Second-Class Citizens

The peanut seller sits on the edge of Thankot village square outside Kathmandu. She’s 33 and dressed in cast-off clothes from her customers and friends. At the end of each day she goes home to a tiny room she cannot affordit costs her $2 a month. She owes a year’s rent and earns just enough to buy food. Devika Khadka Chhetri is illiterate; her family was too poor to send her to school and she was married off at the age of 18. It was a bad marriage. Her fault in her husband’s eyes was that she could not deliver him a sonor even a daughter. So he threw her out and got himself a new wife. Alone and abandoned, Devika is trying to scrape by. “I can barely afford vegetables,” she says, gesturing to her wicker basket of nuts and the few customers standing nearby eating them. “But what else can I do? Some days I eat peanuts for supper.”

Devika is one of thousands of Nepali women who endure social injustice and discrimination, most of it sanctified by religionand ignored by law. This Hindu kingdom in the Himalayas is a man’s world, and it seems determined to stay that way. A two-year attempt to change the civil code and go some way toward putting women on an equal footing with men has been bogged down in the national assembly for more than a month by opposition protests against government corruption and, along with other legislation, is unlikely to be passed. This, despite extensive debate over four sessions of the assembly and a Supreme Court ruling ordering a better deal for women. Critics say the governing Nepali Congress party, with its support largely from conservative rural areas, is not taking the bill or the plight of women seriously enough. “It would be a disaster if this oppor-tunity were missed,” says women’s activist Aruna Uprety. “If the bill fails, Nepali women will know that men in parliament don’t want to help them, not at all.”

By world standards, the proposed legislation is mild. It would give women equal rights to inherit property and divorce and, in certain circumstances, the right to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Abortion is currently a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in jail: some 80 women are behind bars. Most of them probably just had miscarriages, says Uprety. They were turned in by neighbors or relatives to settle a grudge or to grab property. For lawyer and women’s rights activist Sapna Pradhan Malla, however, the struggle is not just about abortion or property rights. “It’s a fight to get men to recognize that they are not superior, that women have the same human rights as they do.”

Consider the plight of Devika, who gets no alimony because she is not legally divorced. Polygamy has been outlawed since 1963, but it is not unusual for men to dump their wives if they don’t produce children. She has gone to court nonetheless, to see what the system can do for her. Once a week she travels to a women’s center outside the capital where cases like hers are picked up and pursued through the courts. “I know that I’ll get something out of this process,” she tells a counselor at the center, wagging a finger in the woman’s face, “even if it’s only to tell my husband that he’s the reason we didn’t have babies.”

Opponents of change base their case on tradition. Constitutional lawyer Ganesh Raj Sharma, who is advising the Nepali government, says any amendment would be disastrous. “Look what happened in India,” he says. “Hindu women have been given full inheritance rights and now husbands and in-laws are killing wives to get their share of the family property.” Oddly, the urban young, too, seem to support the status quo. A radio call-in program on the pop station KATH FM found few in favor of reform. “Women don’t need property rights. They need respect and something more,” Uma Raj Bhandari, founder of Sparkle, Nepal’s only all-female rock band, told listeners.

Nepal has signed all of the appropriate international conventions and treaties on gender and women, but has little to show for it. Maternal mortality is highmore than 1,000 deaths per 100,000 live births. Only 29% of women are literate, compared with 50% of men. “If we could get some admission that women aren’t slaves or possessions of men, then eventually they would be free to play a full role in society,” says activist Uprety. “Right now they’re little better than pack animals.”