The Image of a Nepali Apartment Building

The biggest issue of Nepal in the recent past has been the Maoist insurgency. Since it was quite a drawn out struggle, it can be considered that established political parties and other institutions with a stake in politics (media, schools etc) were considerably influenced in their actions and decisions by this conflict. One way in which such an influence can be analyzed is by saying that these different entities in society were ‘radicalized’ by the Maoist struggle. Radicalized means that they became determined and constructed by the violence of the Maoist insurgency; they became defined in their roles in response to the insurgency. They took strict actions either opposing or accepting the Maoists. They were strongly attached to ideology (as opposed to personal gain) in their response to the insurgency; each political party gained a lot of power and control, and other non-political organizations were encouraged to have a stake in politics. Violence became an important component within politics, and violent politics more and more asserted the role and importance of the political mechanism in Nepal. Thus, politics became the main agenda for all sorts of organizations. No politicized entity in Nepal was thoroughly insulated from the Maoist insurgency; rather, all of these entities were restructured and modified by the conflict. In a sense, the whole of Nepali politics and society was radicalized by the Maoist insurgency. Every decision and event in Nepal had to recourse through politics, and in this course through politics, they became influenced by the radicalized elements within the political sphere. 

Because of this involvement of the whole of Nepali society in the conflict, in its aftermath certain powers want to see the 'slate wiped clean' and the Maoist insurgency to have nothing to do with the forward movement of Nepal. These powers believe that the Maoist insurgency should be isolated as a unique historical event, and then the influence of this conflict among all Nepali political entities weeded out. In a way, they are actively pursuing a policy of ‘insurgency denial’ where they want that period of history to not be representative of Nepal in general; a ‘new Nepal’ is disconnected from its past and is not willing to accept its transitional phase. These powers also want to claim a say in the resolution of the conflict, as being peace-makers really legitimizes any power to continuously involve in the affairs of the newly peaceful country; if one country brought peace to another, it is welcomed rather than rejected. Quickly moving away from the conflict, its resolution has become the main political agenda today. It is in this context that the Nepali skyline emerged, it seemed, out of nowhere (that is, without media anticipation or attention), in the form of high rise apartment buildings that are yet to be occupied well and that seem to be losing money. These buildings are just an image for almost all Nepalis, a distant reality, buildings which cannot be lived in. Rather than analyzing their importance as buildings, or as entities within an economic logic, or within the logic of urbanization, we are considering here that they are simply images in their foreignness from ordinary Nepalis.

Why were the high-rise buildings built if there was no one to live in them? In a sense, the reason was more political than economic: these buildings seek to show that Nepal has made strides forward from the Maoist insurgency, namely that it is no longer a conflicted society. They are not built based on economic calculations and speculation. They are not built with the expectancy that one day they will be occupied. They are not built to create jobs. They are not built with the expectation of making money. They were not produced with traditional economic tenets and knowledge in mind, such as speculation, investment etc. This ‘non-economic’ but economic initiative of Nepal represents how Nepal seems to escape traditional research and knowledge-building, because what seems built out of economic purposes and based on economic rationality seems to be influenced rather by politics. It is this type of instability in knowledge-building which radicalism produces. Nepal is just incompatible in knowledge building exercises that associate houses with economics.

In a peculiar fashion, there is more political value to these apartment buildings being empty than occupied today. In the eyes of the foreigner, the Nepali population as a whole is associated with radicalism because of the recent Maoist insurgency. There is therefore nothing more non-radical, more obedient and more pacifist than buildings and investment in Nepal devoid of Nepalis themselves. In a bid to wipe the slate clean of radicalism, there is a desire among some to see Nepal build buildings without their population in them. No one lives in them, so there will be no conflicts coming forth from them. They are, in a sense, pure images, with nothing animating them at the moment. What this displays to us, however, is a dangerous truth about radicalism: that radicalism is difficult to truly weed out of the population, that it is highly persistent, and that when it has been fuelled to such a high extent, it can emerge at any moment to once again shape politics in a more radical vein. To really remove radicalism is to have to remove the population which is radical, to exclude the radicalized population.

Even though we are speaking of the image of an apartment building, we have to consider that effects of the photographic image are weak in Nepal, so the image has to be made more real, more concrete. The photographic medium of traditional newsprint is caught in between: we are living in the era of the too real (the apartment building) or the too virtual (a video). Moreover, the traditional media is truly helpless against the face of radicalism, precisely because radicalism is seldom mediated through photographic images and print, it seems to emerge rather from something one really saw in front of their eyes, from an injustice felt by someone, from a direct personal suffering in the history of the time. Radicalism does not emerge directly through speeches and pamphlets, but what is first advertised through media is something else, a ‘normal’ political struggle or initiative. Radicalism is progressively built upon this initial batch of population that enlists. Radicalism comes in different intensities, and during the Maoist insurgency, the most radical elements of any political entity had the most power and control. Images and media did not have a big role in facilitating the emergence of radicalism. In the Maoist insurgency, people’s lives were directly influenced and the media did not seem to mediate between politics and real life. Indeed, it pointed towards a crisis of the media in its inability to mediate between real life and politics.

To combat the radicalism of the insurgency, then, we have to find a substitute for directly felt suffering. Photographic images of pleasure do not suffice. Printed messages are also not enough when the radical revolutionary fervor is too high. Powers today have resorted to theatre and the ‘image in the real.’ What the ‘image in the real’ shows is that Nepali populations at times of radicalism may not be able to fantasize based on photographs and words, that is, based on traditional media, and therefore may need to create fantasies  from real-life constructions, from a theatricality of the everyday real as unmediated by the printed and edited photographic image. The strategy for building peace among Nepalis seems thus: a movement from one advertisement in the real to the next, a ‘making theatre’ of the Nepali social space, a reliance on the attractive lifelessness of sets and props to put forward an image of peace and silence. It seems to point to one thing: that beyond a heavy submersion in radical politics is a form of theatre constructed by a superpower, meaning that a totally new, wholly more powerful ‘superpower’ starts to build itself and manifest itself to make of the Nepali social space a theatre. This is why the apartment buildings have the character of having appeared out of nowhere; without any real resistance (because the insurgency radicalized the political entities one against the other...whereas the traditional media asserts that the radicalization was one between politics and non-political organizations, radicalization was rather between non-political organizations themselves...it was a radical approach to  the 'other' mediated through politics where politics became the ideal representative of radicalism that every group aspired to), the superpower entity enters Nepal out of the blue and unchecked. Power is not always already there as powerful, but historical events cause its formation and ascendancy. This does not mean that historical events construct power, but that power is something wary of historical events to facilitate its own construction. Power can exist and operate in isolation and independently as a small kernel but then utilizes a historical event to grow.