Kathmandu, May 9 (RSS): Basanta Roka Magar of Rolpa was a mere toddler when his father was forced into disappearance during the time of the Maoist conflict. Now he is 20 years old and wants to know his dad’s status. Basanta also wishes someone helps him find the whereabouts of his missing father.
“My dad was abducted and then disappeared. Later it was said that he was killed. I hope somebody finds out his status and helps track his whereabouts,” Basanta said when this scribe caught up with him in Libang, the headquarters of Rolpa district which was the epicentre of the conflict.
Basanta’s dad, Dhan Bahadur Rokaya Magar was a news reader at the Radio Nepal’s Surkhet regional broadcasting station. He used to read news in the Khammagar language. He was abducted by the then CPN Maoist on August 4, 2002 from Jaluke of Pyuthan district when returning to his work station in Surkhet after meeting his family in Libang.
What the Rokamagar family heard six months after Dhan Bahadur’s abduction was that he had been killed. But the family neither have seen his body nor the place where he was killed even to this date. It is 16 years since Dhan Bahadur was kidnapped and forced to disappear.
“We asked him not to leave home that day and instead leave the next day. But he insisted and left. We heard that he was abducted on the way to Surkhet where his office is located. And then after six or seven months we heard that he was killed,” said Kushti Rokka Magar, Dhan Bahadur’s mother, sobbing.
Dhan Bahadur’s spouse wants to know when and where her husband was killed, how he got killed and whether his body was buried or cremated.
Journalist J P Joshi’s daughter is now 13 years old and lives with her mother and sister at Malikatol of Godavari Municipality in Kailali district. She was also a tiny tot when her father JP was killed.
She misses her father very much when at school her friends talk about their fathers doing this or that or buying them gifts and clothes.
“Some of my friends give presents to their father on Father’s Day. Sometimes my friends’ parents come to the school together to pay a visit to them. Programmes are organised at school on special occasions and friends talk of their fathers. When I hear them talk about their father, I also think if only my father was there among us in the family,” she said.
Joshi worked as the correspondent for the Janadesh and Janadisha weeklies. He went missing all of a sudden on October 8, 2008. A skeleton said to be that of Joshi’s and his identity card were found inside a forest on November 28, 2008. Joshi was also the president of the Revolutionary Journalists Association, Kailali district chapter at that time.
