Between Irrelevance And Indispensability

Most telling about ex-king Gyanendra’s Dasain message was the strange level its critics emanated from.
The former king merely suggested that democracy without monarchy and vice-versa were irrelevant in Nepal’s context. Yet critics jumped on the former monarch as if he had affirmed that the crown was somehow indispensable to the country.
The distinction becomes essential here. Irrelevance contains the possibility/probability of action from the current rulers that would eventually prove the ex-king’s assertion wrong. Indispensability has a finality and conclusiveness that would have perhaps merited the intensity of the outcry.
Substantively, though, nothing has really changed. Even if a majority of Nepalis agreed with the ex-king and wanted a restoration of the monarchy, how would that be attained? The favorite pathway – a national referendum as stipulated in the Constitution – would be perilous to both the crown and the country.
Enticing as it might be, you cannot subject the crown to a popular test for the same reason you cannot bestow hereditary succession upon the presidency. Each system has its intrinsic worth because of its innate characteristics.
Even if king Gyanendra were to accede to a referendum now, the majority/minority battle lines will have been drawn firmly. The Panchayat system overcame that challenge by being overthrown. Otherwise, the chaos of periodic referenda would have consumed our political attention. The same would hold true on the issue of the crown.
King Gyanendra suggested popular uprising as another route. True, we have seen a surge of street protests in favor of the monarchy. But the organizers are neither organized nor coherent enough to mount an effective movement. Moreover, a national uprising is predicated more on the people’s opposition to something. We would be hard-pressed politically and philosophically to rise against a constitutionally enshrined democratic order. The perverse manner in which that order was produced and the far more pernicious ways in which it is being practiced just might not be enough to sway the populace.
What sounds like the most prudent way – the restoration of the 1990 Constitution – may be achieved politically, say, through any mechanism that affirms the faultiness of its supersedure. Bypassing the king-parties agreement everyone now believes was signed, today’s dispensation also goes beyond the much-maligned 12-Point Understanding reach in New Delhi. Moreover, the succession of compromises to defuse periodic crises only to keep alive the contrived notion of a new Nepal poisoned the new Constitution from the outset.
The country, at the same time, has moved past the 1990 Basic Law. Secularism has seen an inspissation of religious identity and its assertion. Denigrated as it might have been, federalism has not undermined the people’s basic quest for genuine devolution of authority. Such issues would have to be addressed through amendments requiring the participation of forces outside that compromise.
Then comes geopolitics. If the 1990 Constitution could not stand the pushes and pulls gripping our external environment, what makes us think its restoration would address the concerns of those same foreign actors amid the incredible shift in their power equations?
If we’ve been thinking that king Gyanendra has been pretending for far too long that the monarchy has never gone away, maybe it’s time for us to take another close hard look.

What About The Other MCC, Comrade?

The Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) uproar won’t undo the ruling coalition, Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ proclaimed the other day. But isn’t it the other MCC he should be worried about? Or at least the thought of that Bihar-based outfit that subsequently went on to form half of the Communist Party of India (Maoist)?
That Dahal & Co. have been able to engage in parliamentary whatchamacallits while still flaunting their purported revolutionary credentials is an old story. Why his erstwhile allies abroad feign indifference at this dilution of revolutionary fervor is an equally antiquated one.
The enigma endures, nonetheless. Have our Maoists’ one-time foreign allies emulated the Islamic radicals’ notion of taqqiya as a core tenet of their ‘people’s war’? Or they are still revolutionaries simply because they haven’t had the opportunity to wield state power and lick their fingers?
The American compact won’t get legislative endorsement in its current state, Dahal also informs us, a refrain from the ruling alliance's more leftish hue. Yet the ruse has been exposed. Maybe the whole issue of legislative endorsement was contrived to conceal the implementation the MCC would undergo as a regular agreement.
As one mask comes off, Dahal feels compelled to wear another. ‘Storm the citadel, and we will back you’, he exhorted his youth cadre. So what’s with the vacillation here? Or is the seeming equivocation concealing something stiffer here?
Clearly, the Prachanda myth has rested on its ability to give everyone the kind of meaning they sought. While indigenizing Maoism, Dahal perfected the practice of ‘permanent convolution’. That way, he caters to the Indo-West, Chinese and global radical left at the same time.
The subterfuge is wearing thin but still seems to work for now. Yet here the mask fails: the creases on Dahal’s face contradict his spoken expressions.

Mounting Northern Discomfort

“There are no communists in Nepal, all are employees of CIA and RAW”. Such sentiments have lost their ability to shock us. But maybe they do gain some traction when attributed to people like Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress, or parliament.
Granted, the news was carried by a secondary segment of Nepal’s media. The copyeditor wrote the headline based on something that wasn’t even in the text. Moreover, the lack of sourcing and mere allusion to a special conference of the Chinese Communist Party raised more questions.
Still, the background, temperament and record of the personage purported to have made the comment lent some credence.
Expressing concern over the political situation in Nepal, Li said Western powers were dominating the country’s politics. Despite having a two-thirds majority in parliament, he continued, Nepali communists have been accused of working for foreign powers and not for the country and the people.
Specifically, Li was quoted as saying, the United States and the West were working hard against the communist ideology and were investing billions of dollars in Nepal to tear the communist party to pieces.
The current government was trying to appease foreign powers in order to maintain its power, Li said, and accused India and the United States of manufacturing a border dispute with China with ulterior motives. Nepal, he recalled, could not even call the Indian blockade of 2015 a blockade or resolve its long-running border dispute with India.
Li said the United States had brought the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) project in Nepal to encircle China, in keeping with Washington’s tradition of never providing selfless assistance to anyone. Furthermore, he said, the MCC project is eyeing Nepal's precious minerals and would ultimately make Nepalis bear all the losses.
Considered a rising star, Li was elected to the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2012, something uncharacteristic for a chief of the party’s General Office. He owes his political clout to proximity to President and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping.
As the director of the General Office of the Communist Party, Li handled Xi's daily activities, a job that  included management of classified documents, correspondence, security and the president’s health care. He also helped the president advance key policies.
On foreign policy, Li played a major role in facilitating the strong relationship between China and Russia. He was believed to be the first General Office chief in post-Mao China to have played such an active role in foreign affairs. For example, in 2015 Li was sent as a ‘special representative’ of Xi to meet with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. He has accompanied Xi on the leader’s key foreign visits.
Since assuming the leadership of the National People’s Congress in March 2018, Li has been active in promoting China’s relations with its neighbors, including those in South Asia.
Much remains unclear as why Li would make such outspoken comments on Nepal’s relations with third countries. Equally obscure remains the agenda of the ‘special conference’ of the CCP that would have prompted such forthrightness from such a senior Chinese official.
Given China’s rhetorically assertive foreign policy pronouncements in recent years and the opportunities apparatchiks in Beijing have been so gleefully detecting around the world, Li’s brashness becomes understandable. What we can or will do about it is, of course, a different matter altogether.

Afghan Parallels and Ironies

Nepali reaction to the collapse of the Afghan state to the Taliban has been quite revealing. Sections of the royalist right jumped immediately to contrast President Ashraf Ghani’s hurried flight into exile with former king Gyanendra’s decision to stay put in Nepal.
It didn’t take long for others, while praising the former monarch’s attachment to his motherland, to point out that the Nepali Congress and Unified Marxist-Leninists who spearheaded the April 2006 popular uprising were no terrorists akin to the Taliban.
The fact that the mainstream parties played second fiddle to the Maoists – still designated a terrorist group when the 12-point agreement was struck  – was an inconvenient fact that could be airbrushed out because of prevailing political equations. Nor was it palatable to point out that the uprising was against ‘absolute’ monarchy, not the institution itself. Ditto the foreign factor in our regime change.
Still, the debate has been no less contentious on the ‘domestic’ factors gripping our two countries. Afghanistan could have continued as a functioning state even after the overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973 but for the Cold War-era superpowers’ meddling. By the time the Soviets had struck a semblance of stability between the Khalq and Parcham factions in the Afghan Communist Party, Washington had already assembled a forceful albeit fractious alliance of opposition groups ostensibly united by religion but in fact glued together by dollars and advanced weaponry. The collective ‘Mujahideen’ then had a positive connotation because they were arrayed against the godless Soviets. The pejorative ‘Jihadi’ gained currency once those fighters turned their guns in the other direction.
The mujahideen chased the Soviet invaders out but couldn’t begin to rule, paving the way for the Taliban, which, lest we forget, Washington had initially wooed to facilitate the putative flow of Central Asian oil.
Supporters of our April 2006 regime change, anxious to project the initiative as a purely internal undertaking, caution against drawing false parallels with Afghanistan. But, then, just because the Soviet/Russians and Americans haven’t bombed us back to the stone age doesn’t mean that our state institutions are any better than the Afghans’. If the Indians and Americans want their own security forces to protect their interests – be it airline security or the MCC infrastructure – they just aren’t equating us publicly with the likes of Somalia for fear of conceding the post-2006 adventure a failure.
In the end, Zahir Shah returned to Kabul as a citizen but, more importantly, as a prop for the Hamid Karzai government. If the former king instilled any stability in the initial phases of the post-Taliban government, it ceased with his death as ‘Father of the Nation’ in 2007.
King Gyanendra, who many believe lost his throne for tying China’s entry into SAARC as an observer as the price for Afghanistan’s India-backed membership of the regional organization, probably detected the irony here. If Pakistan has prevented India from reviving SAARC, how would a Taliban-led Afghanistan affect the moribund regional outfit? And China? With Afghanistan on its side, it hardly needed SAARC to arrive firmly in South Asia.

