ﾑProtest again, weﾒll kill youﾒ Avirook Sen Pokhara (Nepal), February 4 FEAR HANGS over the Prithvi Narayan College campus in Pokhara where Nepalese security forces quashed a protest on February 1. Although the students picked up by the army have been released, they got their freedom after a warning: "'You demonstrate again and we will kill you,' they told us," said Ramesh Chhetri, a Class XII student. Those on the campus aren't about to risk that. The Royal Nepal Army and the police picked up 66 students in two batches after the protests, said hostel warden Chola Kanta Ojha. They were taken to the army barracks 2 km away and dumped in trenches. "Then we were blindfolded and beaten relentlessly," said Bel Bahadur Purja, a student of Class XI. The blindfolds were removed at eight the next morning. The students said they spent the winter night huddled together for warmth. They were not given food or water and were released only at 2 p.m. The students say, however, that while army choppers flew low and intimidated them, shots weren't fired from the air. The bullets came after four rounds of warning fire, they say. Two students were hit. One of them, Geeta KC, was shot through the thigh. She is now at Pokhara's Manipal Teaching Hospital. Chiranjeevi, a blind student who was among the protestors, heard the whirr of choppers flying low and says he was afraid: "I was wondering if they were really coming for us," he told HT. He and other disabled students on the 12,000-strong campus were unharmed. The incident at the P.N. College doesn't appear to have affected life in Pokhara, however. There's a merry fair on the banks of the Fewa lake. And nobody in this town of 1.3 lakh people seems to know exactly what happened at the college. "That's because there's a complete lack of communication and people are afraid to go anywhere near the campus," says Basudeb Mishra, a journalist with the Pokhara Patra. To those outside Nepal, Pokhara conjures up images of an idyllic tourist spot where the day begins with a view of the virgin Fishtail peak reflected in the still waters of the Fewa lake. To those within Nepal, there's another Pokhara, and P.N. College is an integral part of it.