Friday, November 30, 2018

When The Gods They Create Fail

Aung San Suu Kyi
Given the speed with which her stock has fallen, it’s a relief to see that Aung San Suu Kyi isn’t being condemned for attending the Asia Pacific Summit 2018 in Kathmandu.
In a way, Suu Kyi’s plight resembles that of the other dignitary in our midst: Prime Minister Hun Sen of Cambodia. A former mid-level Khmer Rouge functionary, Hun Sen endeared himself to the West after its massive exercise in nation-building in the early 1990s. By mid-decade, he began consolidating power by, among other things, high-handed marginalization of the other partners in the motley democratic coalition. Global criticism was mild. Over subsequent years, individual actions by the Hun Sen government have prompted predictable international attacks, but the general tone has remained muted.
In our times, it is Myanmar’s leader who singularly encapsulates the international disenchantment produced when externally electrified hope crashes with domestic reality. Suu Kyi has been all but consumed by something that long preceded her ascent to power. The fact that an entrenched military regime refused to sway with the post-Berlin Wall breeze, annulled election results it did not like, and put the symbol of democracy under house arrest created a powerful narrative for the end-of-history peddlers.
Suu Kyi knew better than anyone else that the Nobel Peace Prize she got was more for the satisfaction of the benefactors. In detention, she must have wondered for long hours how many times national reconciliation might have been pushed back by Western obsession with the repugnance of the junta.
When she rose to power, Suu Kyi had to know how fast her incrementalism would clash with the aspirations of liberal internationalism. Tragic as the Rohingya affair has been, the plight of the community was never advanced as an argument why Myanmar needed to democratize fast. Whether this ‘genocide’ is an outcome of Myanmar’s political liberalization cannot be honestly debated until we are sure how much the country has indeed democratized. (All said and done, there was probably just enough democracy to keep Suu Kyi’s international backers happy but far short of what was needed to provide a safety valve to the simmering caldron the country is.)
A series of uncomfortable questions cannot be avoided. Was Suu Kyi empowered enough to do anything about the Rohingyas? (Her official title, after all, is an insipid ‘state counsellor’.) Or should she have stepped down in disgust and demonized the real rulers for perpetrating the massive injustice? If so, to what real end? Just to preserve the sanctity of the Nobel Peace Prize that she never demanded as a birthright?
Maybe Suu Kyi saw herself as that last hope for democracy in a country so precariously placed and abhorred the idea of simply giving up. And what about her supporters? They, too, must be revolted by the Rohingya tragedy. But have they been so to the extent of abandoning the standard-bearer of their wider hopes and aspirations?
Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe was once a darling of the West. If there hadn’t been too many other contenders and Cold War considerations, he might have won a Nobel Peace Prize too. Yet Mugabe was what he always was: a man wedded to a mission that he saw fit for his country. If he turned out to be dangerous, well, his disenchanted former international admirers should have searched a bit deeper within themselves.
The West once adored Syria’s Basher Al Assad, too. He was living a comfortable life in London as an ophthalmologist when a group of geostrategic eggheads considered him best placed to succeed his long-ruling father, Hafez, in the late 1990s. When, in the midst of the Arab Spring a decade and a half later, Syria’s underlying fissures erupted to metastasize into a geopolitical contest, Assad held on tight. Soon everyone with a stated stake in the region since the Sykes-Picot Agreement jumped in while Assad regained the initiative. Figuring out who unleashed chemical weapons where might be easier than making sense of who is fighting whom backed by which external patron. Meanwhile, the Syrian people continue to suffer, and the UN Security Council keeps getting its bland periodic political and humanitarian briefings.
Upon landing in Kathmandu, Suu Kyi must have fathomed the controversy Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli found himself in relation to whether his government did or did not co-sponsor the conference. Like Oli, she perhaps recognizes that things have to go on, no matter how tumultuous our times.

Sunday, November 18, 2018

All Together Now?