Flashback: Can Nepalis Coexist With Nepal?

A snarky question, even bordering on the seditious? Perhaps. But it’s one that cannot be evaded.
When Ram Kumari Jhankri, a ruling party lawmaker in the dissolved parliament, said Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was emulating King Mahendra, much of the country probably wished she was complimenting him.
However, Jhankri, speaking at a public function in Bardghat as a constituent of the Pushpa Kamal Dahal-Madhav Kumar Nepal faction of the Nepal Communist Party, served to exemplify our collective ambivalence.
The penchant to see King Mahendra as Nepal’s most egregious villain does much more than ignore his matchless contributions to strengthening Nepali nationhood. It encapsulates our inability to identify ourselves as well as our place in the world.
In a perfect world, the elected government of Prime Minister B.P. Koirala might have continued in office with the foreign policy King Mahendra subsequently pursued. Despite their deep differences over domestic politics, both leaders shared broadly identical visions regarding Nepal and the world.
We can argue ad infinitum over whether B.P.’s government – and the polity in general – could have survived the time’s geopolitical pressures or whether the Panchayat system was the sole inevitable outcome. But that is what happened.
Our view of how reality should have unfolded need not define how we view ourselves as Nepalis. Even amid its isolation, Nepal marched to the drum of the times. Our baise-chaubise states were locked in a struggle to come out of feudal societies based on tradition to the modern state system approximating the raison d’état of Cardinal Richelieu. Except, it’s safe to assume, our petty potentates had no clue about the Thirty Years’ War.
Prithvi Narayan Shah and his immediate successors waged a campaign to establish a nation-state defined by common language and culture, much in the way the wars of the French Revolution had. But the Treaty of Westphalia or the Congress of Vienna were not common terms in the bhardari sabha.
The Rana rulers might have been familiar with some of the triggers that eventually disintegrated the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, but they felt the geopolitical ripples from the north and the south far more uncomfortably. And in an irony of ironies, Nepal, never a colony, had to face more than half a decade of Soviet vetoes in its quest for United Nations membership. India, still under the British Raj in 1945, is ranked as a founding member of the world organization.
Continuing to debate how much Nepal is a nation and how much a state may reflect the vibrancy and candor of our democratic discourse. How productive would that be today, when cities, cyberspace and common citizens continue to challenge the nation-state as the principal unit of world order? The post-Cold War world’s contours still remained largely obscure when the international system moved on to the equally abstruse ‘post-post-Cold War’ era.
In that sense, the demand to restore the monarchy to save the country becomes no more backward-looking than the communist/socialist vision still largely drawn from a German’s musings at a British library a century and a half ago.
Today, we are a nation entrapped between one open and pluralistic civilizational state that sees our independence as a threat to its national security; another regimented civilizational state that is committed to a fully and functionally independent Nepal; and a diminished but determined superpower intent on seeing an independent but pliable Nepal between the two rising Asian behemoths.
Our inability to accept who we have been has only been deepening fissures over who we want to be. Nepalis need to reconcile with Nepal.

Originally posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2021.

Cut-And-Paste Constitutionalism

Okay, let’s get this straight. The leader of a deeply divided party that barely controls a quarter of the seats in parliament restored by the Supreme Court is ordered appointed prime minister – no less by five honorable justices themselves.
Parties that supported and opposed an elected prime minister’s dissolution order – twice – vote to confirm the court-mandated head of government. But, then, within the former ruling party, elements that had supported the ill-fated dissolution order ended up voting for the new premier. Some of those elements in the former ruling party who had joined the opposition alliance’s court motion demanding this prime minister’s appointment ended up walking out of the house.
Another opposition party, filled with former Maoist and Madhesi antagonists responsible for Nepal’s worst communal killings, supported the new prime minister. There, too, elements that supported and opposed the dissolution order both times endorsed the new prime minister. They included short-lived cabinet members of the government formed after the first resurrection.
Interspersed here, too, are elements who burned copies of the new constriction upon its promulgation six years ago. In their minuscule/individual capacities, members opposing federalism voted for the premier, while the more virulently ‘nationalist’ strand of communists opposed him. And we’re celebrating how the Supreme Court saved the constitution.
The Americans are happy because MCC is back on the front burner. The Indians and Chinese, for their own reasons, are happy that the new government is what it is – a band-aid until the next injury.
Letting Supreme Court justices define every article of the constitution as its flaws emerge is bad policy. How the panchabhaladmis reached their decision this time and last is still in the realm of speculation. But there is a worse aspect. Can Nepalis be sure that the justices just read and interpreted the law?
What if the next challenge and ruling ends up being something the current cheerleaders hate? Or is that the fig leaf they are waiting for? In an highly opaque collective enterprise entailing agents and interests that are as fluid as they are opportunistic, it is hard to apportion blame when the going gets tough. Buck passing becomes convenient.
Look at things this way; we are still blaming a ceremonial head of state for the nation’s ills created by the political class, condemning enduring legislative skulduggery and ultimately making fertile ground for another uprising. If all we want is camouflage, why not cut the text of the 1990 Constitution and paste it into the 2015 version and continuing governing as if nothing had changed? The 1990 text would be far more credible and effective as a living embodiment of a functional democracy? Heck, it might even salve our collective conscience.

What You Get When You Rope In India and the West

‘Indo-West’ as a geostrategic construct vis-à-vis Nepal continues to provide interesting conjunctions and contrasts. Broadly credited with engineering Nepal’s regime change in 2006, the constituents have carefully played down their divergences. Empowerment, inclusiveness and openness have been malleable enough to provide a façade of a common progressive quest.
Republicanism, secularism and federalism – Nepal’s delicate tripod – has veered sharply away from the much-maligned 12 Point Agreement signed by the erstwhile Seven Party Alliance and Maoist rebels on Indian soil. New Delhi, which actively promoted the anti-palace alliance amid clear domestic cleavages, became inextricably linked with the enterprise. As such, India continues to embody the baleful phenomenon of external influence in Nepal, prompting criticism lately from even from onetime Nepali supporters of this search for a nebulous national newness.
The United States and the European Union drove much of the peace process on India’s back. If New Delhi seethed at this infringement of its version of the Monroe Doctrine, larger geostrategic calculations checked too malignant an articulation of its resentment. You just have to play along to get along.
Of course, each power center displayed varying levels of commitment to the emblems of a new Nepal. Steadfast support to left-of-center preponderance against the royalist right had to confront the Chinese juggernaut. If Beijing could go along with this instance of color-coded revolutions, much was because of its enduring Maoist ability to detect and deploy principal and secondary contradictions. The uncovering of the extent of the Indo-West’s hallucinations vis-à-vis the Middle Kingdom had to await the Covid-19 pandemic.
The culmination of our glorified peace process – the 2015 Constitution – was to the liking of neither of Nepal’s two immediate neighbors. New Delhi still cannot wholeheartedly welcome the basic law. While Beijing displayed unusual enthusiasm in hailing it, its subsequent comments and involvement have underscored the depth of its disenchantment. In substance, both Asian giants reflected their reservations in different ways and have been impelled toward some course correction in keeping with their respective national interests. The other side, so to speak, is intent on making sure that doesn’t happen.
With geostrategic considerations regaining traction in the American approach to Nepal, the EU ran the risk of being left behind. Inclusion and equity continued to be core European concerns, which are still reflected in EU documents and that grouping’s joint statements with the Indians and other bilateral partners.
Yet the European version of an otherwise noble endeavor lost much resonance among more and more Nepalis who saw something akin to the arsonist pleading everybody else to put out the fire. By the time the latest Newar-Dalit ruckus erupted, the EU felt compelled to issue a statement denying it had sponsored the individual who was refused a room on account of her caste.
As if Brexit were not enough, the Europeans had to be reminded in Nepal that inclusion was not something that could be imposed. But setback? What setback? The journey to remake Nepal must continue, be it under the aegis of the Indo-West, Indo-Pacific or whatever else is catchy and convenient.

