A Revolution Devoured By Its Parents?

Amid the dreariness of daily political narrative, it is refreshing once in a while to proceed along parallelisms no matter how outlandish they might sound.
How does a country’s journey from point A to B end up at a lower-case e in light italics? And can we be sure we have arrived?
A unified communist party fusing the two best indoctrinated and organized comrades drives a government enjoying a massive legislative mandate. Instead of administering ‘new Nepal’, it is muddling from crisis to crisis. Of the three pillars of our redesigned state, secularism was first to shake. The only reason it still stands is the split between the monarchical and republican advocates of Hindu statehood.
There are other intriguing aspects to the precipitous rise in anti-secularism sentiments. Was the impetuous and enigmatic declaration on the abolition of Hindu statehood the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy to break one of the last barriers to the worldwide dissemination of the Good News? Was it aimed at removing what was construed as the most formidable plank of monarchy to cut it down to size? Or was it just another way of perpetuating destabilization? If anything, Hinduism has had an unprecedented and unexpected revival in secular Nepal.
Still, our astonishment at the plight of secularism pales in comparison to that vis-à-vis the dark clouds hovering above federalism. Not even a year into its existence, that pillar is slowly but surely being questioned on structural grounds. The controversy over the additional tax burden is symptomatic of a wider re-evaluation likely to ensue sooner rather than later.
Republicanism has proven more resilient. It has become fashionable to attribute its success to the unpopularity of the ex-monarch which is only surpassed by that of the ex-heir apparent. Less conspicuous in our collective consideration is the continuing childhood of the candidate for ‘baby king’. The more critical factor, though, may be the relative success of the presidency.
Compared to the occupants of other institutions of state, Ram Baran Yadav and now, Bidya Bhandari, have discharged their duties with remarkable decorum and dignity. Granted, they have been able to dodge serious controversy because of the ceremonialism of their office. Yet it is the individual that has made the institution count.
Even if the presidency were to maintain its record of probity and rectitude, would it be able to compensate for the ricketiness of new Nepal’s other two pillars? That remains in the realm of the future.
There is value for all stakeholders – external and internal – in revisiting and reevaluating how it all began and what went on midway to grasp where things are now.
Chandra Prakash Gajurel, who once headed the Maoists’ international relations department, put things very succinctly the other day in an interview with BBC Radio’s Nepali Service. Gajurel is now languishing in the sidelines as a member of Mohan Baidya’s more radical but rump group.
In the interview, Gajurel conceded that the Maoists ended up furthering India’s interests in Nepal. However, he was not prepared to concede that the Maoists had served as fifth columns. When the ragtag band of Nepali radicals rose up against the monarchy and the parliamentary system, India had little use for them. Having kept the Maoists in reserve, in Gajurel’s telling, the Indians brought them out when they needed to chastise the monarch.
Despite the palace’s coziness with China and Pakistan, New Delhi wasn’t ready to dispense with Nepal’s royalty. When events took their course, India didn’t feel terribly sorry. Nothing ground-breaking here. Where Gajurel gets interesting is when he describes how the Maoist leadership went on to join hands with the parliamentary forces. Gajurel has some credibility in calling this a betrayal of the revolution because both he and Baidya were in detention in India while the events leading up to the 12 Point Agreement unfolded in New Delhi.
On the other hand, if Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Baburam Bhattarai ultimately chose to side with the parties against the palace and split the difference, it was the triumph of pragmatism over principle. A one-party people’s republic of Nepal was always inconceivable, even in the event of a full and formal Chinese takeover.
Pragmatism in input implies the inevitability of practicality in the outcome. If Dahal and Bhattarai created history in the annals of revolution by effecting a betrayal from the top, as Gajurel avers, he himself has grasped the opportunity latent in letting ‘what should be’ prevail over ‘what is’.
China, India and the West – in that precise order – have benefited from new Nepal, after having committed so heavily to suppress the Maoist rebellion on the back of the monarchy. Each of the three external stakeholders is still probably engaged in long-term cost-benefit analysis. If their collective objective is to keep Nepal in suspended animation as the significant acts of the Great Global Drama continue to unfold elsewhere, then they have succeeded.
The cycle thus continues as the new empowerment creates new alienation. Maybe that’s why, in the interview, Gajurel sounded quite sanguine about his aims and ultimate accomplishments. Nepalis ignored Dahal and Bhattarai once only to marvel at their machinations. Would we dare ignore Gajurel or Netra Bikram Chand? Maybe. Not doing so might be the more pragmatic way, though.