If a single garland strung across the necks of our three preeminent Koiralas is what it takes to start talking about reviving the Nepali Congress, we’ll take it.
The individual ambitions of Shashank, Shekhar and Sujata Koirala to don the dynastic crown Girija Prasad Koirala left behind in 2010 have worked to the advantage of party president Sher Bahadur Deuba. He can revel in dreariness only because of divisions among the disaffected within.
The last election cycle pushed what many still consider Nepal’s only democratic party into the opposition in the federal and seven provincial assemblies. The two-thirds-majority government of the newly united Nepal Communist Party has alienated a growing section of the electorate by its incompetence. Yet the ruling party seems to consider governance as a means of managing the contradictions brought upon by the hasty unification of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist factions.
Instead of seizing the initiative, the Nepali Congress is all shriveled up. Deuba’s appointment of Bijay Kumar Gachhadar as party vice-president brought condemnation from across the Nepali Congress factions. Leaders accused Deuba of violating the party’s statute and principles by nominating Gachhadar without consulting the central committee. Moreover, the party statute provides for one vice-president, a position Bimalendra Nidhi already holds.
Deuba brushed off the criticism saying that he took the decision to honor the agreement with Gachhadar that paved the way for his return to the Nepali Congress. (Translation: I did it for the party.) The anti-Deuba camp knew it had to step up its pressure but members weren’t entirely sure of the motives of one another. Every factional leader is too mired in personal ambitions for the others to trust in a post-Deuba setting.
After Sujata’s luncheon the other day failed to electrify the atmosphere enough, the focus shifted to the stage where the three Koirala cousins stood. The ambience in Biratnagar was earnest enough, at least in public. Sujata didn’t let her substantial sense of self-worth monopolize the proceedings, even though it was organized in tribute to her departed dad. Shashank, too, sought to project a sufficiently accommodating image, while Shekhar did all he could to defer to the moment and show that he and Sujata were mere central committee members standing together with their general secretary.
So far so good. But, really, is this good enough? It’s not as if the Nepali Congress rank and file are clamoring for a Koirala to rescue the organization. Political parties always need the right kind of individuals to drive them. What the Nepali Congress needs, though, is ideological coherence. What does the party stand for in ways that its competitors do not?
In a given context, an individual can drive a new narrative and then keep working to justify it. But, then, a Girija Prasad Koirala also needs a Maoist rebellion, an assertive monarchy and an estranged neighbor to break away from a key founding tenet of his party.
Having abandoned the monarchy, the Nepali Congress needed to define a new purpose. As labels like social democracy and democratic socialism became expansive enough to cover the Maoists and Marxist-Leninists as well, the Nepali Congress could have sought to distinguish itself by taking distinct positions on issues such as secularism, federalism, the Indian embargo and Chinese investments.
Furthermore, when you keep touting how you abandoned your ideological fealty to constitutional monarchy, it becomes kind of disingenuous to keep harping on your role in the 1950-51 revolution. Again, if the communists are so despicable when they have acquired power on their own today, how could you not have anticipated so during a decade of post-monarchy cooperation (and especially after all of B.P. Koirala’s steely admonitions)?
Not every politician can talk about a U-turn like Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan did the other day. Those intent on marching ahead are the ones who need the greatest clarity of message and means. A garland doesn’t love you or hate you, it just exists – and withers faster than most things.

Saturday, November 10, 2018

When It’s All About Looking Busy

As the post-Dasain/Tihar political momentum picks up, introspection seems to be the byword on the left center and right alike.
Former prime ministers Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Madhav Kumar Nepal of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) have promised that the government will begin showing more life. It is significant that the assurance comes from the two men most responsible for disrupting Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s government from within the party.
Dahal’s much-hyped geopolitical excursion turned out to be a dud, largely owing to the excessive hospitality New Delhi showered on him. Madhav Nepal’s use of Oli’s absence from the country to mount a virtual insurrection didn’t turn out be propitious in its timing, either. Still, the two ex-premiers can’t escape part of the blame for our political plight. Dahal has little compunction in accusing the bureaucracy of impeding a government enjoying a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Madhav Nepal hasn’t been as callous in deflecting responsibility, but he hasn’t been terribly receptive of what is arguably his share of it.
Over at the Nepali Congress, president Sher Bahadur Deuba has lost none of his newfound zeal for going his way. The nomination of Bijay Kumar Gachchaddar as vice-president is proving hard to swallow for many party functionaries, including who have nothing personally against the man. The party hadn’t quite suffered such a drought of qualified candidates that Deuba had to turn to someone who left and rejoined the Nepali Congress in circumstances that still are largely obscure. Gachchaddar’s skills as a leader are not in question here. What kind of message does Deuba want to send by rewarding, so to speak, a water pot without a base, regardless of the shininess of the brass? (If you ask Deuba privately, he’d probably have a short and easy answer: personal loyalty.)
The Nepali Congress is so divided that the anti-Deuba factions can’t be sure that anything of significance really unites the dissidents. So Sujata Koirala talks about Deuba’s last chance, while cousins Shashank and Shekhar speak of the imperative of checking the ideological and institutional disarray the party finds itself in. Little wonder that non-Koiralas like Ram Chandra Poudel feel the need to tip-toe around things: letting everyone know how mad they are but not enough about what they intend to do.
The right is once again animated by talk of reunification among the three principal factions. Kamal Thapa of the Rastriya Prajantantra Party seems to be preparing for the storm he predicts will rage after India’s national elections next year. Pashupati Shamsher Rana of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Democratic) insists he will restore Hindu statehood, without elaborating how he intends to achieve that. Prakash Chandra Lohani of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Nationalist) insipidly maintains that unity will be achieved sooner than later.
The fusion/fission cycle on the right has become so routine that most people aren’t too bothered about what really unites and divides the men and women on that end of political spectrum. The mere process is exciting enough to drive the larger narrative that politics is alive.
Still, the fact that all three points on the ideological spectrum are undergoing a form of overt introspection can’t be coincidental. At a basic level, it underscores the tentativeness Nepali politics hasn’t been able to shed even after the promulgation of a new Constitution and elections at all three tiers. Politics, like most other things, shuns a sense of finality. But haven’t we been loitering around the starting line for far too long? Maybe the key to Nepal’s destiny still isn’t in the hands of Nepalis.
A glance around the neighborhood does little to clarify our outlook. Is Doklam or Wuhan the operating word regarding Sino-Indian relations? An election in the Maldives is said to have thrown out a pro-Chinese government. But it only seems to have shifted geopolitical rivalries north-eastward to Sri Lanka. Pakistan was said to have become a shining emblem of the inherent senselessness of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But the joint statement announced after Prime Minister Imran Khan’s visit to China appears to have given new impetus to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship of the BRI.
In such a situation, you can’t blame our political class for not knowing what might happen here next and when. The best they can do is prepare for the indefinite. How do you do that best? By looking like you are busy preparing all the same.