Colder Calculations On Covid-19?

Earlier this year, when the Indians were no longer able to bear Nepali accusations of New Delhi having imposed its version of the Pressler Amendment, they let us know that Nepali middlemen were the real culprits.
The amendment mentioned above, under which the United States continued withholding delivery of F-16s Pakistan had already paid for as punishment for Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program, dogged bilateral relations for much of the 1990s. The 9/11 attacks cleared that barrier. India’s refusal to deliver vaccines in Nepal carried worse optics.
China’s glee at the dent in India’s image was subsumed in Beijing’s more considerable glory against the vaccine it continues to be accused of having unleashed for nefarious geostrategic purposes.
With the tables turned on them, it’s the mandarins up north who are irked. Apparently, they didn’t like how our government officials hyped up reports that they were about to purchase four million doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccines. Beijing’s specific grievance was that we publicized the price – $10 per jab – despite our apparent undertaking to say nothing.
A supposedly do-nothing government finally sputtering to life went beyond damage-control mode. It issued a statement denying that any deal had been finalized at all.
While our southern neighbors are understandably giddy – judging from the media coverage – far from subdued chuckles must be emanating from the Americans. Not that Washington sees its vaccine generosity as a tool to break the MCC deadlock. It’s just that Nepalis can’t see how the Americans can’t see that it is.
This development has been described as an ‘awkward snag’ in Nepal-China diplomatic relations – in the words of one Indian newspaper. Still, the Indians – and the Americans – have learned the hard way how perilous it is to issue sweeping generalizations on the Nepal-China relationship.
More broadly, when humanitarian relief matters are caught in prevailing geopolitical cross-currents elsewhere, it is easy to lament over the despoilation of the human spirit. But when it is felt so close to home, all we can expect is for others to sympathize – if they have time to rise above their own problems, that is.
Sure, self-reliance as a virtue is bound to be extolled eternally. As Nepal has been unable to instill that attribute, it hardly comes as any comfort. We may rail all we want against ‘vaccine apartheid’ or create more catchy terminology, but the fact is that human nature hasn’t broadened enough to accommodate our aspirations as world citizens. The gap between the haves and have nots must be bridged as an ideal. In emergencies, idealism becomes little more than idle talk.
What Nepal can resort to is old-fashioned cold calculation. Our two neighbors can’t let us go down without figuring out how to divvy up the debris. Worse, they can’t figure out whether the debris would be an asset or a liability. In that situation, those farther afield can’t afford to turn up the geopolitical heat unless they are pretty sure places like Tibet and Kashmir do not become their problem. Mutual assured destruction may sound a bit crude as a strategy for survival for a nation that has tried almost everything else. But it also sums up our options.
The United Nations Security Council would hardly be expected to issue a presidential or press statement – much less adopt a resolution – affirming how vaccinating every Nepali would help maintain international peace and security. But as Nepalis, we have the freedom to believe so, regardless of who is incensed or amused.

Collective Beclowning For A Cause

A legislature dissolved a second time after its members couldn’t justify its restoration. A Supreme Court constitutional bench locked in a ‘conflict of interest’ row, undermining its credibility in testing the second dissolution order. And now, a newly appointed deputy prime minister making comments perceived to advocate a further dilution of an already fluid Nepali state and then claiming to have been misquoted.
Not to forget that these shenanigans come amid the worst health emergency the country has faced. Nepalis may be forgiven for thinking that state authorities are deliberately beclowning themselves to avoid responsibility for their misguided adventure into a new Nepal. The rats may not be abandoning the sinking ship. But they can no longer pretend to hold their breath long enough to float out of the fiasco.
Having exhausted every political experiment, the people are understandably downhearted. It’s not that we have run out of alternatives to the status quo. No single one commands enough support to bring people onto the streets. For the first time since Matrika Prasad Koirala held that official title in 1950-1951, ‘dictator’ is beginning to acquire some positive connotation in the popular imagination.
The post-2006 political leadership, to be sure, has benefited from this apathy and could continue doing so. But it seems to have lost patience. The inevitability of collapse makes the wait more excruciating.
From the outset, the notion of a ‘new’ Nepal was too nebulous to work. Since it was a collective enterprise pushed by dominant internal political players carefully anointed by geopolitically attuned external stakeholders, the quest could carry particular momentum.
The script, moreover, could change with such great convenience because arbitrariness was camouflaged as compromise. A decade down the line, the new constitution stood on the three pillars that were not part of the agenda of ‘People’s Movement II’.
If anything, the outcome has been dear and dreadful. New taxes have been levied to fund and facilitate additional layers of the federalism-driven political/administrative machinery, with little to show for the people, except percolation of political opportunism.
Secularism is being promoted as affirmative action for a religion that has been the farthest from our roots. Republicanism has spawned neo-royalism with a pomp and splendor beating the ancien regime.
In retrospect, the political class made a shrewd bet. Since the Nepali people went along with each compromise made to uphold the main – albeit tenuous – 12-point compact, they, too, became stakeholders. Ordinarily, corruption may be a bad word, but in context, its institutionalization is what lubricates the state machinery in a resource-strapped economy. Nepotism, too, is part of the manifestation of newness with Nepali characteristics. After all, preserving hard-won gains requires us to make hard choices.
But, alas, the world around us has a logic of its own. When they made investments, each external stakeholder was benign in its intention. When the time has come to claim their return, they have turned bold in their expectations.
The political class is anxious to hasten what is considers an inescapable breakdown. Since no one is prepared to take the fall individually, they seem intent on collective responsibility – evading it, to be precise.

Grossed Out By That Net Gain

If all official India can do these days on matters concerning Nepal is to ‘take note’, it has good reason. There seems to be no meeting point between the three broad strains of opinion. Restoration of the Hindu monarchy and statehood, the establishment of a Hindu republic and maintenance of the existing dispensation with enough tinkering to suit New Delhi are not ideas that can easily be reconciled into coherent policy.
So Nepalis are left scratching their heads over what the parade of former Indian ambassadors are saying about developments here. When the dean of that fraternity writes, we read. But Shyam Saran seems propelled by a higher urge. As foreign secretary during that tumultuous April 15 years ago, his sleight of hand led directly to the mess Nepal is in today. If the ‘Shyam Saran Doctrine’ has any connotation on this side of the border, it is hardly complimentary.
That awareness impels Saran to defend himself. “The abolition of the [Nepali] monarchy is a net gain for India and the government must firmly and unambiguously declare that it does not support the revival of the monarchy, which has already been rejected by its people,” he wrote the other day. Tempting as it is to contest that sentence at multiple levels, let’s desist and focus on the ‘net gain’.
Those two words let on more than what Saran might have intended. Just as King Gyanendra – in Maila Baje’s humble opinion – had no roadmap for Nepal when he took over full executive control on February 1, 2005, Saran’s prescription lacked focus. Intending to break a tightening deadlock, the monarch dared India to do the unthinkable: cobble together a coalition of the mainstream parties and the Maoist rebels. Saran took on that challenge firmly and faithfully.
Here’s a hypothetical. Saran arrived as ambassador in late 2002, after King Gyanendra had sacked the Deuba government the first time to begin the first phase of his direct rule. Nepal was unlike Indonesia, where Saran was serving as ambassador. Nor could his tenures in Mauritius and Myanmar be of much help. What did help him was an uncanny ability to sniff out information and act on it. During the second ceasefire and peace talks with the Maoists, Saran found himself quite busy tracking down sources and anything of substance. King Gyanendra, irked by Saran’s snooping around, was said to be quite straightforward with Saran about a newly reassertive palace’s intentions. Maila Baje guesses that the monarch – in his polished yet pointed style – put India’s ‘unofficial’ Nepal policy on the top of the agenda.
So, on the morning of February 1, 2005, when Saran had become foreign secretary, he was prepared to take on the monarch’s challenge. “[T]he monarchy in Nepal, at least since King Mahendra’s accession in 1955, has always tried to distance Nepal from India and promoted a nationalism which takes hostility to India as its main driver,” Saran wrote the other day. It is not unnatural for a smaller nation’s assertion of independence to be perceived as hostility by the bigger neighbor zealously intent on asserting its influence. Saran sought to perfect that sentiment into strategy and feels duty-bound to defend it.
Granted, Saran could be speaking about the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. A bitterly divided New Delhi could have gone along with Saran’s ploy of subcontracting Nepal policy to Sitaram Yechury et al. in exchange for their silence on the United States. How far Saran was committed to anything beyond a republican Nepal became immaterial because Prime Minister Manmohan Singh got parliamentary endorsement of the nuclear deal through legislative legerdemain. Since Yechury and Co. could still claim to have opposed the deal, they didn’t badger Saran or the Indian National Congress for duplicity. For us, the 12-Point Understanding was terrible enough. The departure from that document – which Saran precipitated – opened the Pandora’s Box even Girija Prasad Koirala had been warning us about.
So, was the abolition of the Nepali monarchy a net gain in terms of India’s new quasi-alliance with the United States? Under Bush Jr., Obama, Trump and now Biden, the optics seem good. But deeper down?
A ‘net gain’ for India in Nepal? If so, why is Saran so grossed out in the remainder of his article?

Everything Is Fair In Hate And Peace

Almost all of our democratically elected prime ministers have asserted their right to dissolve parliament as a matter of executive privilege. (And who knows what the prominent exception B.P. Koirala might have done by 1964 amid the deepening cracks in the Nepali Congress had King Mahendra not preempted him?)
It’s just that the incumbent has proved to be doubly zealous. So it is perhaps natural to expect the opposition to be equally faithful in their Newtonian fervor.
The escalating Covid-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s invocation of the elections in the United States and the razor-thin patience of Nepalis have made the political firmament bleaker. (Not to exempt all those pesky astrologers on YouTube.)
The presidency is in the worst shape. According to the dominant narrative, the institution was created because the palace was becoming too creative with Article 12. Yet we can’t stop heap scorn on a ceremonial head of state for rubber-stamping the premier’s fancies. Not to put too fine a point on it, everything in Nepal seems fair in hate and peace.
With weighty matters like citizenship being decided through ordinance, the presidency is bound to sink deeper into the morass along with the premiership. But, hey, maybe we can finally circle the square by completing the triangle: endorsement of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with the United States and enactment of the extradition treaty with China by decree.
At another level, it’s become fashionable to affirm that the 12-point process has come full circle. Yet that is being unfair. This is a case where one must defend that maligned accord/agreement/understanding or whatever else it was. The three pillars of our polity – republicanism, secularism and federalism – in no shape, manner or form resemble what the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoist rebels had undertaken to construct in November 2005. The fact that real architect couldn’t welcome the culmination of that process – the current Constitution – says enough.
Sure, politicos as distinct as Narayan Man Bijukchhe and Rajendra Mahato support President Bidya Bhandari’s decision, but they are few and far between. Anyway, they have their own reasons for doing so.
From outside the tent, King Gyanendra aimed some of his most blistering words yet against the political fraternity (assuming, again, if the tweet really is his).
On the far left, Netra Bikram Chand ‘Biplav’ party wants a referendum on abolishing the parliamentary system and the institution of a ‘progressive political system’ through national consensus (without elaborating on what such a system might be).
The right – far, near, and in between – sees in this sordid saga a justification for the restoration of the monarchy.
Still others blame the monarchy for mishandling things so bad over two and a half centuries that the people were forced to bring in a president to make things worse. For a change, we seem to have cut foreign powers some slack this time, given our urgent need for vaccines.
The moral of the story? Heck, who knows if there is any? Still, proffering one becomes incumbent in places like this one. So here it is: stick to the plan all the way through, no matter how nebulous. It may not work but still prove less fickle than public opinion and geopolitical equations.

Flashback: When History And Geography Collide

With Nepal on the cusp of the traditionally portentous month of Jestha, political battle lines of sorts have been drawn at the individual, institutional and international levels.
Fresh from an enthusiastic reception up north rejuvenation, President Bidya Devi Bhandari landed in a storm over her purported imperious ownership of the government while unveiling its annual program and policies. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, unable to comprehend what the hullaballoo was all about, left us scratching our heads.
He departed on a visit to Vietnam and Cambodia, countries that have little political, commercial or cultural relations with Nepal. To many of us, the trip makes sense only as part of Nepali leaders’ traditional political pilgrimages to our southern and northern power centers on the territories of their respective Southeast Asian confederates.
Oli’s Nepal Communist Party (NCP) has been able to put a lid on dissent. The latest step in the organization's inexorable unity drive has only served to widen internal fissures. Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ speaks or maintains silence based on personal calculations.
The main opposition Nepali Congress, for its part, is able to show signs of life only because of the listlessness of the ruling party. Its ‘awareness campaign’ may turn out to be an opportunity for the people to give the leaders an earful.  The smaller parties are united by little else than their antipathy for the Oli government.
Institutionally, too, the fluidity is becoming intense. The sour taste federalism has left in Nepali mouths has been aggravated by the tightening pinch in their pockets. Official state secularism has proved to be the best sponsor of Hindu revivalism. Cursorily, republicanism remains the strongest pivot of the tripod of Nepali newness. That, too, is wobbling under popular fascination with the comings and goings of the ex-monarch and the animation in broader royalist right. If the government feels compelled to think out loud about criminalizing demands for monarchism and Hindu statehood as anti-constitutional, it should give us a fair idea of the stakes involved.   
The broader international lineup is ominous, too. While much of the ‘democratic’ West is rooting for Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s defeat in the elections, traditional foe China joins long-time Indian ally Russia in longing for the reelection of the incumbent government.
There has been feverish speculation over the impact of Modi II on Nepal, ranging from restoration to Hindu statehood to a full-fledged return of constitutional monarchy. On the eve of the Nepali new year, soothsayers became so sonorous about the future of sanatana dharma that Prime Minister Oli felt compelled to denounce their participation in a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Nepal’s predicament is,  however, deepened by growing evidence that the Indian National Congress, too, is troubled by the way things have turned out here. In retrospect, the party astutely hedged its bets through the Karan Singh-Shyam Saran shtick in 2006 so as to revisit things with enough credibility over a dozen years later should Indian electoral realities and national interests warrant.
Our die-hard domestic votaries of the 12-Point Agreement aren’t giving up. It is significant that Baburam Bhattarai’s group’s unification with Upendra Yadav’s outfit and their revival of the 11-province-cum-presidential-system demand follows the visit of Shyam Saran. Admittedly, on the Nepali Congress side, Krishna Prasad Sitaula looks like a has-been. Yet you have to recognize the similarity of his voice to those of other leaders like Ram Chandra Poudel and Bimalendra Nidhi to grasp the revolutionary camp in that party fully. As they fight tooth and nail in defense of their baby, the Bhattarai-Sitaula duo can be expected to draw more extensive support.
How will things pan out when Nepal’s politically discredited albeit established history collides with the precariousness of its geography underscored by C.K. Raut? The fact that many Nepalis are praying rather than prognosticating provides a telling portrait of our plight.

