After fiery protests, Nepal reckons with its future

The mob descended on the former Nepali prime minister’s house around noon Tuesday. One person uncorked a plastic bottle filled with gasoline and doused the curtains. A match was struck. The flames moved fast.

The former prime minister, Jhala Nath Khanal, was not at home in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal. But other household members raced up the stairs from one floor to another. Khanal’s son escaped from a balcony. His mother, Ravi Laxmi Chitrakar, a science professor, was trapped on the fourth floor, which broiled like a kiln. Smoke seethed around her.

By the time a rescue team found her, she had suffered extensive burns, including to her hands and face. Chitrakar’s airway was singed by the smoke, her lungs deeply damaged.

Chitrakar was transported to Nepal’s only specialised burn unit, where she
remains in intensive care, despite various media outlets reporting that she had died. The burn unit in Kirtipur Hospital in Kathmandu is a critical resource in a country where fires maim and kill with shocking regularity.

There were 34 acute burn patients admitted there Friday, including seven who were injured in the frenzy of arson that blazed nationwide this past week when protests spread rapidly. The tumult unseated the government before a new interim leader was appointed Friday.

The burn victims from the rioting include those targeted in the conflagrations, unlucky bystanders and arsonists who were harmed by their own deadly devices, said Ujjwal Bikram Thapa, known familiarly in Nepal as the Burn Guy for his advocacy on patients’ behalf.

Thapa said there are likely many more burn patients who are in private hospitals, both in Nepal and overseas, now that international airports have reopened. Others will reach the Kathmandu burn unit from far-flung districts in the coming days, he said. And charred skeletons are being discovered every day.

On Friday, in Dharan in eastern Nepal, police officers recovered four sets of human remains from a supermarket. A local deputy superintendent of police said it was not clear whether they were supermarket employees or members of the attacking mob.

Burns are the second most common injury in the country, according to the World Health Organisation. Wood-fired stoves, forest fires, fireworks, electrocutions by unstable power sources, and, until recently, acid attacks have all contributed to about 100,000 burn cases a year in Nepal, a nation of nearly 30 million, according to estimates from the country’s small team of burn doctors. The average travel time of patients to the specialised burn unit wedged into Kirtipur Hospital is five days.

The initial marches Monday were peaceful. Young protesters began rallying to demand an end to widespread corruption and a ban on social media platforms imposed to quell their dissent. But by the evening, security forces had opened fire, killing students.

On Tuesday, the demonstrations took a more violent turn. Looting and arson intensified. Mobs equipped with jerrycans and bottles of gasoline fanned out nationwide, some carrying rifles and daggers. Thousands of buildings were burned across the country, including ministries, government offices and homes of politicians and businesspeople connected to the leadership.

The original student protesters, who call themselves Gen Z, have dissociated themselves from the coordinated arson spree and wider chaos. More than 50 people have died in the violence, a police spokesperson said Friday, a majority of them protesters.

Thapa, the activist for burn victims, said he had been in communication with protesters who expressed regret for how the violence spiralled out of control. He had advice for them.

“I told them, ‘You burned this country down,’” he said. “Now you had better do something about the burn issue.”

Chitrakar, 70, faces months and even years of gruelling treatment, including surgeries. Her husband, Khanal, a communist leader who once operated an underground cell, has been unable to meet her. Top politicians like him, even retired ones, have been vilified in social media campaigns for being members of Nepal’s pampered political elite.

But Chitrakar did not appear to be among the ostentatious. Even when her husband became prime minister in 2011, she never moved into the official residence. Instead, she lived at home and continued to walk to the university where she taught.

“It was only when she became first lady that I came to know that her husband was a politician,” said Rabindra Shrestha, one of her former students who is now the principal of a medical college in the city of Pokhara.

The recent outbreak of arson also injured ordinary Nepalis unconnected to the nation’s leaders.

Two cousins in Siraha district in southern Nepal watched a small crowd of student protesters form early Tuesday. The violence didn’t start until just after noon, when thousands of people descended, some spraying the local bazaar with gasoline. The new arrivals did not look like students, said the cousins, who ran a small photocopy shop next to a municipal government building. As the crowd unleashed flames, the cousins tried to save their shop when a gas canister exploded. They were caught in the inferno, suffering burns and eventually being transported to the specialist unit in Kathmandu.

Birendra Kumar Sah, one of the cousins, said he had initially joined in the Gen Z protests. He, too, was angered by Nepal’s endemic corruption, the wealth gap and the stranglehold on politics by a select few. But his face and body are now ravaged by burns.

“I supported the protests thinking it would change the system,” he said, as a nurse dressed his wounds before placing a cloth mask on his face. “But I’m the one who has been changed.”

His cousin, Sibam Sah, lay next to him in the spartan ward, groaning as his mother applied a burn ointment to his face. The photocopy shop has been reduced to ashes, like so many businesses across Nepal.

Nepal’s burn victims are particularly vulnerable because they are overwhelmingly poor and from remote corners of this Himalayan nation. Some villages lack roads at all.

Climate change has made Nepal’s forests more vulnerable to blazes, environmental researchers said. Fireworks, deployed often during holy festivals, add to the toll. But one source of burns has waned. For years, men poured out their anger at women in terrifying liquid form, tossing acid on their faces. The chemicals burned the women’s features. But in 2020, with Thapa’s lobbying, the penal code was strengthened to hold accountable not only the perpetrators but also those who sold the acid. Over the past couple of years, no acid attacks have been reported.

At the Kirtipur hospital Friday, one of the patients was a little boy whose hand had been electrocuted when he was playing games on a cellphone plugged in to a faulty power source. Another was a 17-year-old girl from western Nepal, who had been cooking fried rice when bubbling oil splashed her body. It had taken her three days to arrive in the capital.

Shankar Man Rai, the head of the Kirtipur hospital cleft palate and burn unit, is a plastic reconstructive surgeon. He reads about innovative burn treatments available in the West but knows that such therapies are unaffordable in Nepal. Most of his patients have no money, but their cases cost about $3,000 on average to treat. The burn unit depends on donations and funds from international charities to operate.

“We are like the neglected stepchild of surgery,” he said. “It’s very challenging.”

This month, the hospital was supposed to break ground on a dedicated burn unit with 70 beds that would be finished in two years’ time. The project was to be funded by one of Kathmandu’s richest businesspeople. But this past week, 27 of his supermarkets burned nationwide, presumably targeted because he was seen as close to the country’s political elite. The nearly $6 million burn unit donation is now in doubt. Many of the nation’s public records were destroyed in the arson strikes, complicating efforts to provide basic health care.

“Everything has gone up in smoke,” Thapa said. “It happened in an instant, and we will be paying for it for years.”