Nepal In The Vajpayee Vortex

With the first waves of tributes to the late Atal Behari Vajpayee now subsiding, it may not be inopportune to reflect on the man through the prism of political developments in Nepal.
A steadfast friend of Nepal, Vajpayee was at ease with Nepal’s royalty and its detractors alike. Having spent much of his early political career building the Hindu nationalists into a viable electoral force, Vajpayee served as foreign minister in the short-lived Janata Party government that ousted the Indian National Congress in 1977.
Ideologically close to King Birendra, Vajpayee was a committed democrat with an affinity for B.P. Koirala and the Nepali Congress. Reconciling those imperatives was a difficult job in the best of times. The post-Sikkim-annexation environment was hardly assuring for Nepal.
As one coalition partner of Prime Minister Morarji Desai, Vajpayee was scarcely in a position to influence policy based on his Jana Sangh’s political ideology. Moreover, while Koirala allies dominated the Janata Party, they were at a loss over how to accommodate Nepal’s most prominent democrat’s quest for a return to the kingdom's political mainstream. Amid the shakiness of the Desai coalition, the best one could have hoped for was a sort of modus vivendi between the partyless Panchayat system and the Nepali Congress.
Months earlier, Koirala had returned to Nepal from exile in India, ostensibly fed up with the restrictions Indira Gandhi’s Emergency-era government placed on him. Although he alighted the aircraft with a message of national reconciliation, Koirala was a wanted man back home and was treated as such. In the near term, Koirala’s hopes of political reconciliation with the palace were heading nowhere.
With the advent of the Janata government, there were some expectations of progress and, gradually, subtle signs of movement. Vajpayee worked behind the scenes together with ideological adversary George Fernandes and personal rival Subramaniam Swamy.  King Birendra held consultations with Koirala and sanctioned his trip abroad for medical treatment over the objections of key palace advisers, some of whom were still advocating the death penalty for the man. (Asked by a reporter whether he would return to Nepal and almost certain reimprisonment, Koirala responded by propounding the famed Two Necks in a Noose Theory.)
From the break it so energetically sought to make from the overt Nehru-Gandhi overlordship of Nepal, the Janata government might have gone along with any verdict emerging from the national referendum in Nepal in 1980. By then, however, Indira Gandhi had returned as prime minister. How she could have reconciled her personal antipathy toward Koirala with a restored multiparty system that he would have dominated remained an academic question. Koirala himself made things easier for Gandhi by offering a prolix yet principled endorsement of the popular verdict, going against the prevailing mood in the opposition camp.
The next decade and a half were a period of often-convulsive conversion for both Nepal and Vajpayee. His new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) increased its legislative tally from two seats to head the federal government in New Delhi. Nepalis, emerging from shockwaves sent by the fall of the Berlin Wall, were living under a restored multiparty democracy but were growing disenchanted with the attendant political shenanigans. Maoist rebels were pouncing from the sidelines.
Vajpayee’s fortnight-long first premiership in 1996 was a dry run for the second two years later. How a Hindu nationalist-led government might engage with the world’s only Hindu monarchy was something keenly watched on both sides of the border and beyond. The early signs seemed promising. When the Vajpayee government invited King Birendra as the chief guest at the Republic Day in early 1999, many saw this as a solid affirmation of India’s recognition of Nepal’s sovereign existence.
By the end of the year, bilateral relations took their worst plunge ever. India’s RAW intelligence agents, through carefully calibrated leaks, projected Nepal as a haven for Pakistan’s spy agencies obsessed with anti-Indian subversion. A Christmas Eve hijacking of an Indian aircraft shortly after takeoff from Kathmandu was immediately cited as evidence of Pakistani destabilization. But, then, the flight went on a murky path with intriguing twists to weave a story that couldn’t be kept straight. When the ordeal ended in Afghanistan with Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh escorting the imprisoned militants the hijackers demanded in exchange for the passengers, everyone wanted the story buried.
Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, our prime minister then, isn’t around to recall the pressure he was under to incriminate Pakistan. But his foreign minister, Ram Sharan Mahat, can perhaps still remember how it was US President Bill Clinton who ended up letting him off the hook by rejecting the notion of official Pakistani complicity in the hijacking.
The succeeding year fared little better and ended with protests sparked by an Indian film star’s purported derogatory words for Nepalis. Few, if any, could confess to hearing those words or to knowing where or when they had been uttered. As Kathmandu burned, the usual suspects came up. Only this time, they were now-exiled elements of India’s underworld supported by Pakistan.
Of course, the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan and the Kargil War, among other things, had heightened regional tensions. Yet the Chinese were uncharacteristically subdued in their backing – if you could even call it that – of Pakistan in both instances. The Americans were hardening their stance against China politically and economically. Although officially US-India ties were on the upswing, privately, according to subsequently published memoirs by some key players, the Americans were having a hard time overcoming the BJP-led government’s emulation of Nehru-Gandhi-era sanctimony and moralism in an effort to preserve their strategic autonomy. President Clinton’s brief stopover in Pakistan, recently the venue of a military takeover, was more of a rebuff to India than an embrace of the Pakistani generals.
In Nepal, there was a flurry of high-level visitors from China, including Premier Zhu Rongji. That burst of diplomacy culminated in the Chinese government’s invitation to King Birendra to the inaugural Boao Forum as a special guest, followed by a state visit to the country.
Of course, sections of Indian academia and media voiced concern over this sudden surge in activity on the Nepal-China front. Representatives of some leading Western governments were said to be advising King Birendra to take a more assertive political role in view of the political parties’ ‘mismanagement’. One outgoing ambassador’s audience with the monarch was said to have turned testy on both sides when the king reminded him that his government’s undue pressure in 1990 was partly responsible for Nepal’s tumultuous politics.
Although buried in the post-9/11 narrative, American relations with China under the new George W. Bush administration were so fraught that in early April 2001 Beijing forced a US military spy aircraft to land in China and held it for three months before allowing its dismantled pieces to fly out three months later.
What was noteworthy was that, in the midst of this mayhem, the Vajpayee government was in the initial phases of striking a grand bargain with the Chinese on Tibet. Was the trilateralism we are talking about today making its first stirrings then? (Last week, the Chinese were fulsome in their praise of Vajpayee for having made “path-breaking contributions to the development of Sino-Indian relations”.) We were never to find out, the Narayanhity Carnage having intervened on the night of June 1, 2001.
Even those most convinced of India’s hand (or a couple of fingers at least!) in the palace massacre were at a loss to explain how it could have happened under Vajpayee. Reports emerging years later that the BJP-led government had opened contacts with Nepali Maoists served to underscore the cold unsentimentality underpinning our bilateral relations.
Vajpayee’s personal reaction to the massacre was no different from the official messages pouring in from world capitals. At a private gathering of party workers in Nagpur weeks later, Vajpayee was said to speak of having been presented with a fait accompli in Nepal. That cryptic clarification was extended to imply that Indian intelligence agencies, long-time foes of Nepal’s monarchy, were working on their own plans as part of competing Nepal policies being forged by Indian institutions. (Years later, after the BJP lost to the Congress, Rabindra Singh, a senior RAW agent defected to the United States via Nepal purportedly with a cache of classified files on Nepal.)
If accurate, this reasoning would not only explain the BJP’s opening to Nepali Maoists but the entire subsequent script unfolding from India.  Amid the studiousness of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s effort to shield its Nepal policy from any overt ideological tilt, we have come to accept it as axiomatic that India, like any other country, makes cold foreign-policy calculations in the pursuit of its national interests.
Yet during the Vajpayee years, either out of sheer Nepali naivete or belief in the genuineness of personal relationships among leaders of two countries, it was hard to grasp the tragic confluence of events of the times. It is still so.

