History will not forget Gyanendra Khadka

Ajita Khadka was nine-years-old at the time, and after helping her mother do the dishes remembers getting out of the house to go over to a neighbour to ask for a flowering plant for the family garden. 

It was a bright clear afternoon on 6 September 2003 in Jyamire village of Sindhupalchok, the monsoon was taking a break, and Ajita remembers thinking how beautiful the flower would look on their porch.

Over on the other side of the village at the Janata School, Ajita’s father, the journalist and teacher Gyanendra Khadka, 32 at the time, had finished addressing a group of parents and guardians. Suddenly, two men in shorts sprang up, and wielding pistols and hand grenades, grabbed him roughly, and led him away.

Ajita had just stepped outside her front gate, when she saw her father, wearing a green check shirt and white trousers, being taken down the path by the armed Maoists. His hands were tied behind his back with a rope.

In a heavy, trembling voice, Gyanendra glanced at his daughter and said: “I’ll be back soon.” 

Ajita ran back into the house in panic, and told her mother, Mithila, what she had just witnessed. “My mother let out a visceral scream, and raced down the path after them,” recalls Ajita, who was so terrified that she hid in the cowshed.

By the time Mithila caught up with the Maoists, they had tied her husband to a volleyball pole, and forced her to watch as one of the assailants pulled out a long khukri knife. Then she fainted. 

Gyanendra’s close friend and fellow-journalist Yubaraj Puri heard what had happened, and rushed to the site. “The blood was mixed with the dirt at his feet, and when I got closer I saw that his head had been nearly sliced off. It was dangling from his neck.”

Ajita finally found the courage to enter the house, where her mother was still unconscious. Relatives and neighbours gathered around to offer words of comfort.

 “Deep inside, I was still hoping desperately that I would wake up from what felt like a nightmare and find my family whole again,” says Ajita, who as the eldest daughter now had to take care of her 5-year-old sister Asmita and 3-year-old brother Aswin. Gyanendra’s father, Bishnu Bahadur Khadka, a retired army man, was in total shock. 

Being a reporter, Yubaraj Puri immediately headed down to Melamchi to file the story about the murder of Gyanendra Khadka, who reported for the RSS news agency, and to inform the Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) in Kathmandu.