Now that the government has fenced the premises of the Office of the Prime Minister, the Residence of the Prime Minister and the Parliament of Nepal, it can finally go back to sleep again. In a country that hardly has footpaths, to begin with, the government’s sealing off of its Singha Durbar, Baluwatar and Baneshwor premises is not going to make a huge difference to public convenience in the literal sense. But how long can the government live within its own cocoon, scared by the very people that have propelled it to power? How much longer can it pretend to be in deep slumber even as the voices of the loan shark victims grow louder and louder? With dozens of the victims entering the high-security premise of Parliament earlier this week in an attempt to draw its attention, the government is bent on interpreting the episode as a security issue.

Any attempt at brushing it aside as a security issue is plain stupidity. It was the sheer moral force of the unarmed victims, mostly women, that incapacitated the otherwise trigger-happy security personnel stationed at the Parliament gates. What is of greater concern is the ineptitude of the government when it comes to providing a sense of security to the thousands of victims across the country who have been raising their voices against loan sharks. It has been almost two years since a small group of loan shark victims from Madhes first called on the government to consider their plight. Today, the protests have taken the shape of a movement, with victims from over 50 districts nationwide congregating in Kathmandu to fight for justice, apart from demonstrations in respective districts.

Not that the government is not aware of the problems of the loan shark victims. Its conservative estimate shows the victims owe Rs6 billion to loan sharks in various districts. A task force set up to deal with the loan sharking problem has received 28,000 complaints, and has freed at least 218 bighas of land from the sharks. The numbers could be much higher, as the victims opt to keep quiet for fear of retribution, which ranges from confiscation of property to physical and sexual abuse. In the deep hinterlands of Madhes and Pahaad, the loan sharking problem is quickly becoming a social and national security issue.

If there is any government that should understand the problem of loan shark victims, it is the current one led by a former guerilla commander. In their heyday, the Maoist insurgents, led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, tore illegal loan deeds and meted corporeal justice to the loan sharks in their kangaroo courts. The Maoist party has long ceded that paraphernalia of being a party of the proletariat class. However, for all the big talk that Prime Minister Dahal does about good governance, his government should understand that the rot lies deeper and that ad-hoc measures hardly scratch the surface of the problem. The only way out of the current imbroglio is for the government to deliver on its promises of bringing the loan sharks to book, provide the victims with security, and make institutional arrangements to ensure that people have better financial security and access to easy loans so that they don’t have to fall into loan sharks’ traps.