Crafting A Constitution With A Bill of Wrongs

We can’t turn back from a federal Nepal but can’t seem to agree on the kind of states to create. So one of our brilliant political minds came up with a dazzling idea. Let’s promulgate the new constitution, setting aside that contention issue, and any other ones, for that matter.
The Nepali Congress has an established tradition of taking half steps and then claiming to be the only party with the fortitude to go the full mile. Yet, Maila Baje thinks Dr. Ram Sharan Mahat’s proposal may not be as half-baked as it sounds. Nepal can’t put off indefinitely the culmination of that hopey-changey moment six springs ago.
To be honest, the political shenanigans have become too delicious to miss. The systematic mockery of constitutionalism is being supported by the paragons of democracy in the south and west, as the supposedly reactionary right finds itself the lone voice pleading for a semblance of legality on our march toward newness.
What makes things urgent for us, however, is the fact that our giant neighbors aren’t really smiling anymore. A modicum of political stability is required for the three political successions in our midst.
Up north, Chinese President Hu Jintao is scheduled to hand over leadership to the next generation of communists at the party Congress later this year. However, Xi Jinping’s accession will only mark the beginning of the transition to the fifth generation of New China.
In India, the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty is searching for that propitious moment to pass the torch to Rahul Gandhi. As the party traditionally most accommodative to the Chinese, the Indian National Congress cannot afford events in Nepal to provoke any Chinese reaction that might help to spoil things.
The crucial leadership transition intersecting the two relates to the 14th Dalai Lama. His Holiness has begun the Great Withdrawal in the full knowledge that his eventual demise is likely to set off rival claimants to Great Fifteenth. To preempt Beijing, the current Dalai Lama is toying with the idea of naming a successor, perhaps even one not born inside Tibet.
The succession struggle is likely to be waged not only from Dharmasala and Beijing but also from other traditionally assertive Tibetan sects who have been overshadowed all these decades only by Tenzin Gyatso’s larger-than-life persona.
A formal if incomplete Nepali constitution, an elected government and other indicators of domestic life can give sufficient stability for the next stage of the geopolitical maneuverings.
Of course, the risks inherent in jumping the gun are obvious. Members who adopt such a constitution will have done so with their reservations. That will make it easier for some of these same people to be among the first to burn copies of the document. At least there will be a document to set ablaze.
What’s more, not all will have been lost. We can attach a bill of rights – or, more appropriately, wrongs – as and when we deem necessary. It’s not for nothing that some alien quarters have prepared themselves for at least two years of ethnic conflagration before Nepalis can decide which group’s victimhood tends to run the deepest.
Should we then agree on the model of federalism – or any other form of the state – we can keep adding them to the main document. Finding that unworkable, we would have the option of changing that. That way, hopes of everything between a people’s democratic republic and Swiss-style confederation will have been kept alive.
Sound outlandish? We’ve made enough amendments to the interim constitution to breeze through the job.

