All In It Together – In Life And Death

The silver jubilee of the eruption of the ‘people’s war’ provided an opportunity for its erstwhile supreme commander to shed some more light on the shadier parts of the saga.
Addressing a special function at Nepal Communist Party headquarters in the capital to commemorate the anniversary, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, among other things, sought to explain how the Nepali Maoists could have perished the way of their Peruvian counterparts had they not chosen to land safely in the peace camp a decade later.
While illustrating the contradictions of the period, Dahal recounted how Nepali Congress titan Girija Prasad Koirala would regularly suggest the Maoists to carry out major attacks against state installations. “We were in regular contact, almost every day,” Dahal told the audience, adding: “To my bewilderment, he used to provoke me to launch military attacks on district headquarters.”
Predictably enough, that remark infuriated the opposition Nepali Congress. How dare Dahal seek to tarnish the reputation of a man who dedicated his life to peace and democracy, party spokesman Bishwa Prakash Sharma roared in an official statement. Nepali Congress leader Shekhar Koirala – who was reputedly clued in on his uncle’s interactions with the Maoist chief – condemned Dahal’s remarks as ‘reckless and deplorable’.
Amid the brouhaha, Baburam Bhattarai – Dahal’s one-time deputy and chief propagandist – said the former Maoist supremo was exaggerating things. Girija Prasad Koirala had only urged the Maoists to escalate attacks against the state to thwart the undemocratic elections the royal regime was pushing through. In other words, destruction for democracy.
So, what’s going on here? Would Dahal speak ill of the dead just for the fun of it? True, the dead can’t be slandered. On the other hand, Dr. Bhattarai’s clarification presupposes some element of truth in Dahal’s assertion. And truth is the best defense when it comes to defamation.
Once again, the ball is in our court. The people need to put things in context against the public record. By his own later admission, Girija Prasad masterminded the hijacking of a Royal Nepal Airlines plane from Biratnagar to Forbesgunj and the looting of Indian Rs. 3 million in state funds in 1973.
The Nepali Congress made attempts on the lives of kings Mahendra and Birendra and continues to honor the executed would-be assassins as martyrs. Dahal – like the rest of us – recognizes that the Maoist ‘people’s warriors’ and the Marxist-Leninist headhunters never quite reached that level of dastardly audacity.
Dahal may not always choose his words carefully. But he does know how to put even bad ones to good effect. Consider his plight today. The one-time Fierce One has become a subject of either ridicule or pity. He celebrates the anniversary of a ‘people’s war’ conducted by a party that no longer exists. He does so as co-chair of a party that feels so uncomfortable that the other co-chair – the sitting prime minister – feels compelled to stay away.
Dahal’s peers within the power structure want to blame him for the ills of a system doddering before our eyes, while erstwhile allies outside accuse him of betraying the revolution. But, as his speech in Gorkha the very next day seemed to suggest, he won’t be the fall guy. They are all in it together – in life and in death.

The Art Of Faking It

If the recent central committee meeting of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) was indeed a blow to Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli, the other party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ is strenuously trying to show that he isn’t the beneficiary.
Buoyed by the election of loyalist Agni Sapkota as speaker of the House of Representatives, Dahal seems content with the reconfiguration of NCP equations. For how long, though? It’s not as if sharing the party leadership with Oli is anything akin to replacing him as premier.
Oli doesn’t look or sound like a broken man, according to many who have met him after the crucial NCP meeting. Things are good and are about to get better, the prime minister appears to suggest. Barriers have been broken, and national energies are being unleashed. If no one else can see this, well, he’s not the nation’s chief ophthalmologist.
Dahal, for his part, doesn’t seem to want to rock the boat – yet – if his subdued comments are any indication. In a speech in Kathmandu the other day, the NCP co-chair conceded that the Oli government’s claims about its performance were at wide variance with the people’s perceptions.
But he was careful to qualify that criticism – if it even did amount to one. “Our intention might not be ill, we might have tried to do something good,” Dahal said before going on to explain that motives ultimately didn’t mean much to the people. This was a good time for introspection, Dahal said, especially since being communists did not automatically guarantee the people’s trust.
While he poked fun at Oli’s short-necked fiddle show he happened to miss, Dahal was careful to maintain that it was not out of malice. He was too busy with party work.
As with that fraternity pretty much everywhere, you can’t really tell what’s going on among our comrades. If they could fake unity well enough to win an electoral landslide, what makes us think that they are bad at feigning discord and division?
It’s hard to put a mathematical framework to factionalism where neither ideology nor loyalty are fixed quantities.  For all the gains Madhav Kumar Nepal is supposed to have made in the party, can we be sure how that might impact Dahal – or Oli, for that matter – especially in view of the gaping holes in the Lalita Niwas corruption case that are growing bigger?
Anyone with a passing acquaintance with Bam Dev Gautam’s politics knows that his empowerment as NCP vice-chair changes a lot. Still, can we contend with that fact without factoring in the wild card called Jhal Nath Khanal? Narayan Kaji Shrestha’s election as a member of the upper chamber is just one of the myriad imponderables.
It’s hard enough to keep up with the frequency and swiftness with which ex-Maoists are joining hands with ex-Unified Marxist-Leninists and vice versa without the capriciousness of it all. And if it’s any consolation, those inside the NCP are as bewildered as those of us on the outside. Our comrades must be happy to have the MCC Compact and other subjects to camouflage their real disarray.

