I was aware of Bhola Paswan’s steady gaze at the Dharan journalist training. It gave nothing away. I imagined its owner to be solid and reliable, but also slightly unimaginative. Not the type to go out and get a huge scoop. How wrong I was.

Bhola is the only Nepali journalist from the Paswan sub-caste. At least he is the only one known to the Jagaran Media Center. Suvash Darnal met him at a training in Kathmandu two years ago, and asked him to write for JMC. Bhola agreed, and now divides his time between his newspaper and the JMC.

Bhola’s big moment came several weeks ago, where the JMC received reports that the Maoists had rounded up twenty-five Dalit women in the Jagatpur village (Saptari district) and raped them. The pro-government media ran the story below screaming headlines. This was terrible publicity for the Maoists, who have attracted many Dalit by their egalitarian ideology. The JMC received inquiries from Amnesty International, the local office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, and the Nepalese human rights commission.

Suvash Darnal found the story suspect, and he asked Bhola Paswan to investigate. At the time, Bhola was a struggling junior reporter on the Rajbiraj Today, a newspaper in the provincial town of Rajbiraj. Bhola has worked for the paper for almost two years and has been publishing about two stories a day.

In spite of this, his editor has found a novel way of paying his reporters. Bhola is given 100 papers to sell each day (at the rate of 2 rupees a day). It is tough to get by, he says, because so many customers are late in paying. But he says, all 60 reporters are paid this way, and only the editor receives a salary. The paper sells about 2,000 copies each day.

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Rough justice: Shambhu Chaudhary was beheaded by the Maoists for allegedly raping Dalit women. The head is placed next to the body

Bhola was well placed to follow up on the rape report because he had been contacted the week before by two local Maoist leaders, Bhola Chaudhary and Jakir Miya, with a tip.

As Bhola was on his way to the village of Jagatpur to investigate the rape report, he ran into the same two men escorting a third man who was clearly very frightened. This was none other than the alleged rapist, named Dinesh Sardar. He told Bhola that he knew he had done wrong. He also knew that he faced almost certain execution.

Sardar was from a nearby village and on the night of the incident he had gone to Jagatpur with two friends, Shambhu Chaudhary and Pradip Gupta, drunk. Sardar then raped one Dalit women while his two friends misbehaved with some other Dalit women. 25 of the village’s 60 families are Dalit.

The three men were known to the villagers and had boasted of being Maoists, which was not strictly true. Still, the Maoists had used Sardar for some assignments, so there was a connection. This was more than enough to cause the Maoists serious embarrassment, and they sent their two cadres to arrest Sardar and take him to Jagatpur, where he was forced to publicly apologize in front of the whole village. For good measure they also beat him up. They also went after the other two and managed to catch Chaudhary, but not Gupta.

The two Maoists talked freely to Bhola, but when they realized that he intended to publish the story, their mood changed. They told him not to go public, and warned him that they knew where he lived. Bhola ignored their threats and proceeded on to the village where he spent much of the day interviewing the Dalit women and other villagers.

Bhola missed his lunch but got something much better – the biggest scoop of his life. His story was front page news in the Rajbiraj Today. It was also distributed to the world by the Jagaran Media Center in the JMC’s first-ever E-bulletin. Bhola and the JMC even published the names of the Maoist cadres, showing a sturdy disregard for their threats.

In some ways the story was not nearly as damaging to the Maoists as the initial reports, which had suggested an undisciplined rampage or a calculated act against the Dalit. But in the end it did the Maoists little good, particularly when JMC published a photo of the body of Shambhu Chadhuri, one of the three alleged rapists. The man had been beheaded, and his head placed near the body.

Ironically, Dinesh Sardar, the undisputed rapist, was detained the day that the Maoists declared a ceasefire and this allowed him to escape. He has not been seen since.

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Ace reporter: Bhola Paswan stood up to the Maoists

Like many members of civil society, the Jagaran Media Center has an uneasy relationship with the Maoists. To paraphrase Suvash: “We like their politics but not their methods.”

Suvash has had his own strange encounters with the Maoists. After one paper reported that forty Dalit houses had been burned, he sent a reporter to check it out and found that the houses had been torched by the Nepalese Army during an operation. JMC held a press conference and the story was widely picked up by the BBC and others.

On June 30 of this year, he heard that 50 Dalit had been displaced by a Maoists attack, and that the Maoists were drafting children. Suvash wrote to the Maoists and asked for an explanation. He received a reply to the effect that the Dalit were “bad people,” and decided to publish it.

This report caused a furor. Chastened, the Maoists then contacted the JMC and asked Suvash Darnal to mediate between them and the displaced Dalit. Suvash contacted the Army and received permission to talk to the Maoists. He then set off an extraordinary peace-making mission.

First he talked to the displaced Dalit. It was hard going, and they were suspicious, but eventually they relaxed. Next he trekked two days into the forests for an appointment with the Maoists. He arrived at the meeting place, found the house locked, forced the door and waited for several hours.

Late at night a low-level Maoist envoy arrived, but the talks were inconclusive. Suvash waited. Late the next day a more senior Maoist arrived and they settled down to some hard bargaining. This produced a 5-point plan under which the Maoists promised not to recruit children and to pay each displaced family 2000 rupees a month for the next six months. The also punished the two cadres who had been responsible, with a year’s forced labor. This was very successful mediation.

When Suvash returned to Kathmandu he went public with the deal, which was reported by the BBC and the Advocacy Project among others. The JMC also received a letter of thanks from Ian Martin, representative of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.