Dharchula in western Nepal is a Doklam doppelganger in that it is situated at the trijunction of Nepal, China and India. The town is bifurcated across India and Nepal by the river Kali; the terra firma underneath is the de facto border since the Treaty of Sugauli that ended the Anglo-Nepalese war of 1814-16. The suspension bridge over the river connects Nepal and the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand. Dharchula was an important town on the old Tibet-Nepal-India trade route.
That was before China occupied Tibet in 1950. On the edges of the Chameliya tributary of the Kali in Nepali Dharchula is where Ajay Kumar Dahal lives alone. The family and life of the project chief of the state-owned Nepal Electricity Authority’s (NEA’s) 30 MW Chameliya Hydroelectric Project is as divided and fragmented as the land he operates on. Dahal’s family is in Kathmandu, nearly 1,000 km away.
His sons are studying to be engineers: one in China and the other in India. He himself was one of the last Nepali engineers to have got his professional degree from Tashkent Poly Technical Institute in a now extinct country called the USSR, much like Tibet.
However, there is nobody fighting to reclaim the USSR. Dahal graduated in 1990, the year the USSR formally collapsed.
(indiatimes.com)
0 comments: