Image via WikipediaImmigration Court Date: June 6, 2011: Prepared StatementJune 3 Immigration Court Date
1. What is your name?
My name is Paramendra Bhagat.
2. Where were you born?
I was born in a hospital in the city of Darbhanga in the state of Bihar in India. I don't have a birth certificate. They don't do that where I grew up.
3. Why are you seeking asylum in the US?
I show up in Nepal and I am dead meat. My instincts tell me so. It is the same instincts that told me in February 2007 that Barack Obama was the next President of the United States.
4. By whom you fear for your life in Nepal?
There are a few different actors and groups that might want to harm me. The people who lost power in 2006, the Maoists who still dream of a one party dictatorship brought about by an armed revolution, rivals in the Madhesi groups, violent and nonviolent, who might be dead set in their own views and methods, separatist armed Madhesis.
5. Why do you think you will be subjected to political assassination?
I am high profile. I spent six months in jail in America for being the top Obama volunteer in the city of his primary rival. That was political. I was the only Nepali in America who did full time work for Nepal's democracy movement of 2006 and the Madhesi movement of 2007. That kind of visibility puts you in harm's way. If my political enemies in New York City can do what they did to me, what do you think my political enemies in Nepal will do?