Stubborn Watchdogs Amid Sinister Shadows

As a nation, we didn’t have a decent 2019. Our freedoms came under attack as the government proposed laws to restrict the right to freedom of expression and subject civil society organizations to greater restrictions. For Nepalis, Amnesty International only states the obvious. The rest of world may not know and should.
“Over the past year, we have seen the country increasingly resort to repressive methods to restrict freedoms. Journalists were arrested simply for doing their jobs, singers were imprisoned solely for the content of their songs, and civil society came under greater pressure,” Biraj Patnaik, South Asia Director at Amnesty International, was quoted as saying in a news release on the organization’s ‘Human Rights in Asia-Pacific: Review of 2019’ report.  Any Nepali could have strung together those sentiments into intelligible sentences, even if not so engagingly.
“The government has also failed to deliver on truth, justice and reparations for thousands of victims of crimes under international law and other serious human rights violations committed during the decade-long armed conflict. Migrant workers, a source of prized remittances, were not protected from abusive recruitment practices. And many people who lost their homes during the 2015 earthquake were no closer to finding permanent shelter.” Yeah, well, Patnaik sums up the year we lived through.
Details such as how laws like the Electronic Transactions Act 2006 were used to arbitrarily arrest journalists and artists or how three proposed bills on the media council, mass communication and information technology would further restrict the right to freedom of expression add urgency to the affair and amplify it for the widest possible audience.
Amnesty’s references to proposed amendments to legislation that would undermine the independence of the National Human Rights Commission and a new law that would restrict the activities of civil society organizations and subject them to more stringent monitoring cannot be good auguries for the new year and beyond.
“The new bills proposing restrictions on freedom of expression will damage Nepal’s regional reputation and violate its international obligations. These bills must be withdrawn or amended immediately to ensure that no one in Nepal is punished for what they peacefully say or write,” said Patnaik.
Now, that’s where we need to pause. Amnesty International overlooks one crucial fact: that 2019 was also the year when Nepal sunk deepest ever in the mire of the raging Sino-American rivalry. And in such a situation, reputation tends to vary with the predilections of the beholder. Nepal’s performance on the US Millennium Challenge Corporation scorecard underscores a priority widely at variance with that of Amnesty International. The Chinese, for their part, won’t say what they think, unless they really think they have to say it.
With such divergent priorities and preferences, you will always have different ways of looking at things. When Nepal can’t figure out its place and posture in the emerging world order, how can you expect us to please Amnesty International?
And Transparency International’s Corruption Index? How do you think a poor country is supposed to oil the wheels of its great federal democratic republican secular juggernaut? Are Nepalis really so fed up with democracy? Not if you ask the architects of our change, here and abroad. We’re still a beacon to the world.
Truth, justice and reconciliation may be building blocks for sustainable peace and development elsewhere. Our leaders perceive them as perilous threats to the political consensus we so urgently need to keep afloat. The watchdogs can bark all they want – and God bless them for doing so – but we’re firmly marching on our path – even if we don’t know where it will take us.

