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.