Originally posted on Sunday, May 12, 2019

Compulsion Versus Choice

Deepak Manange (aka Rajiv Gurung) is too much of a human being not to have anticipated the public reaction his appointment as a provincial minister prompted. He must have prepared his response to us with some deliberation.
‘Politics is my compulsion, not choice’ may not be exactly what the Nepali people wanted to hear now. Such in-your-face demeanor has been Manange’s stock in trade. Bearing that sting, the important thing here is that Manange, with seeming effortlessness, deflected blame to our political culture, if not quite to the system itself.
To be fair, every Nepali regime has had its share of ruffians and louts who managed to leverage their brawn and brutality into political capital. The difference is that the Ranas and panchas did not flaunt much sense of impunity.
The regime leaders then protected their kith and kin fairly well – at times too well for our liking. As a general rule, though, the political class believed it was bound by the same rules that governed the rest of the people.
Now, having ‘emancipated’ the people from ‘tyranny’, our current crop of leaders can be expected to regard themselves as a class unto themselves. Incarceration and exile must stand for something. But expecting such treatment is not quite the same as asserting it as a matter of right.
Deep down, Nepalis understand that corruption is what lubricates the political machinery, especially amid the bedlam legitimized as democracy. A society deliberately splintered by those claiming to save it cannot expect its politics to remain untouched. It’s the end-of-history mindset gripping the ruling class that’s problematic.
If the price of nebulous newness is factionalism, then factions must reign over politics. With so many external state and non-state factors at play domestically, politicians must pretend to be for and against things at the same time. But even a professional contortionist has limits.
Popular allegiance – the ficklest of commodities during the best of times – oscillates with public attitudes toward personalities. And we are notoriously capricious when it comes to our likes and dislikes. Still, the people can’t be blamed for, say, failing to figure out who is justified in calling whom ‘lampasarbadi’ when that’s the default posture of the political class.
So when the going gets tough, it’s the toughies like Manange who get going. But, then, you’re forced to wonder: If every cabinet needs a don to survive, why isn’t the portfolio allocated commensurate with the urgency of the moment? Put differently, how is the youth and sports minister supposed to save Prithvi Subba Gurung’s government in Gandaki province except in ways we can’t fathom?
If Manange took the oath out of compulsion, maybe it’s incumbent upon the chief minister should explain why. Or perhaps Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli himself should clarify why his Unified Marxist-Leninist party backed Manange’s independent candidacy in the provincial elections. But, then, we crossed that bridge long ago, didn’t we?

Crossing Floors And Red Lines

If democracy is said to work best at the local level, it’s probably not because of the shockwaves it can send across national politics. What passed for an innate exercise in democracy in the legislature of the far-western province of Karnali the other day may not have passed muster with the average Nepali voter. It has turned the tables in Kathmandu in a way no one wants to ignore.
The party whip has long been considered an anachronism anyway. Flogging and flagellation just don’t stir up positive images and emotions in terms of maintaining party discipline. Moreover, if individuals can’t vote their conscience in this day and age, what good is our collective will?
So four Unified Marxist-Leninist blokes chose to cross the floor and save the Maoist Center government of Chief Minister Mahendra Bahadur Shahi. Hounded by the Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s faction, those four legislators were honored by the rival Madhav Kumar Nepal group. With the four subsequently expelled from the UML, Chief Minister Shahi rewarded three with ministerial posts.
The impact was immediately apparent. Having pinned down his party rivals wearing a grim smirk all the way, Oli suddenly felt compelled to place a call to Maoist Center leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal. Still recovering from how victory in the restoration of the House of Representatives boomeranged on his party and politics, Dahal recognized he had just regained the initiative.
While he accepted Oli’s phone call out of courtesy, the Maoist Center leader refused to meet the prime minister. Instead, he huddled with Madhav Nepal, after which both groups absented themselves from the all-party meeting Oli had convened.
Having seen him defy critics to survive this long politically, it would be foolhardy to suggest that the prime minister may have run out of options. His ostensible alliances with the extreme right and the extreme left have given him a wide enough berth. Many of Oli’s own methods have had the thinnest veneer of democratic propriety for him to rail against practices such as floor crossing. Yet Oli can count on popular apathy.
Few Nepalis have the willingness to consider the shenanigans in Karnali as anything but a crude power play. True, Nepalis have not lost faith in democracy. That’s only because that’s not an option. The ability of this political class to lead us in the right direction has eroded beyond the point of ineptness. Second-, third- or fourth-generation leaders have been so groomed and galvanized in the traditions of their mentors that they would be hard-pressed to let old habits die.
External stakeholders, for their part, are doing everything to establish the wisdom, cogency, and legitimacy of Nepal’s post-April 2006 course, knowing full well how off-course we have careened. If there were to be a course correction, no foreign power wants to forfeit the stakes it already holds to another power.
So forget floors or ceilings, the 12-point understanding is the red line no one’s supposed to cross. Lest we be tempted, external and internal handlers know when precisely to inject such issues as MCC, RAW and debt traps and rein us in.

Flashback: Go Your Own Ways For The Good Of All

We are permitted to anticipate enough good sense from the rival factions of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) to step back from the brink. But we are also prudent enough to face the inevitable.
The unification of the predominant Marxist-Leninist and Maoist factions of Nepal’s heavily splintered communist movement was artificial enough from the outset to expose its underlying unviability. If anything has been a surprise, it is that the NCP could maintain the subterfuge this long.
So, in that sense, another patch-up would only presage greater subsequent calamity. The NCP is top-heavy with bruised egos, burning ambitions and broad-spectrum bitterness to maintain the fiction of unity any longer. Allowing the party to split and politics to take its logical course may be the more judicious course.
There are apprehensions that a full-blown political crisis could sweep away the system. Such fears are not misplaced. In fact, they may be prescient enough. The ground has shifted significantly since the 12-Point Agreement was signed in India in late 2005, laying the foundations of the existing order.
The context should be more instructive for our purposes today. The Seven Party Alliance against the palace and the Maoist rebels reached the agreement on Indian soil at a time when a beleaguered royalist government’s assiduousness in breaking free from what it considered Indian duplicity morphed into a direct challenge to Indian and American regional interests in the so-called global war on terror.
Moreover, the reality that Washington and New Delhi were busy redefining their strategic relationship through a civil nuclear agreement under an Indian coalition government comprising a feisty communist partner served to facilitate a tacit and imprecise arrangement on Nepal.
China, exasperated by the royal government’s inability to stabilize the situation, recognized the perils of prolonged instability in Nepal to Tibet amid the Olympic Games it was organizing. Irrespective of how significant Chinese support for the royal regime was in the beginning, Beijing began making not-so-quiet noises about how the palace was exaggerating the extent of the backing.
That was music to Indian and American ears. New Delhi, Washington and Beijing came to a quiet understanding in early 2006 that would facilitate the implementation of the 12 Point Agreement. Still, they somehow seemed to let events on the ground define the specifics.
The outsized benefits China managed to reap in Nepal early on – without any investment, in New Delhi and Washington’s view – might not have been such a source of extreme consternation if geopolitics could stand still. As the three principal external stakeholders sought to stabilize their triangle amid newer entanglements, Nepali leaders enjoyed a wide berth to redefine the peace process by manufacturing more grievances than the people could sustain.
Today, each of the three external protagonists has recognized the futility of that accord in the changed circumstances. Our political class, meanwhile, has played the part so long that it has started to believe it has been in full control from the start.
Beijing has become a political intermediary in the ruling party’s affairs at a time when Washington and New Delhi are wariest of the mandarins in recent memory. The Nepali Congress is anxious for legislative endorsement of the US Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact as if those paltry billions stood between the nation’s life and death.
The government chose a time and manner to step up its claim to Indian-held territories and build massive national consensus wherein New Delhi has shed all qualms to dismiss an acknowledged bilateral dispute as a Chinese-instigated ploy. We have affirmed those territories in our coat of arms listed in an annex of a Constitution which, by most accounts, is gasping for breath.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli need not have squandered words on something so patently obvious as a concerted Indian campaign against his government in the aftermath of constitutional endorsement of Nepal’s new political map. His principal NCP rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal was even less warranted in having engaged in a such a discreditable attempt to shield New Delhi from growing demands for the prime minister’s resignation.
The unfortunate and even counterintuitive chain of events and analyses the two men have precipitated has tainted the political process amid a palpable but imprecise realignment of geopolitical equations.
Unfortunate as this confluence of internal and international dynamics is, we should not miss the bright spot. No new slogan, agenda or campaign can entice us into another nebulous promise of newness that fizzles into detriment and disappointment.
All forces across our political spectrum have been tried and tested for their purported decency and depravity. Now that Nepalis have recognized the expanse between those two extremes, we must learn to make do with what we have. Friends can be better friends – but they will never be one of us. As for enemies, we better start looking harder within and without.

