Festival disturbance

Nepali festivals are kind of hard to get a grip on. This is festival season, and there are so many diverse castes and peoples that it's more a question of asking 'which festival is on today?' Hindu festivals run on a lunar calendar, so they change every year, and are usually marked by 'first full moon of the month' or some such description. In addition, Nepal has it's own calendar, and the newspapers never seem to report on upcoming events - it's always 'yesterday a meeting was held', 'yesterday this festival happened'.

I came back to Kathmandu from Bhaktapur and things were in full swing for the Hindu festival of Indra Jatra - important to the local Newars. This culminates in the full-scale ritual sacrifice of hundreds of animals in Durbar Square. Unfortunately (for the Newars, not the animals), the recently-elected communist government in Nepal had failed to allocate any money in the budget for the buying of these animals.

Nepali's might be all for a communist government (mostly because they might be a change from previous corrupt governments), but they aren't ready for a cultural revolution. The first night there were protests in the streets, people climbing up on the temple steps and hurling rocks at the riot police below.

Your intrepid reporter Alexander uknowingly slept through the whole thing. The next morning I knew something was up because of the still-smouldering fires in the streets, poles across the roads from an impromptu bandh (strike), and Durbar Square looked a mess:



That night was meant to be the culmination of the festival, and by dusk there were already groups of young Nepali guys with rocks and sticks heading towards Durbar Square. I decided that maybe I didn't want to be a war correspondent, and stayed in my hotel.