The Weight On Our Premier In Waiting

If Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ is delighting in his status as prime minister in waiting, he’s also demonstrating an impassioned longing for the job.
Ever since the unification of his Maoist stream with the Marxist-Leninists to create the Nepal Communist Party (NCP), Dahal has found himself in a fix. As the leader of a party that waged both a people’s war and peace to astonishing effect, Dahal is incapable of playing second fiddle. Yet his current status as co-chair of the ruling party alongside a man who also happens to be the incumbent prime minister constrains the onetime Maoist supremo.
Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s exertions over the past six months must have emboldened Dahal to seek to cement his status as the logical successor. In that sense, his moves are carefully crafted to defend the party but not necessarily the prime minister.
In barely veiled swipes at the government, Dahal has been warning against the emergence of a tax system that could eventually undermine federalism. He has been more candid in criticizing the government for failing to create a climate conducive to foreign investment.
The rejection of Deepak Raj Joshee’s nomination as chief justice has upheld the supremacy of parliament, Dahal said. He could not have been oblivious to the shenanigans preceding the legislative committee’s vote nor the extent of the difficulties such comments could add to Oli's.
Dahal’s assertion that talks were the only way to resolve political differences may have sounded like friendly advice to former acolyte Comrade Biplav and others against wasting valuable time and energy on futile pursuits. But couldn’t it also be construed as an admonition to the government?
Of late, Dahal appears to have been drawing support from meaningful external quarters. When outgoing US Ambassador Alaina B. Teplitz paid a farewell call on the NCP co-chair, the mutual admiration they lavished almost made you forget that the Maoists were once on the US government’s terrorist list. (Or that former US president George W. Bush had advised former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, during their Oval Office meeting, to “finish them off” as part of the unfolding global war on terror.)
During their meeting in Kathmandu last month, visiting Vice Minister of International Department of the Communist Party of China Wang Yajun conveyed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s warm greetings to Dahal. And that was just before Wang thanked Dahal for the political stability maintained in Nepal following the alliance forged among the big communist parties.
And now the Indian media have been playing up Dahal’s scheduled visit to China and India in September, particularly underscoring its potential contribution to fostering trilateral cooperation. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the reporters and editors across the southern border were writing about our serving prime minister. Since there’s hardly any evidence that Oli has subcontracted that vital dimension of Nepali foreign policy to his party co-chair, it’s fair to wonder what our prime minister may be wondering.
The experience of two tenures at the helm must be enough to educate Dahal on what to expect a third time. But what is a politician without ambition? All the better if you can actually cast it as an onerous calling.