Originally posted on Saturday, July 4, 2020

Chancing With The Stars

A tempest in a teapot it may not be, but our Unified Marxist-Leninists (UML) wallahs sure seem to be trying to make a little extra out of business as usual.
The UML’s Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal faction has decided to intensify its campaign to expand parallel committees in the party. All this is being done in the name of unity. The Vietnam War-era credo ‘you have to burn the village in order to save it’, seems to have acquired particular relevance from the other end of the ideological spectrum here.
An informal two-day meeting of lawmakers and central committee members of the UML’s Nepal-Khanal faction decided to implement the 17-point resolution adopted earlier by a meeting of national cadres.
Accordingly, the faction will continue its struggle inside the party by forming parallel committees to reorganize the party, strive for unification among communist forces, and not surrender to the incumbent leadership.
After the Supreme Court ordered the revival of UML and the Maoist Center, the Nepal-Khanal faction has been lobbying to legitimize party committees that existed on May 16, 2018, before the two parties merged to form the doubly dolorous Nepal Communist Party (NCP).
UML chairman Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, on the other hand, has consolidated power. The party’s central committee endorsed the parliamentary party statute to give him, as the PP leader, sweeping authority to recall any lawmaker elected to the House of Representatives under the proportional representation system and choose the deputy parliamentary party leader, a position Subas Nembang currently occupies.
The central committee meeting also decided to hold the party’s 10th national convention from November 18 to 22 and annulled all office-bearers’ positions except those of the chairman and the general secretary.
The duo is entrusted with selecting the new office bearers and the standing committee – in a thinly veiled attempt to emaciate the Nepal-Khanal faction. The party central committee decided to ask Nepal and three other parliamentarians to clarify their activities. Oli also inducted 23 Maoist leaders into the UML central committee, giving the prime minister a clear majority.
The Nepal-Khanal faction continues to demand that Oli revoke his decisions, which the party chair has rebuffed with equal vigor. The prime minister also said that the clarifications submitted by Madhav Nepal and Bhim Rawal were unacceptable and suggested the party could initiate further action against them.
Oli surrogates like Surya Thapa, the prime minister’s press adviser, have suggested that Nepal and Rawal be suspended from the party central committee for six months as part of a cleansing campaign.
With the party hanging perilously between unity and split, a countervailing dynamic is at play. Despite taking an increasingly harder line since the Supreme Court’s restoration of the House of Representative and the NCP’s nullification, he is reluctant to hound out his rivals at the cost of being responsible for a formal split. The Nepal-Khanal don’t want to be blamed for any split, either. So the UML essentially finds itself in a position it has been in for much of its existence.
With the Nepali Congress, Maoist Centre and Janata Samajwadi Party no less flustered on the eve of Nepali new year, however, perhaps our astrologers can serve up more exciting insights into what the stars might have in store for us. It’s not as if Nepalis, who hardly hold elected officials accountable, would serve summons to deficient stargazers.

A Hoax In Time

The signs were apparent in their conceptual and explicit manifestations alike. Here were the two dominant factions of Nepal’s awfully fractious communist movement – coming from vastly dissimilar schools, no less – in a headlong rush toward amalgamation.
Deftly deflecting us from the whys and hows, Unified Marxist-Leninist leader Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli and Unified Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ insisted on what they touted as a historical inevitability.
The commentariat uniformly considered it too good to be true. A few others didn’t shy away from declaring that it would be bad if it were true. Yet Oli and Dahal persisted over countless one-on-one sessions but let on precious little. Photographs showed them sipping tea and swapping tales. Nepalis were persuaded that this was a done deal. The only thing left was to figure out how to do it.
The bad blood between the two factions existed in its darkest hue. Yet key members of each faction – many as clueless as the rest of us – pushed for unification. It was thrust down our throats with a surfeit of zero-calorie sweeteners.
According to the prevailing narrative, the Chinese masterminded the unification for their political and strategic ends. If Nepalis could not produce our version of the Kim dynasty, we could put in power a communist government in perpetual majority. North Korea and Nepal needn’t be alike. Democracy promotion with Chinese characteristics had enogh local camouflage to contrast it favorably with western-inspired color-coded revolutions.
But, then, maybe the Indians were behind it all. Their 12-point agenda had gone through so many contortions that a majority government was the only saving grace. At least the 1990 Constitution had produced a majority government (even if it didn’t turn out to be a good omen).
Or was it the Americans? A two-thirds-majority endorsement of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact was within reach, despite the ruling party's perfunctory noises.
To stretch the story a bit, maybe a united communist party was the best way of containing China. Let’s not forget how the Indians and Americans portrayed the Chinese as driving the Nepali Maoists, only to see Beijing reap low-investment post-monarchy rewards in a way neither New Delhi nor Washington had anticipated.
When Messrs. Oli and Dahal finally came up with an extended unification plan to be formalized through a party convention, they couldn’t even get the new organization’s name right. They added the abbreviation to the party’s official name. Common parlance christened the new party ‘Double NeKaPa’.
That oversight became the butt of many jokes. In retrospect, it has become far more tempting to wonder whether our comrades had deliberated placed that as an escape clause. Power, pelf and patronage were too enticing prospects not to foist a hoax upon the country, especially when the Constitution specifically forbad a no-confidence vote for two years.
Politicians are what they are. How could the country go along with such a transparent sham? The question may have come too late for any redeeming value. Still, it’s becoming harder not to ask.

The Anticipation Behind Our Exasperation

With the Supreme Court’s resurrection of the House of Representatives last month, you’d think Nepalis should be well past viewing politics in the tragedy-farce-and-beyond sequence.
Let’s admit it; our collective exasperation also carries a dose of shared anticipation. It’s as if quirky Nepali politics has acquired a sensibleness of its own that does not cease to astonish our leaders and the led alike.
The narrative that the Supreme Court order represented a decisive – and even irretrievable – blow to Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli could barely last a week. Today’s prevailing line appears to be that, while not handing our premier an outright victory, the justices ended up cementing his position, as far as where he stood just before issuing the dissolution order.
The conventional wisdom, in a nutshell, appears to be that everything now depends on a formal split in the ruling Nepal Communist Party.
Ordinarily, such an unabashed declarative could have been easily cast aside as the fulmination of a conspiracy theorist or agent provocateur. But, as Nepali Netbook readers are often reminded here, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.
The political equivalent of that adage is that leaders have come to rely on the crystallization of any of the competing theories that may be in fashion at any given time. They still have to play the part of the primary drivers of our irremediable era of hope and change. Privately, they, too, want those alien forces who instigated them to break ‘old Nepal’ to own it.
Once you’ve figured that out, a lot more becomes clear. You can stop wondering how Oli rivals who today insist they always knew how nasty the prime minister is could once partner with him. The Nepali Congress’ nauseating eagerness/indifference on leading/joining a new government becomes more comprehensible. (As does party president Sher Bahadur Deuba’s affirmation that – as leader of the opposition – he is the prime minister in waiting, but isn’t actually lining up for the job.)
Heck, it even starts to make sense when a prime minister accused of taking a lurch to the extreme right suddenly pallies up with the most radical leftist force on our spectrum. (And rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ taking credit for an agreement signed by a government he castigates.)
Maybe our leaders are waiting for specific guidance from their respective external patrons, you might insist. Maybe. But let’s not forget the power of Nepali politics to confound foreigners. A prime ministerial aspirant to promises to lead a government India would feel ‘comfortable’ doesn’t exactly burnish credentials in New Delhi. The foreign powers that matter don’t seem to be able to think together or alone, much less act.
The proverbial snake, frog and scorpion abroad have to come out of this trance before our leaders can even sense a smidgen of succor.
Doing the same thing repeatedly to expect a different result may be a sign of insanity among our leaders, Baburam Bhattarai recently advised us, advancing that well-worn adage. For all the toil and turmoil of the last decade and a half, the people at least can try thinking up all possible equations ahead.
After all, who says you can’t apply logical reasoning to even the most ostensibly twisted logic?

