“Where is your brother?” the police shouted as they began to lay into Devi Khadka. “We know you’re going to meet him. Tell us where he is!” One of the officers kicked her hard in the stomach and she crumpled to the ground. “For a few seconds, I blacked out,” says Khadka. “I thought it was the end for me.”
It was 1997, a year into Nepal’s brutal decade-long conflict between Maoist insurgents and government security forces, and the police were after Khadka’s brother, Rit Bahadur, a local Maoist leader. Khadka had gone to the market in her home district of Dolakha in the east of Nepal, on an ordinary shopping trip. Now she lay in the dust, blood seeping from her nose – a 17-year-old girl surrounded by a squad of male officers.
The police, determined to drag information about her brother’s whereabouts out of Khadka, hauled her off to jail, hung her upside down and continued the assault with bamboo canes. It lasted for hours. “I was vomiting blood. There were bruises all over my legs. I hoped they would just kill me quickly,” she says.
Khadka survived, but a week later she was transferred to the police station in Dhulikhel, a town near Kathmandu. One night, still bruised and bloodied, she was taken to a hut outside the police compound. Inside was a group of male officers, drinking beer. They demanded she sign a document denouncing her brother, but she refused. “I told them I’m not going to sign anything. It’s better to kill me,” she says. “If we’re going to kill you, let’s have some fun first,” they told her, before she was repeatedly raped.
Khadka, now 44, is still contending with that horrific ordeal. For years, she was left traumatised, shamed and broken. Yet she has refused to let it define her.
Instead, she has turned her trauma into action. In the years since, she has lived multiple lives; as a rebel fighter, a parliamentarian and now, a fierce advocate for Nepal’s survivors of wartime sexual violence. “I need to speak up because it’s the only way to get justice,” she says. “I have the right to refuse many things, but I do not have the right to stop sharing my story.”
Khadka’s story is now being told in a new documentary called Devi, by Nepali film-maker Subina Shrestha. The film follows Khadka’s remarkable efforts to build a survivors’ movement in Nepal and hold officials and politicians to account.
The film is also the story of a country struggling to face up to its past. The war ended in 2006, and in 2014 a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) was established to investigate the “gross violations of human rights and crimes against humanity” committed by both sides during the conflict.
Yet the process was widely criticised for allowing amnesties for serious human rights violations and was accused of being designed to “legislate an escape hatch” for those who should have been held accountable for wartime abuses but who had taken on positions of power in the new government. A decade on, there has not been a single successful prosecution under the act.
The process has utterly failed survivors of sexual violence, says Khadka. She says rape survivors were reluctant to come forward and those that did were treated badly; some were publicly exposed, others were not believed.
Decades later, many are still struggling to cope with the physical, psychological and financial impact of their abuse. It is a struggle that Khadka has faced herself.
When she was released by the police, she says: “I had no idea who I was any more. I wondered if I was even a human being.”
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After her assault, she joined the Maoists and, as the war raged on, rose up through the ranks to become a platoon leader. Then, in 2002, she was hit with a devastating blow when her brother was killed by government forces. After his death, Khadka took on her late brother’s political role within the Maoist party and then, after the peace deal with the government in 2006, stood in the first national elections in 2008 and won a seat in the new parliament.
Khadka has been accused of failing to speak up for conflict-era rape survivors while in office, a charge she accepts. “I regret it. I wish I had raised my voice, I was running from myself,” she says.
Her hopes that her own party, who had promised peace and justice, would speak up for the thousands of wartime survivors of sexual violence from the conflict were dashed.
“When the Maoists started, they had a very clear vision about how they would help everyone, but when they got power, they got disconnected,” she says.
With the fight for recognition and justice going nowhere, Khadka realised the stories of the survivors of sexual violence were “being erased from history”. She spoke out about her own abuse and work with other survivors, and now leads two survivor organisations, documenting wartime rape cases, lobbying for medical treatment and financial support and organising fellow survivors to demand justice through the TRC.
“Society needs to change its view of rape victims,” Khadka says. “Currently, victims are running away and hiding, while the culprits are free and enjoying power. This is just the opposite of how it should be.”
Khadka’s efforts may be beginning to pay off. In 2023, the government tabled a bill to amend the transitional justice act, which, among other measures, would categorise the rape of non-combatants during the conflict as a “serious violation of human rights”, which would not be eligible for amnesty. Despite this, and other amendments such as guaranteeing reparations for rape survivors, rights groups still say that the amendments don’t go far enough and the bill “risks perpetuating impunity”.
Yet Khadka remains undaunted. “If I lose hope, I won’t be able to continue fighting for it,” she says. “And I believe we will get justice. If not for this generation, then the next.”