In recent times, there has been a spate of killings by the armed forces against individuals not associated with the Maoists in anyway, but rather for personal reasons or paranoia on the side of the forces.
The most incendiary of these was the infamous Nagarkot massacre where an off-duty soldier shot dead 12 locals of the area after he had a scuffle with them. Dressed in casual uniform, he went back to the barrack and came back with weapons, shooting everyone is sight before turning the gun on himself, or so the official story goes.
During the municipal polls, police shot dead a participant of a peaceful protest. A few days later, in the far west, a man who was squatting to relieve himself was killed because the police thought he was planting a bomb. In Dharan, two teenagers who were smoking marijuana and tried to run to avoid the army were shot at. One of them died. And more recently, a priest and principal of a local school was shot dead when a policeman shot at a crowd celebrating Holi, among them a man who had had a fight with the policeman. Just a few days ago, during load-shedding, right here in Kathmandu, an inebriated policeman shot dead a proprietor of a hotel.
How do we make sense of such murders committed either by paranoia or for personal reasons? Why has there been an increase in such incidents? And why are people taking it all so lightly?
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