Back To School Again

As his government advances toward its six-month milestone, Prime Minister K.P. Oli must be busy wondering what has gone so wrong.
Backed by a two-thirds majority in parliament, Oli expected to lead New Nepal on its first real steps toward peace, progress and prudence. Three tiers of elections under the new popularly drafted constitution had set the country firmly on the path of republicanism, secularism and federalism.
By uniting the country’s two major communist parties, Oli had at least provided the theoretical basis to end the factionalism and instability emanating from that end of the ideological spectrum.
The early signs were impressive. Oli ended the transport syndicate that was fleecing the people, often in connivance with officialdom. His government began regulating foreign volunteer organizations to ensure what they were doing was in fact what Nepal needed.
The government stopped construction activities on cultivable land and began holding contractors accountable to their schedules. Governance may not have suddenly improved. There was the promise that it could become better.
On the vital external front, Oli succeeded in winning the confidence of Nepal’s two powerful neighbors, raising the prospect of ending a divergence of north-south expectations that had long constrained our politics. Braving opposition from countries farther afield, he forced the United Nations to close its political affairs office, deeming it an irrelevant hangover of the UN Mission to Nepal.
When some began describing him as Nepal’s most powerful leader since King Mahendra, Oli seemed to like the comparison. After all, he understood that the more politically apt B.P. Koirala analogy was practically futile, considering that a two-thirds majority eventually meant little for Nepal’s first elected premier.
And yet, our prime minister is being roundly castigated as an autocrat, if not already then certainly an aspiring one. Opposition parties are organizing protests in the defense of democracy with the decibels rising in the media echo chamber. The prime minister, struggling to regain the initiative, imparts an image of sheer helplessness.
When Oli even begins to reiterate his promise of achieving an eight percent economic growth rate and a per capita income of US$5,000 by the end of his five-year term, he provokes howls of derision. The train from China and boat rides to India entered the compendium of ‘Oli-isms’ – entertaining but empty exhortations.
It is tempting to argue that this opposition is contrived by the very domestic and external quarters Oli has alienated the most. That would only ignore the assistance the prime minister and his party are providing his opponents.
In the recent imbroglio involving Dr. Govinda KC and his hunger strike, the government’s eventual conciliation was weighed against its initial callousness. The parliamentary public hearing committee’s rejection of Deepak Raj Joshee’s nomination as chief justice may have been the inevitable outcome of broader systemic and political vagaries. Yet it is being portrayed as Oli’s egregious assault on the independence of the judiciary and democracy.
When Oli continues to speak in parables and proverbs, it can be digested as an enduring personality trait. When ministers try aping their boss – in candor and caginess alike – it creates the kind of unfortunateness the law minister found himself in vis-à-vis Nepali female students in Bangladesh.
Oli’s counterpart as leader of the unified Communist Party of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, has invoked a vow of silence of sorts when it comes to the prime minister. When Dahal does speak, he does so in platitudes that can be hardly comforting to the prime minister.
Oli, moreover, is discovering the downside of personal preponderance. With little role or relevance on things that really matter, men like Madhav Kumar Nepal, Jhal Nath Khanal and Bam Dev Gautam can’t be too enthused about defending the prime minister.
All said and done, a ruthless and relentless learning process wasn’t what Oli – or the rest of us – thought these first six months would be.