Stop Whining, Mr. Prime Minister

For a man who knows how to dish it out, Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai sorely lacks the ability to take it. His latest gripe involves how some Kathmandu-based ambassadors have insulted him.
“Ambassadors direct their shoes to my face while seeing me at my office,” the prime minister reportedly complained to a group of friendly scribes. The diplomats’ postures also seem to pinch Dr. Bhattarai a lot.
Before castigating the premier for singling out this fraternity of foreigners, you have to concede one thing. Dr. Bhattarai knew what he was getting into domestically when he consented to taking the top job. Politicians of all stripes were going to pillory him at every opportunity. (Isn’t that what Dr. Bhattarai did to his predecessors and a great many others?) The diplomatic corps was somehow supposed to be another thing altogether.
Prime ministers before Dr. Bhattarai had had to deal with their share of haughty and overbearing envoys. Awkward slippers and even more awkwardly crossed legs were the least of their concerns.
Yet Dr. Bhattarai’s predecessors were at least dignified enough not to whine about it. (Would Dr. Bhattarai have refused the premiership had Comrades Jhal Nath Khanal, Madhav Kumar Nepal or Pushpa Kamal Dahal volunteered their worst moments with ambassadors? Didn’t think so.)
This brings us closer to the kind of person Dr. Bhattarai seems to be. Or, to be more precise, the kind of his skin. Even if you can’t see through it, it does seem very, very thin.
Remember how, during his underground days at height of the insurgency, he engaged in a blistering exchange of magazine columns with BBC Nepali Service journalist Rabindra Mishra?
Or the ease with which he took a few media critics to court for defamation just because they had the temerity to question whether there was a quisling behind his peripatetic nationalistic exterior? (After having thrown around the Q word with such abandon himself all these years.)
What Dr. Bhattarai does seem to have is an inflated sense of self-worth. The we-are-the-ones-we-have-been-waiting-for attitude is eternally palpable in the premier. Even if Nepalis tended to go along with that carefully crafted image, should foreigners do so, too? When they see that trained architect, Maila Baje must ask, how likely are they to also recognize one known more for demolishing things?
This is by no means a defense of the diplomats, who are here to further their own national interests. If they saw in Dr. Bhattarai’s decades of prose literal translations from Mao Zedong’s Collected Works updated only for local context, would they have pointed out those points of similarity, especially when the convolution suited their governments? Yet could they be expected to restrain their body language in the way they did their words. These ambassadors, too, follow the news, all the way from the Mustang to the talk of merger.
Sure it should pain every Nepali when his or her leader is hurt by foreigners. If our premier is so intent on bolstering himself from external arrows, a better way would be to start building a shield by winning over more of your own people.

State Of Our Peace War

For a people struggling to hope for the best, peace in pieces looks better than nothing. Still, you are forced to wonder: what exactly is it that we have been collectively seeking?
For the mainstream parties, the peace process was something to hit back at the monarchy with. The Maoists rebels, after a decade-long spree of murder and mayhem to impose Year Zero, went along because their principal external patron shared that sentiment, all the while hedging its bets.
Today, the international community is still anxious to see the integration of the state and former rebel armies as the most compelling evidence of peace. But their original resolve has fizzled. This comes at a time when fewer and fewer ex-fighters seem to consider that as a prerequisite to peace.
The human rights wings of the international community want to see that part of their agenda on the front-burner, something their cousins in the non-state sector are far more incendiary in asserting. Words like justice and reconciliation would have retained their sonorous ring if the truth of it all had not kept shifting so swiftly.
Over half a decade later, a chastened but still bickering Nepali Congress wants the Maoists to prove their commitment to the democratic process, despite the fact that the voters validated those credentials by electing them the largest party. True, that mandate was not eternal. But then there is little else to go on.
Even then, the Nepali Congress wears a far more substantive aura than the UML, which does not seem to know what it wants from the ex-rebels. Yet it cannot resist proclaiming that it is the only party that can drive the nation.
The Indians wanted the Maoists sidelined because they had envisaged the ex-rebels merely as something that would propel the Seven Party Alliance (SPA) protests beyond Ratna Park. The SPA’s subsequent performance fell far short of New Delhi’s expectations, while the ex-rebels’ geopolitical drift proved intolerable.
The mainstream parties may have succeeded in pulling the Maoists to their own level of ordinariness. But they did little to foil the ex-rebels’ overtures to Chinese pragmatism. Beijing, which once helped the palace and the parties in their effort to crush the rebels, today wants the Great Helmsman’s local offspring to head a broad patriotic front. In response, New Delhi is fanning the factional battles within the Maoists.
The Americans want the ex-rebels to maintain equidistance between the regional behemoths and have been extending a lateral hand in all directions. The Europeans, Russians, Japanese, Pakistanis, Arabs are all staking their claims in the emerging dynamics.
The international left is more interested in peddling such pet issues as homosexuality and abortion – not to mention that perfect watermelon, environmentalism – as the defining characteristics of Nepal’s newness over
everything else.
The global right is not only resisting with full force, but the evangelical variant also wants to spread the Good News in such a way that there is no Second Going.
And still we are at a loss. What do Nepalis want?