Messing With Us – And More

Biplab Deb (left) and Amit Shah

Some Indian state chief minister jests that the former head of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) suggested two years ago that he planned to expand the party’s presence in Nepal and Sri Lanka, and that’s enough for our foreign minister to lodge a formal protest.
Come on. From the news footage, it’s clear that Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Deb bantered away that bit to rile up his base and butter up Amit Shah in the process. We may be less certain about the mood and motive of Shah, who now is federal home minister. Still, a second-hand slur is hardly tantamount to more than slander.
For Nepalis, the matter is more than something to laugh off – but not that much more. Aren’t some of our own parties already acting as if they are wholly owned subsidiaries of the likes of the BJP and the Indian National Congress?
And let’s not forget that our own Nepali Congress and original Communist Party were born in India. Moreover, don’t our major political parties have allied organizations in Indian cities?
Shah made the comment in 2018 as BJP president, when we had just elected a communist government close to enjoying a two-thirds majority. Opinion in India – political and public – evidently saw that as an advantage for China, largely because of the narrative New Delhi had promoted. The more militant sections of the ruling BJP were probably irate that the Indian National Congress and its buddies on the left had been responsible for the mess.
As it had just lost power, the BJP couldn’t do anything in 2005-2006. But surely it could certainly do something now, the rank and file probably wondered. Maybe Shah thought he had come up with the best response.
Two years later, did Chief Minister Deb just think of sharing that inside story? Not quite. In fact, the BJP may have strategically leaked the news to put some pressure on Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s government.
After all, we’ve heard how Oli set aside a more right-wing draft while addressing supporters in front of Narayanhity Palace earlier this month. If true, that move came after US Ambassador Randy Berry’s whirlwind briefings on the new American administration’s Nepal policy (something President Joe Biden probably still doesn’t know he has).
New Delhi expected Biden to be more assertive on human rights issues in India and wasn’t disappointed. Confronting the star power of the world’s Gretas, Rihannas and Mias in defense of India’s agitating farmers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government may have detected a less tenuous link to the new US vice-president’s niece.
The change of guards in Washington DC has resulted in steps toward disengagement along the India-China border, which many Nepalis expect to have a salutary effect here.
Suppose the BJP deliberately leaked this news as a warning to the Oli government to be mindful of Nepal’s immediate neighbors. In that case, our prime minister is certainly not thick-skinned enough these days to have let it pass. (And who has time for more than one Biplab at a time?)
But a formal protest? And we’re still wondering why Modi refused to meet Pradip Gyawali.

Buying Time And Getting By

Photo courtesy: Setopati.com

If you can alienate Chitra Bahadur KC and Keshar Bahadur KC with the same set of words and gestures, count yourself pretty successful.
Did Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli hype his Narayanhity appearance just to draw people? Nah. Maybe he was as clueless about the whole affair as the rest of us. Perhaps the prime minister had a few competing rough drafts and used the one he found good enough at the last moment.
To be sure, anti-republicans and anti-federalists ended up the most aggrieved while anti-secularists had some succor. In keeping Narayanity Royal Palace as the backdrop, Oli had anything between three and nine messages, pundits instantly proffered. The audience seemed far more confounded and conflicted.
So what really played out behind the scenes?
There is enough internal and external consensus that the status quo cannot continue. The notion that the country must revert to April 2006, too, seems pretty settled. What’s not is what we do once we’re back there.
Much has changed in the intervening decade and a half to make the revocation of republicanism, federalism and secularism easy. Each principal stakeholder within the country and outside wants to achieve that in a way that would be least damaging – if not most favorable – to its long-term interests.
Just consider how Oli has been read the riot act by the Indians, Chinese and Americans. New Delhi used its external spy agency, while Beijing deployed the military. Scrambling to maintain the initiative, the American ambassador engaged in a hectic Biden briefing even before the new president had assembled his South Asia team in Washington.
Domestically, anti-republicans are divided on the kind of monarchy to be restored but also who should occupy the throne. The anti-federalists are confused over modes of devolution and decentralization. The anti-secularists can’t figure out how expansive enough ‘Omkar Paribar’ is to cover the ground Nepal has traversed since the revocation of its official Hindu identity.
Comparatively, the elements of the original ‘three antis’ campaign – Mao Zedong’s 1951 drive – contained far more coherence (corruption, waste and bureaucracy).
Amid this turmoil, Oli had to do and say something – and he did. Maybe what had been hyped was indeed intended originally, but fell prey to dark machinations and maneuverings. Oli couldn’t have just called off the spectacle.
So the prime minister tried to make best use of the moment, at times crying and contradicting himself at others, but ultimately celebrating. He bought time for himself and the rest of us – even if we’re unsure how long.

Dilemmas Of Hindu Statehood

At least one reluctant ally turned outright critic has openly speculated that Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli might be on the verge of declaring Nepal a Hindu state later this week.
Now, we can all wonder why Surendra Pandey would wade into something that could actually shore up the prime minister’s constituency. Directly accusing Oli of conspiring to restore the monarchy might not have fared any better, considering the palpable national mood. At least, the Pushpa Kamal Dahal-Madhav Kumar Nepal faction would not be accused of being willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike.
For now, Pandey’s remark at a sit-in organized by the anti-Oli faction of the Nepal Communist Party has given the republican variant of Hindu statehood the most potent shot in the arm since the Universal Peace Federation-sponsored Asia-Pacific Summit in December 2018, known to us pejoratively as the ‘holy wine’ conference.
Not that Oli has been an innocuous onlooker in all this. Days after visiting Pashupatinath to perform a ‘special worship’, the prime minister announced the government was expediting the construction of a temple to Lord Ram in land he declared last year was the deity’s real birthplace.
Leaders close to Oli, too, have been claiming that he would deliver some extraordinary remarks during a mass gathering being organized by the Oli-led faction on February 5. The venue, moreover, is the road in front of Narayanhity, the former royal palace. The prime minister’s defense at the Supreme Court in the House dissolution case is being waged by a bevy of lawyers with overt royalist sympathies. And Water Supply and Sanitation Minister Mani Thapa inexplicably referred to ‘His Majesty’s Government’ during a speech, which his subsequent apology only helped fuel the frenzy.
Two years ago, ostensibly buoyed by the public’s revulsion at the government’s overt support of a controversial Christian organization’s initiative, Nepali Congress general secretary Shashank Koirala urged the nation to address the issue of restoring Nepal’s Hindu identify through a referendum. Tiptoeing around the monarchy may have made some sense then.
Although his comment was not new, it prompted Rastriya Prajatantra Party president Kamal Thapa to propose joint action with the Nepali Congress. A fortnight later, on the eve of the Nepali Congress’ crucial mahasamiti conference, the BJP lost key state elections seen as a bellwether for the 2019 national elections. Almost on cue, Koirala stepped in to clarify that he had never suggested that Nepal be declared a Hindu state again. In the changed atmosphere, Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s much-hyped trip to Janakpur became just another religious visit.
For his part, Thapa hasn’t quite budged from his announcement that the RPP would launch a decisive campaign for the restoration of Hindu statehood. To be sure, he finds himself in the perfect place. In power, the RPP was too inconsequential to make a difference. In opposition, it is too insignificant to heat up the streets. Thapa has acknowledged that the RPP blew the chance Nepali voters gave the party in the 2013 constituent assembly elections. In that sense, its debacle in the parliamentary elections 2019 was deserved. With other organizations taking to the streets with more specific slogans and programs, Thapa may be running out of time.
Still, keeping the Hindu statehood agenda alive helps Thapa keep his party alive. His advocacy of restoring the monarchy remains tepid, which gives Pashupati Shamsher Rana and his Rastriya Prajatantra Party faction solid points for political scrupulousness. Rana wants to redesignate Nepal as a Hindu state because an overwhelming part of the population professes the faith but retain the country’s republican character. Rana has since begun advocating a return to the monarchy but still believes someone other than ex-king Gyanendra would sit on the throne.
The Nepali Congress, however, has a more arduous job. Having helped to legitimize the Unified Marxist Leninists as well as the Maoists during the post-2006 years, the party was late in realizing that the communists no longer needed democratic crutches. Democratic socialism need not necessarily be incompatible with the overt espousal of Hinduism, as the Christian Socialists in Europe attest to.
Still, religion puts the Nepali Congress in risky territory. When the party remained wedded to constitutional monarchy, its link with Hinduism was ancillary. For a party that had to resort to the creative ambiguity of a comma in the 1990 Constitution on religion and statehood, a full-blown embrace of Hinduism would be, well, a giant leap of faith.
And we haven’t even started addressing the more elementary issues often recounted in this space. Can the mere fact that most Nepalis happened to be born Hindus be extrapolated to mean that the state’s character should be designated as such? Sure, most Nepalis are Hindus. But didn’t they vote resoundingly three times for parties explicit in their secular affirmation and orientation? And don’t officially atheist organizations today hold the largest number of elected seats?
Then, there’s the inevitable question of the monarchy. Granted, not every Hindu is a monarchist. (Nor can every secularist be deemed a republican.) But when you talk about the restoration of Hindu statehood, consider the individual/institution needed to officiate such a state. True, our presidents have presided over Dasain and other religious observances with admirable gusto. (Lately, the president and prime minister seem to have been carried away by their zeal.) But the president is doing so under a secular dispensation. A Hindu state would have very little room for either institutional tentativeness or the vagaries of an individual’s temperament.
By definition, a Hindu republic won’t have a king, who has traditionally solemnized Hindu statehood. We also would lack a bada gurujyu and mool purohit. We do have the mool bhatta at Pashupati, but, then, we already want someone more indigenous there, don’t we? A return to the 1990 constitution would solve those problems, but the Hindu republic votaries believe they have a catchy slogan that only needs a credible storyline.
 
