In Hindu mythology, Mount Kailash is the abode of Lord Shiva; according to one story, the deity sat on its peak and, in order to save the earth from drowning, caught in his matted hair the celestial might of a divine river as it came down from the heavens. As the legend goes, he then allowed just a trickle to form the great river Ganges that carves through the Indian subcontinent. The advent of man-made climate change has intensified the terrifying power of this sacred geography; the glacial lakes of the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau feed some of Asia’s biggest rivers, but, as they melt faster and faster, they’re thrusting impoverished, landlocked Nepal onto the front lines of a battle that was started by other nations. “Nepal is paying an extraordinarily disproportionate price for a crisis it did not create,” Sumnima Udas, a member of Nepal’s Parliament and the chair of its committee on international relations and tourism, told me. “We contribute a negligible share of global emissions, yet we sit downstream of some of the fastest-warming glacial systems on Earth.”
Udas said she hopes vulnerable nations such as Nepal can get a “real seat at the table” in future negotiations over global climate policy, and that Nepal, India, and China can work together to better manage the mountains, rivers, and “accelerating risks” that they share. That may be a tall order, given the enmities in the region and the current lack of trust between the three governments. Before the floods, Brahma Chellaney, an Indian commentator who is hawkish on China, warned of the “strategic leverage” that Beijing has accrued through its control of the Tibetan Plateau. “It has built cascades of dams on transboundary rivers, withheld hydrological data during periods of tension, and resisted entering any water-sharing treaty with downstream states,” he wrote. “Water has become another instrument of coercive statecraft.”
The flooding in Nepal is yet another calamity for a country grimly accustomed to crisis and upheaval. Udas is among a wave of reform-minded politicians who came to the fore after a popular and violent Gen Z uprising last year toppled the country’s political establishment. Their anger was a generation in the making: at the beginning of this century, Nepal, then a Hindu monarchy, was convulsed by a civil war between Maoist rebels and government forces. A peace process brought the rebels into the mainstream and led, somewhat remarkably, to the abolition of the monarchy and a transition toward a secular republic. But it was a tortured journey, marred by the caprice, narrow-mindedness, and corruption of political élites, including the former guerrillas. In the last decade and a half, a carrousel of feuding political factions took turns governing, all inadequately. Corruption was endemic, and the country’s deeper troubles—its poverty, its social inequities, and the hopeless conditions that drive millions of Nepalis to emigrate for work—endured, laying the kindling for last year’s explosion.
In the midst of all this, Nepal’s geology and geography remained unforgiving: a 2015 earthquake killed close to nine thousand people; deadly floods and landslides, though nothing on the scale of this past week, routinely hit the country. The new government, led by a thirty-six-year-old engineer and rapper, and most recently the mayor of the city of Kathmandu, Balendra Shah, had hoped that fresh ideas and a record of good governance could turn the economy around and bring in sorely needed foreign investment. The floods will likely change that outlook, squeezing a country that’s heavily dependent on tourism while forcing a costly period of reconstruction. “This disaster sets Nepal back by at least a decade,” Udas told me.
On Thursday, I spoke with Anup Kaphle, a former colleague of mine at the Washington Post who is now the editorial director of the Kantipur Media Group, Nepal’s largest media company. His newsrooms, including the Kathmandu Post, have deployed all their assets to cover the tragedy, and to provide Nepalis with clear, accurate information on emergency relief, river monitoring, and other immediate needs. “We’ve stopped asking who covers the Prime Minister’s office, districts, police, health, and essentially put everyone on the disaster desk,” he told me.
“A year ago the ground shook because of us—our politics, our anger, our frustration,” Kaphle said. “Yesterday, it was the actual ground again. It’s as if Nepalis are having to alternate between the disasters we cause and the ones that just arrive.” ♦
