Nepali Farmer Embraces the New Order : Politics: ‘We need a monarchy,’ he says, but he feels the old system was fraught with corruption.

Keshab Bahadur Keshi, a farmer from the Khatris warrior caste, is delighted with Nepal’s political reforms but still thinks his country should remain a monarchy.

Working on his small terraced farm in verdant hills 25 miles from Kathmandu, the 34-year-old Keshi has decided that he will join the Nepali Congress Party and is glad that the old partyless panchayat (council) system has finally crumbled.

Keshi hopes new Prime Minister Krishna Prasad Bhattarai will be fair and share power with King Birendra, the absolute ruler regarded in Nepal as the incarnation of the Hindu deity Vishnu.

“We need a monarchy. We must have a king, but he should share the power with the people,” he said.

Life in the hills of Nepal, one of the world’s poorest countries, is tough for Keshi and other small farmers, but the panchayat system made it more difficult.

“ Panchayat was an unfair system and helped only those who had good connections. They were whispering men who never discussed things openly,” he said.

Keshi listened on his small radio to news of the violence and curfews in Kathmandu in April and was glad when the king agreed to dissolve the panchayat system and introduce multi-party democracy.

Days after police shot dead dozens of people among thousands of pro-democracy campaigners attempting to storm the royal palace, King Birendra finally succumbed to the demands.

That transformed the political climate. Freedom was again in the air and Nepalese liked it.

Keshi said he opposed the panchayat system because its members lined their own pockets.

“When funds come for building a canal in the village and a road, they just disappear,” he said.

The paved road from Kathmandu abruptly comes to an end in the small trading town of Panauti. From there a mud track leads to Sunthal, two miles away.

“My neighbor’s house in the village burned down two years ago. After running around for 14 months, the government gave him compensation of 250 rupees ($10), which was not enough to make a cow shed,” he said.

When another house burned down in the same village, its owner received good compensation within a month and the government gave him corrugated iron sheets to use as a roof.

“What kind of a system is that? It is good only for influential people,” Keshi said.

“As soon as we have a constitution and elections are held, I think the quality of life will change, or at least I am hoping it will,” he said.

There is no drinking water in the village and the nearest well is a 15-minute walk from Sunthal. There is a local primary school but the high school is in Panauti.

Keshi produces enough rice, wheat and corn on his farm to sustain him, his wife and two sons for six months of the year.

When he has harvested his own crops, he goes to work on the farms of big landlords as a casual worker on daily wages.

Keshi is poor but luckier than many others. He went to school for eight years.

When he heard on his radio that Bhattarai’s Congress Party had formed an interim coalition government with the Communists, he decided to join the Nepali Congress.

“I thought about joining the Communists. But I don’t want to work under their discipline or take orders from them,” he said. “So I thought I’d join the Congress and lead my life as I want to.”