Nepal is a highly unjust and inequitable society. The Coronavirus pandemic and the country's response to it has dramatically demonstrated that again for all to see.
One set of data which has done that is the administration of the COVID-19 vaccines by Province.
Province 2 got shafted...for obvious reasons...as far as I am concerned!
Nepali media is atrocious. Far from it being the fourth pillar of democracy, it panders to the those who are responsible for making the country a failed State. And that's only ONE of the many issues with them.
There's a very good reason for that. No different from those that make up the other three pillars of democracy and pretty much every other structure of any import, Nepali media is of, for, and by Khas-arya men. And that conclusion is based on data.
Breakdown of 419 applications for 14 positions at an NGO (non-profit) along gender, caste, qualification lines expose the structural issues inherent in the Brahmanical and highly patriarchal Nepali society.
When pointing out systemic and structural issues in Nepal, the structurally privileged, the hill so called high caste Hindus either go on the defensive or offensive. One of the offensive tactics they use is to accuse the person of "pointing fingers" at them! I have had that. What would have been welcome, among other things, is them listening to our analysis and evaluations and working with us to establish a more just and equitable society.
Nepali social, economic, and political structures are completely warped. The hill so-called high caste Hindu men are disproportionately highly represented in pretty much every body of note. How did that happen? Here's a little bit of history about that and more.
When a hill so-called high caste Hindu counters a member of another caste describing the challenges in their lives because of the caste they are born into by saying that they too struggle and have had to work hard to get as far as they have gotten in life, they are basically making a false-equivalence argument. What is a false-equivalence argument anyway? I go into the details by using an analogy -- that of climbing Mount Everest.
November 8, 2012: it had just been two days since the re-election of President Obama in the US. That day, I shared, on Facebook, how who is in the White House doesn't make a real difference to the US and the world. I argued that regardless of who is in that House in Washington DC, because the systems in place are completely rigged and those who control, run, and enforce them are corrupt, a significant percentage of the American and world population will continue to suffer.
Here's a reproduction of that Facebook post and the interesting discussion I had underneath it with friends, interesting especially now since the election of Trump to the same office!
Why do most of the contestants and winners of Miss Nepal beauty pageant belong to BCN (Bahun Chhetri Newar) trio of ethnicities?
My tentative answer is that they are the most privileged groups in the country, and the pageant is of the BCN, by the BCN, for the BCN!
This section from Unleashing Nepal describes how the Birta and Jagir systems implemented by Prithvi Narayan Shah created cultural practices and values and shaped some of the attitudes of the upper caste males of the Brahmin, Chhettri and some Newar castes, which, still prevalent in one form or another, has been and continues to also be an impediment to social, economic and political progress. (Another consequence of the systems were to impoverish and marginalize the indigenous population of the country.)
COMMITTED, in the process of expanding, recently advertised fourteen different positions. Reproduced in this blog post are charts of the applications by age, gender, caste etc.