Co-Curricular Activity

In my spring break of my senior I had the opportunity to travel to Nepal for a program called Zones of Conflict, Zones of Peace where we were traveling with the intention to learn more about the civil war that took place in Nepal for over a decade and the effects it had on its people, forced and voluntary migration being one of those consequences. Nonetheless, it was interesting to travel and see that through the past few decades so many significant things have taken place in Nepal and there has barely been any international media coverage on it whatsoever. The migration trend in Nepal is known to be one of the largest and the amount of people that were displaced due to the war is also incredible, yet we don’t ever hear about it unless you go out of your way to read about it. Nepal has always been sidelined in the news for years and people often even hold the misconception that it’s simply a part of India, the lack of knowledge on Nepal is also greatly due to the lack of media coverage it receives on an international level. 

When we traveled to Nepal we had planned to meet with academics, lawyers, politicians and people who were experts on the one decade of war and had seen the effects of it. One of the most enriching talks we had was with a panel of women which included academics Anita Ghimre, Nina Poudel and Jaya Luintel who helped shed light on the important topic of sexual violence that occurred very frequently during the ten years of war and was inflicted upon the national army as well as the maoist rebels yet you wont ever see local news channels cover such news, which is to note as the current prime minister is also from the Maoist group, Pushpa Kamal Dahal (more commonly known as Prachanda). Prachanda doesn’t seem to have enough influence to be able to control the media to a great extent as mentioned by several Nepalese people yet some of the media channels do seem to be biased according to their allegiance to different political parties, a case similar to Pakistan as it is in many south asian countries. 

The trip to Nepal helped highlight to me that no matter who is in power and even when there is mainstream media that might be independent and free there will always exist a part of the media that will be attached to politics and thus be biased due to their allegiances. Such has been the case with Nepal as well, where we spoke to several important people and the common Nepalese people who all had something to say about the war and how it had effected every group of the community, alot of the sentiments were anti-maoist, especially against Prachanda and many were even in favor of the monarchy that has been taken down years ago but it’s interesting to see that we don’t often get to see the public opinion in the news too commonly. It’s significant to notice why such trends often exist in south asia and why does the media get biased and tend to turn away from the community and rather provide them with misleading information just for their own benefit. Has the media lost its freedom of expression and is too involved in politics and how do we even know what media channel to trust anymore for factual information.