This is an updated version of a post that originally appeared on Saturday, December 15, 2018.

Ambiguous, Yes – But For Whom?

For all the toxicity it has injected into our post-2006 political travail, one mystery persists around the 12-Point Understanding. Why did the two principal Nepali signatories, embarking as they were on an epochal exercise of national re-engineering, desist from issuing a single signed document in November 2005?
Now, the Maoists and elements of the erstwhile Seven Party Alliance have subsequently claimed that the ambiguity inherent in the substance and its dissemination was deliberate. It gave the rebels and the mainstream opposition parties enough flexibility to achieve the impossible: abolishing the monarchy.
Yeah, but that doesn’t quite cut it. The Indians, who had begun facilitating direct links between the two anti-palace forces long before the royal takeover, let the myth of an intrinsically Nepali-driven enterprise to persist. Only in January 2009 did Indian External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee take ownership of the accord.
The Indian military, we now understand, was against mainstreaming the Nepali Maoists at the monarchy’s expense. The External Affairs Ministry, which had been taking a relatively hard line against the palace, had come under the soft-spoken Prime Minister Manmohan Singh after the hawkish Natwar Singh was forced to resign in early November 2005.
As a former external affairs minister hailing from the Marxist-dominated West Bengal, Mukherjee was responsible for steering the Indo-US civilian nuclear deal (123 Agreement) through parliament. The Manmohan Singh government, already dependent on the Marxists for survival, needed ratification support. Was the empowerment of a consolidated left in Nepal the basic minimum price the Indian National Congress needed to pay for its budding strategic alliance with the United States?
Because of his influence and experience, it would be fair to say that Mukherjee was also de facto foreign minister at the time of the 12-Point Understanding and subsequent Karan Singh-Shyam Saran shenanigans. The anti-monarchy sentiments of Saran, another firm advocate of the civilian nuclear deal, were known long before he had left Kathmandu to become foreign secretary.
During those two tumultuous days in April, Prime Minister Singh’s absence on foreign visit allowed Mukherjee and Saran to employ the 12-Point Understanding’s ambiguity to pull Nepal back from its traditional twin-pillar policy on Nepal. No less significantly, it gave the Indian premier plausible deniability at a highly critical time.
By the time Mukherjee returned as foreign minister in October 2006, the Chinese had already stunned the Indians by their intention and ability to snuggle deeper into what was to become the federal and secular republic of Nepal, overtaking the terms of the 12-Point Understanding. Since the 123 Agreement had to be ratified, India needed its left alliance to continue scripting the show.
Prime Minister Singh’s broader administration couldn’t afford to take its gaze off the neighborhood’s long- term scenario. Might Mukherjee have gone on Al Jazeera television in January 2009 – months into Maoist Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s overt efforts to ingratiate himself to the Chinese – to take ownership of at least the idea of the 2005 understanding? In other words, was Mukherjee under pressure from the home team to ensure the Nepali signatories did not veer dangerously off track?
Consider this. Mukherjee’s interview was broadcast days before he took additional charge of the finance ministry. He would continue as foreign minister until May. However, the 123 deal had already been ratified through a legislative sleight of hand: the Singh government had won a confidence vote in July 2008 that was equated with legislative endorsement of the deal.
In the 2009 elections, the Indian National Congress won enough seats with ideologically more pliable allies to abandon the left, which had been trounced in the polls, anyway. Had it let Nepal drift within pragmatic limits too long to be able to fully control the departure? In any case, the dilemma of 2005-2006 had not entirely disappeared, as demonstrated by the reception King Gyanendra continued to receive in official New Delhi during ostensibly private visits.
Suffice to say that the Narendra Modi government inherited a Nepal policy it disliked but could do little about, given its own wider struggles with the intricacies of India’s much-vaunted strategic autonomy. Despite sustained political and punitive pressure, India couldn’t get a Nepali constitution it could live with. Over time, the headache called Nepal, at least for the more verbose Indian analysts and commentators, was worsening just as India was being forced to crane its neck in all directions.
To cut a long story short: maybe the ambiguity of the 12-Point Understanding was intended more for India’s benefit. Now that it is hurting them, are they looking for an escape route? If so, was the counsel by one S. Ramesh that it “might be smart for India to revisit its earlier doctrine of constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy and support the restoration of the 1990 Constitution” the first decibels of an impending din? Maybe the principal architect is now intent on holding our ruling class responsible for exceeding Delhi Compromise II’s brief? That would help explain the current antics of Nepali leaders.
And speaking of ambiguities, the author is identified as a former additional secretary with the Indian Cabinet Secretariat. Yet he seems to be so close to the 2005-2006 story in a way that only the S. Jairam of the Indian Embassy who won the fattest golfer title in the Soaltee Crowne Plaza Crazy Golf Tournament in early 2005 could have been. If it is indeed the same person, isn’t it odd that a reputable Indian daily would omit the writer’s obviously germane stint in Kathmandu?

All Together Now – In Amusement And Affliction

With the nation’s political discourse now resembling a kindergarten brawl, Nepalis may feel shoved toward reconciling with an ever-expanding abyss of oblivion. This degeneration could prove to be a turning point.
That Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ have tugged their respective factions along on a race to the bottom of invectives demonstrates that this has never been a battle of ideas. The main opposition Nepali Congress, already on an interminable search for relevance, remains unsurprisingly divided on the House of Representatives’ dissolution. The smaller constituents of the post-2006 political establishment, drinking from the same trough, could not have escaped the general malaise.
The Supreme Court has the difficult task of ruling on the constitutionality of what is a purely political issue: the inexorable conclusion of the extended experiment spawned by the 12-Point Understanding. Arguments in favor or against the prime minister’s dissolution order are masquerading as constitutional ones. But they cannot address the reality that the current dispensation is collapsing under its own contradictions. Regardless of how it rules, the judiciary is simply incapable of preventing the dénouement.
Our dominant political forces continued to invest too heavily in the 12-point enterprise far too long after its principal architect began reappraising its viability and value. The internal and external power alignments of 2005-2006 could not have continued long enough to permit an open-ended transition where Nepali actors could pretend to be in control.
Nor were their external patrons really in charge. Domestic actors may have made themselves available to new permutations and combinations, but a decade and a half was more than enough to exhaust sponsors working at cross-purposes. The Chinese couldn’t keep intact the communist party they helped unify. The Americans couldn’t get their MCC compact endorsed by the legislature. The Indians couldn’t prevent the incorporation of a new Nepali political map into the country’s constitution. (How did we get the Soviets, American/British and Indians to build the East-West Highway, while disinviting the Chinese without upsetting them too much?)
To be sure, there is a danger inherent in today’s deepening popular apathy amid a palpable aimlessness. Nepalis recognize that every system of governance has been tried and tested. They also know that the principal national forces still have not mustered the will or wherewithal to join hands. Nepalis may not have acquired the audacity of attempting to lead their leaders. However, they are intent on ensuring those leaders act as Nepalis first.
Clearly, the dissolution of parliament was an inevitability. Its judicial reinstatement cannot restore the status quo ante. Nor can new elections address the systemic ailment. Dangerous as the unknown may be, enduring it may have become our only option. The internal and external churning processes are so intertwined that even a semblance of steadiness may be years away.
In retrospect, the political class did make a shrewd bet. Since the Nepali people went along with each compromise made to uphold the main – albeit tenuous – 12-point compact, they, too, were deemed stakeholders. When that turned out to be a faulty premise, the political class became anxious to hasten what it considered an inescapable breakdown. Since no one is prepared to take the fall individually, they seem intent on collective responsibility.
Political jabs and jokes can perhaps make life more bearable for the people in the interim, provided we’re not too fixated with afflictions and amusement.