Dr. Bhattarai And Our Strategy For Survival

Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai is getting grief from across the spectrum for having suggested that Nepal risked being merged into either China or India if it failed to redefine its geo-strategic self-interest.
Some have attributed pure diplomatic immaturity to the premier’s assertion. Others see a pronounced albeit misguided boldness in his attempt to contend with both powerful neighbors at the same time. Others still see a sense of insecurity transformed into a ploy to prolong his tenure in power.
Regardless of the motive(s), Maila Baje feels Dr. Bhattarai has made a positive and much-needed contribution to the national discourse. If such forthrightness had not come from the man on the top, it might not have left us scratching our heads with the intensity we are today.
Ever since Nepal – in the eminent historian Father Ludwig Stiller’s words – “passed definitely from the status of an insignificant state to that of a power in the Indian subcontinent”, stopping the juggernaut entailed utmost urgency for Qing China and British India. And this consisted of more than military means. As Nepal festered in domestic turmoil after its military defeats by China and British India, the two empires perpetuated their respective narratives in which Nepal was part of their historical inheritance. Manchu emperors, Sun Yat-sen and Mao Zedong all claimed Nepal as part of territories China lost to western imperialism.
To be sure, Nepal’s treaties with the People’s Republic of China have abrogated all past claims of Nepali vassalage to the Middle Kingdom and precluded the possibility of any resurrection of irredentist claims. But the historical and cultural legacies that feed the narrative are still very much alive among the Chinese, whose memory is legendary for its length in time.
Indians with a penchant for history have similarly been puzzled by the fact that Nepal managed to remain out of the formal British empire despite the East India Company’s decisive victory in the war. Indeed, if the Chinese shadow had not loomed so large on Governor-General Francis Rawdon-Hastings’ considerations before and after the Sugauli Treaty, the notion of a “limited war” would not have not existed. But for the Indians dominating the political security establishment in New Delhi, it is nonetheless intriguing that states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Andhra and Karnataka – so distant from their version of Indianness – should be part of India but not Nepal.
As Nepalis continued to bicker, irrespective of the political system in place, this contested realm of overlapping orbits deepened among the Chinese and Indians. During times of peace, the fallout for us seems to have been calmer. During periods of tensions, greater convulsions have occurred. Sometimes, events have moved so fast that their impact on us has become quite inexplicable. The July 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship New Delhi signed with the Rana regime, for instance, was made utterly redundant merely by October that year, when Chinese communist troops moved into Tibet. A little over six months after Mohan Shamsher Rana thought his regime had attained some security vis-à-vis independent India, the Rana regime receded firmly in the dustbin of history. Not without the incongruity of the same Mohan Shamsher having become the first prime minister of democratic Nepal.
At other times, regional events have proceeded with greater placidity. With the Dalai Lama’s flight into exile in India in March 1959, Nepali democracy had virtually run its course – even before Nepal’s staggered first national elections had been completed.
For thirty years, the opacity and closed nature of the partyless system provided our two neighbors the kind of equilibrium they needed to calibrate their relationship. Whether Nepalis themselves would have volunteered to choose between full-fledged democracy and a sense of nationhood in the international community is debatable. That King Mahendra pushed us toward the latter course out of any consideration other than reinforcing his rule continues to be hotly debated. So is King Birendra’s Zone of Peace Proposal, which was prefaced by his 1973 interview with Newsweek that Nepal, consisting of three districts appertaining beyond the Himalayas, was not technically a subcontinental nation. King Gyanendra’s emphasis on developing Nepal into a transit hub between the two Asian giants continues to stir jeers of derision. Yet the Zone of Peace proposal has been gaining new interest, while the post-monarchy leadership has been touting the transit-hub model. If you really look for it, there is even a grudging admiration for King Mahendra’s notion of nationhood among his fiercest critics.
Put differently, Nepalis seem to like the way the country has survived in the international community with a distinct identity. Would the same have been achieved through the path of unshackled democracy and development? Probably. But the Cold War history of Asia, Africa and Latin America leaves us less sanguine. Other developing countries may have been liberated following the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Cold War that really matters to us has never really receded.
Our unrelenting march towards national newness has been marred by a lack of clarity on things that really matter. Manifestations of this contested realm of overlapping orbits, Maila Baje, feels will become more apparent in the period ahead from both our neighbors. By illuminating our geo-strategic vulnerability in so stark terms, Dr. Bhattarai has permitted Nepalis of all ideological persuasions to ponder a new – to borrow a worn but still worthy phrase – strategy for survival. It is only with life, after all, that liberty and the pursuit of happiness can follow.

