Radio Censorship: From pirate radio to voice of a nation

When 20 armed soldiers stormed into Radio Sagarmatha on 12 February 2005, Mohan Bista, the station's chief, knew there was going to be trouble. The King of Nepal had just declared martial law, seized executive power and ordered all news bulletins and political shows to be replaced with music. Draconian restrictions were suddenly placed on all media outlets. King Gyanendra had just turned Nepal into one of the most severely censored nations in the world.

All the constitutional and legal protection acquired by the independent press since 1990, when a previous popular revolution replaced an absolute monarchy with a constitutional one, had been wiped out overnight. More than a thousand journalists were sacked and any media outlet that relied on government advertising to stay afloat saw its revenue dry up if it dared to criticise the move. For a small organisation like Sagarmatha, South Asia's first community radio station, which broadcasts from the heart of the Kathmandu Valley, the restrictions threatened to strangle a non-profit station that prided itself on giving a voice to the ordinary people of Nepal.

After four days, Mohan decided to simply ignore the new orders. "The government had supposedly allowed us to begin broadcasting non-political shows only," he says, breaking into a broad and mischievous grin. "But we began finding ways to get around the restrictions on broadcasting the news. The Nepali word for news is samachar but we also have another less formal word haalchal which kind of means a casual conversation. So we started calling our news broadcasts haalchal instead."

But it wasn't long before the authorities caught wind of what Sagarmatha was doing and ordered the station to stop broadcasting haalchal bulletins or risk being shut down completely. So Mohan came up with a yet another ruse.

"There were no restrictions on broadcasting comedy, as long as it wasn't political, so we decided to ask one of our regular comedians to sing the news in a comedy style familiar to Nepalis instead. They let us do that for a lot longer."

This type of dogged refusal to bow to King Gyanendra's increasingly draconian rule earned Sagarmatha, also the Nepali word for Mount Everest, a reputation for being willing to stand up to the government and take on the censors at a time when independent journalism in Nepal risked extinction.

In 2005 alone, Nepal accounted for half of all the world's censorship cases according to Reporters Without Borders. Now that recognition has gone global. This month, 14 months after a popular democracy movement forced King Gyanendra to relinquish his absolute control on power, Mohan Bista and Radio Sagarmatha received a special award at the One World Media Awards in London, in recognition of its community led broadcasts during such a troubling time for Nepalese media.

In an age of 24-hour television broadcasts and streaming internet news, Nepal's radio stations showed that, in non-industrialised nations where a large percentage of the population live in isolated communities, the radio still rules supreme. During the political agitation in April last year which handed power back to the Nepali people, independent radio stations like Sagarmatha played a vital part.

In the Himalayan kingdom, where electricity is sporadic and many Nepalis earn as little as £1 a day, televisions were simply an unreliable luxury outside the few cities. For those who did manage to get to a television set, the coverage was either very bland or highly censored. Nepal TV, the state broadcaster, was under the thumb of King Gyanendra and the commercial TV stations had far more to lose if they openly criticised the regime.

Radio became the most reliable way to find out what was going on and only the independent stations, which didn't have commercial interests and government advertising revenues to protect, dared to tell the truth.

"Radio played a crucial role during last year's democracy movement," says Rabindra Mishra, the head of the BBC's Nepal service, which continued to broadcast a daily half-hour show. "In the entire history of the BBC's Nepali service we had never had so many listeners."

The BBC's stringers remained in the country to report the news, even when it broadcast the first ever radio interview with the leader of Nepal's Maoist insurgency, Prachanda. Broadcasting that interview upset the government – when Radio Sagarmatha simply mentioned that the BBC had conducted the interview, police stormed the offices for a second time and arrested five journalists.

As the protests increased, journalists found themselves closer to the firing line. According to the Federation of Nepalese Journalists, in the month of April, when the protests peaked, at least 225 journalists were arrested and 110 were physically attacked. The previous month there had been just five arrests.

It is doubtful that many Nepalis were surprised by Radio Sagarmatha's audacity. Even before the February 2005 coup the station's journalists had shown a healthy disdain for authority. Sagarmatha began life as a pirate radio station broadcasting secretly from – and moving between – supporters' houses.

Now that the King of Nepal has humiliatingly ceded power and the country discusses its democratic future, it is radio once again that leads the debate.

"We have such a big responsibility now," says Mohan, when asked whether times are better now that the arrests have stopped. "This is a transitional period for Nepal and we still have many social problems. We may be a small country but we have more than 60 languages and dialects and everybody wants to be heard."

One of the main debates dominating the Nepali agenda is whether the country should become federal along ethnic lines. Mohan believes that radio is the best means of explaining such concepts to a largely illiterate audience. "The media has to continue to disseminate information about even the simplest concepts like democracy or what a constituent assembly is. We have democracy back again but it's our responsibility to ensure it stays for good this time."

As the smile returns to Mohan's face you get the impression that were the monarchy to try to seize power again and silence dissent, the journalists at Radio Sagarmatha would not accept it quietly.