The Asian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) is worried for Ganga Maya Adhikari, an icon of justice, who has resumed her hunger strike on August 11. Ganga Maya has asked Nepal’s Minister for Health, Gagan Thapa, to convey her demands seeking punishment for her son Krishna Prasad Adhikari’s murderers to Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’.
Ganga Maya had suspended her hunger strike after the painful death of her husband in September 2014, when the Nepalese government committed to prosecute the culprits of her son’s brutal murder. She decided to take liquid-food only, continuing her strike from the Bir Hospital bed in Kathmandu. Eight months after the Supreme Court directed the government to take Chabilal Poudel, the main accused behind Krishna’s murder, into judicial custody, no action has been taken yet.
Krishna Prasad was brutally murdered by the Maoists at Chitwan in June 2004 while he was visiting his grandparents. His parents Ganga Maya and Nanda Prasad began a hunger strike asking for justice in 2013. Instead of justice, Nanda Prasad met with a painful death on the 334th day of his hunger strike, on 22 September 2014. The first death while staging a hunger strike in Nepal, Nanda’s body is still lying in wait for justice at the Teaching Hospital’s morgue in Maharajganj.
All Nanda Prasad was asking for before his death, was justice. Is this too much to ask for in a so-called democratic country? If citizens die seeking justice for their loved ones, there is something wrong in that country. It is an utter failure of the state, and its justice institutions. The government of Nepal should be ashamed for putting its citizens in such a position.
Nepalese civil society must now urgently come together to save Ganga Maya, whose quest for justice continues while her health deteriorates. Fighting for justice for over a decade, Ganga Maya has become an icon of justice for the victims of Nepal’s conflict era. The Asian Human Rights Commission urges the government of Nepal to provide justice to Ganga Maya, and prevent yet another senseless death.