China Plays The Nepal Card

One striking aspect of Premier Wen Jiabao’s abbreviated visit to Nepal was his professed expectation that Nepal’s relations with India would continue to grow in the days ahead.
To be sure, the assertion was revealed to the public indirectly. But since it has not been contradicted, the sentiment can be assumed to be one both Beijing and Kathmandu want disseminated in the aftermath.
At one level, you could argue that such a candid expression of goodwill on Wen’s part would be conducive to boosting the kind of stability that has eluded Nepal for a long time. Moreover, no country would question another’s sovereign right to conduct relations with a third nation as it wished.
And have not we heard countless Indian leaders go on the record that they were entirely satisfied with Nepal’s growing relations with China?
The Chinese have been particularly adept in transforming this accepted practice of international behavior into a tool of foreign policy. It is not hard to see how the longer the Indians and others are preoccupied with deciphering the motives and intentions of the Chinese in Nepal, the better it is for the mandarins up north.
You do not have to be an incorrigible cynic to see the depravity inherent in Beijing advising a government led by a party that has so strenuously flaunted its northern tilt with abandoned while spewing anti-Indianism for several years now to pursue greater ties with India. One can only imagine the heartburn among the hardest liners among the Mohan Baidya camp.
The circumstances and schedule of Wen’s visit amply underscore that it was one the visitor was anxious to make. That he was intent on doing so to send a message to audiences beyond Nepal was equally clear. Normally, visiting Chinese dignitaries have included Nepal in a wider regional itinerary or in terms of countries with which they believe they share civilization or traditional ties. From Beijing’s perspective, it suffices that the visit took place at all.
The pledges of Chinese assistance that made international headlines may be of limited purposes here. Foreign assistance that comes with no strings attached – touted as the singular tenet of Chinese benevolence – tends to cuts both ways. The donor can delay projects or disbursements or quietly pull out altogether on grounds that may not be anticipated or often explicable to the recipient.
What Nepalis and others should perhaps focus on is the basis for pursuing bilateral relations that Wen’s visit has provided to the next generation of China’s leadership, which is to begin ascending power at the party congress later this year.
Many key factions – including the ‘princelings’ (scions of former PRC leaders and officials) and the ‘neo-comms’ – are likely to bring a neo-Maoist approach to the helm over the ensuing years as they continue to dominate the levers of power. The Communist Youth League led by President Hu Jintao is unlikely to be able to challenge any broadening of such an alliance. The voice the People’s Liberation Army has acquired in China’s policies concerning its periphery has been ringing a disproportionate echo on matters concerning Nepal.
Those dwelling on – and denigrating – Nepal’s brazen flaunting of the so-called China card always sought to deny the fact that any game by definition requires a full-fledged partner willing to play on the established terms. Today those critics find themselves forced to contend with the meaning and motives of China’s Nepal card.