by former Constituent Assembly (CA) member Binod Pahadi, has started its work to scout for at least two separate places for a burial ground in each of the country’s 75 districts in the next four months.
The task force will submit its final report to the government by July 2013. “Based on the report, the government will arrange burial grounds for us,” C.B. Gahatraj, the General Secretary of the FNCN, told the media. William Stark, ICC’s Regional Manager for Africa and South Asia, says, “This is an example of how some countries in South Asia are progressing to a more religiously pluralistic society.”
Before its secularization, Nepal had been a Hindu monarchy for over 200 years. Christianity is still considered a foreign religion by the majority population of Hindus and even by Buddhists. When someone becomes a Christian, they run the risk of facing opposition from the family and sometimes face the possibility of being ostracized from the community.
The Right-wing Hindu militant Nepal Defence Army exploded bombs in churches and mosques after the fall of the monarchy. The outfit’s chief, Ram Prasad Mainali, was arrested on Sept. 5, 2009 for exploding a bomb in a Catholic parish in Kathmandu, Our Lady of the Assumption, which killed a teenager and a newly married woman and injured more than a dozen others on May 23 of that year.
Troubled Past
The nation has survived a civil war, an unprecedented mass murder and the abolition of a long-standing monarch, to emerge into a democracy that is trying to work out a new constitution for a new Nepal. Since 1996, Maoist rebels had waged a decade-long campaign against the monarchy, leaving more than 12,000 people dead and 100,000 people displaced, according to UN figures.
After the infamous Royal Massacre in June 2001, when Prince Dipendra killed nine members of his family before turning the gun on himself, Nepal went through a season of further political instability. Then a nationwide uprising, known locally as Loktantra Andolan, against the new monarch, King Gyanendra, led to the end of his rule in April 2006, followed by Maoist rebels reaching a peace deal with the government, in November, to end the civil war.
After elections in April 2008, despite its perceived unlikelihood, the Maoists emerged as the largest parliamentary party. The monarchy was abolished a month later and a Maoist-led government took office in August. Since then, according to the BBC, politicians have not been able to agree on a new constitution – a key part of the peace deal with the Maoists – and are at odds over proposals to divide Nepal into states, along ethnic lines.
Challenges Remain
But, numerically speaking, Nepal’s political transition has been good for the Church. Since it was officially declared a secular state in 2007, after over two centuries of a Hindu monarchy, the number of Christians has increased from about 0.4 percent, to 1.4 percent of the 26.4 million people, according to the Census 2011 report by the Central Bureau of Statistics.
Yet, even this growth, significant in itself, does not tell the whole story. The figures were dismissed by the Church as a gross underestimation of the actual growth in the number of Christians in Nepal. “We can produce concrete proof of our numbers as we have registered all our members at over 8,500 churches. We are above 2.5 million but the census of 2011 shows us to be just 300,000,” said Gahatraj at press conference in Kathmandu in December 2012.
The shift in power, philosophy and the practice of law in Nepal will take time to bear fruit, economically and socially. The UN estimates that about 40 percent of Nepalis live in poverty and the social perception of Christianity remains under the shadow of fear and suspicion. Nepal’s political reformation remains influenced by forces that want to preserve the status quo, particularly in the bureaucracy, the judiciary and the military, which are resisting progressive changes.
But its decisive action to listen to the voice of Christians, to give them the right to bury their dead and to share the nation’s soil with them – which, for centuries, was considered the property of Hindus – is a dramatic step forward in the right direction. Christians in Nepal have been given a glimmer of hope that the future will give them greater freedom and more liberty to practice and share their faith freely and without fear.