We All Have Our Jobs To Do

A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic. Uncle Joe had advised us of the degrees of decease in the revolutionary scheme of things way back in 1947. Or at least that’s what that bloke called Leonard Lyons of The Washington Post quoted the Soviet dictator as saying then. While we can quibble over the accuracy of the attribution, our own Agni Prasad Sapkota is living the adage.
Days after the supreme commander of the erstwhile Maoist People’s Liberation Army, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, accepted responsibility for 5,000 of the 17,000 deaths inflicted by the decade-long insurgency, Sapkota became the unanimous choice of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) to become the next speaker of the lower house of parliament.
The decision created a new stalemate. Civil society, human rights activists and conflict victims have taken to the streets to protest the ruling party nominating someone accused of murder for such a dignified position in the state. A murder case was filed against Agni Sapkota by the wife of Arjun Lama in the Supreme Court in 2011, where the case is subjudice.
NCP general secretary Bishnu Poudel, however, defended the party secretariat’s decision to propose Sapkota and rebuffed all charges against him as baseless. “There is no case pending against Sapkota. He is an eligible candidate for speaker,” Poudel was quoted as saying in published reports. “He is an elected people’s representative who served as minister twice in the past.” Sapkota also won all three national elections since the Maoists joined the mainstream in 2006, Poudel might have added.
Now senior advocate Dinesh Tripathi has filed a writ petition demanding that the Supreme Court order not only a halt to the election but also to arrest Sapkota. Activists will agitate as long as they can, while Sapkota and his supporters will continue to reject any suggestion of disqualification. Given that the NCP almost split over the candidacy of the next speaker – with the former Maoist faction insisting that it should retain the speakership following Krishna Bahadur Mahara’s exit in infamy – Dahal is taking a victory lap.
You could argue that Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli may have accepted Sapkota, after pressing for months the candidacy of his Marxist-Leninist ally Subash Chandra Nemwang, in the knowledge that the murder accusation would continue to encumber the ex-Maoists.
Theoretically, the NCP’s numbers in the house virtually assure Sapkota’s ascension. The main opposition Nepali Congress hasn’t made loud noises on Sapkota’s candidacy. What’s more, it did not field a challenger to Sapkota and is unlikely to contest the post of deputy speaker. The inside story is that the development is part of a larger deal between Oli, Dahal and Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba on transitional justice and who knows what else?
Congress leaders privately concede that, in return, Deuba expects a stronger voice on the Constitutional Council, where he sits as the leader of the opposition, in such crucial appointments as ambassadors and officials of constitutional bodies. The unspoken imperative is the Nepali Congress’ eagerness to have parliament endorse the Millennium Challenge Corporation agreement at the earliest.
Publicly, the erstwhile UML strand in the NCP will emphasize the imperative for unity during these critical times for the nation. How far Sapkota’s speakership will go in appeasing the ex-Maoists is as unclear as its potential to fan discontent among former UML members wary of Dahal’s growing clout in the unified party. Oli’s own failing health can only heighten apprehensions and anticipation of a new front in the broader CPN power struggle.
It would be imprudent to rule out Oli’s ability to astonish us. Depending on what legal course the Sapkota case takes, Nemwang could yet seize the spotlight. He could plausibly play up the pretense of having joined the ex-Maoists to gain the speakership, should that office fall vacant again. (We still do marvel at his ability to pull off that ‘magna carta’ trick – complete with secularism – in 2006 without anyone else in the interim parliament or outside knowing how.)
Or Nemwang could leverage his experience of having presided over two constituent assemblies consecutively to make a bid for the premiership. We all have our jobs to do.

Stepping Up And Back

Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, former supreme commander of the ‘People’s Liberation Army’, has publicly assumed responsibility for the deaths of 5,000 of the 17,000 people killed during the decade-long Maoist insurgency. And everyone seems to be up in arms.
“I take responsibility for both the good and the bad that took place [during the ‘people’s war’. I am not shying away from that,” Dahal declared at a function organized in Tundikhel – the most public of the capital’s public places – by the Tharu Community to mark the Maghi Festival. “But the blame should not be placed on me for the things that we did not do.”
Was Dahal carried away by a level of confidence borne out of a favorable balance of power emerging within his Nepal Communist Party (NCP)? Was he no longer able to contain the ghosts of the ‘people’s war’ haunting him incessantly deep within? Was his declaration part of a carefully crafted effort to influence the much-delayed transitional justice process? Or was the NCP co-chair just messing with us?
It’s a free country and everyone can have a take from every angle. Daman Nath Dhungana laments that Dahal chose to speak at Tundikhel something he should have said in a duly constituted truth and reconciliation commission. As a prominent mediator/facilitator between the state and the rebels during the height of the insurgency, Dhungana certainly has a stake in this.
Baburam Bhattarai, on the other hand, contends that culpability in conflict-era deaths cannot be divvied up. Easy for him to say. Unlike Dahal, he was a pen-pusher during the insurgency who has since graduated to tweeting.
Only Dahal knows what he knows. Intended or otherwise, though, he has subsumed the truth, reconciliation and transitional justice processes into the wider contest of victimhood our national conversation has stalled into.
The political parties, security agencies and former monarchy will no doubt seek to sort out their place in the culpability list. Out of the 5,000 deaths Dahal accepts, which ones weigh the heaviest on the blameworthiness scale? Victims on whom the Maoists inflicted the most pain before their souls departed? Within that cohort, whose suffering takes precedence? Those whose limbs went out before their lives did?
As we go down the hierarchy, where do those rank whose hearts just stopped beating amid the general pressures of the times? Do the dead insurgents who the fleeing rebels beheaded on their way out of the battlefield to evade identification come under the 5,000 or 12,000 column?
It is a telling commentary on our state of affairs that Dahal has been reduced to making such statements today. There was a time, after all, when much of our vaunted civil society was almost sanctifying the blood spilled by the Maoists as a hallowed act against royal feudalism. What other recourse did disadvantaged, dispossessed and desolate Nepalis have?
Time has shed much light on the ‘people’s war’ – particularly its external dimensions – which has only been amplified by the political course the country has taken in its aftermath. This is not necessarily to Dahal’s detriment, though. Maybe next time the erstwhile Maoist supremo should declare that he was merely following orders – from abroad.