By:  Madan Lamsal

The Magic of Poverty Cards

If some business people are yet out of this poverty bracket, they will soon fall into it as industries are closing, foreign investors are running away and political crisis deepens every other day.



Poverty is pervasive as pervasive are the communist ideologies, ideologues and leaders in Nepal. There could be many manifestations of the relations between the communism and the poverty. Since the communism is commonly interpreted as the dictatorship of proletariats, then all people first must be proletariat or belonging or possessing no material wealth; means absolute poor. Nepal is run by an ultra-left Maoist government, then, by definition every citizen of this country is a proletariat, or absolute poor. 

How would you establish that every Nepali is in indeed a proletariat or poor? For this purpose, the Red government has a very innovative idea of distributing ‘Poverty Cards’ to every Nepali. And, to make sure that every Nepali is entitled to this card, the government has a full-proof plan of first evenly distributing the poverty among the entire populace by every means possible and then start beginning to distribute these MAGIC cards to each citizenry.

Some may have seen recent industrial unrest, largely created by the trade unions affiliated to ruling, or if not, to this or that Left Party, as detrimental to national prosperity. But, in fact that is a well planned communist strategy of making every one poor as soon as possible so that the capitalist entrepreneurs of today, labourers and the men in the streets -- all alike can become eligible to get these ‘poverty cards.’

The government has rightly assigned the donor funded Poverty Alleviation Fund (PAF) to lead this drive to distribute the poverty card. The Fund is all set to start this mission in this very month of September itself. The choice of PAF for the task too is a very appropriate as it is the only institution in the country that has experience of distributing anything related to poverty, including the poverty itself say some.

Who are the poor? It is the commonplace knowledge that the citizen who does not possess any asset is the poor. Got some clue on why all the leaders of the ruling United Maoist party including its charismatic Chairman Prachanda and Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai had reiterated that they would surrender all their property in the name of their party? They were in fact making themselves eligible to get this ‘poverty card.’ Not only that, right since the beginning of the guerrilla war, the party also greatly helped to make citizens properly qualified for the card by confiscating the land, houses and property or physically eliminating them who were not instantly becoming poor at the Maoist will.

All these instances suggest that this ‘card distribution programmme’ is going to be a great success and an event of real national pride. Every citizen of this country is sure to get it. If some business people are yet out of this poverty bracket, they will soon fall into it as industries are closing, foreign investors are running away and political crisis deepens every other day.

What does this card do? A simple answer is: it will be a magic card capable of providing everything for the one who holds it -- food, education, health services, employment, unemployment benefit, or you just name it. They can also function as the credit cards as well.

Then, who all will get this is anybody’s guess! But you can have some hint by the choice of the 25 districts put in the first priority, including Rukum, Rolpa, Gorkha, and Chitwan to distribute these cards. Why these districts? Rukum and Rolpa are where Maoists started the ambitious program of making every Nepali a proletariat and dispensation akin to proletariat dictatorship. Gorkha and Chitwan are the districts where the Maoist numero-uno Prachanda and PM Baburam hail from. Even before that, it goes without saying that all these leaders living in Kathmandu without ‘anything’ would be getting the privilege of this card. We are just waiting to see this card doing the MAGIC.