Out of the Shadows, Finally

It feels good to finally come out. I’ve been tempted to do so several times over the last decade and a half. The shades just seemed too soothing. I chose this nom de guerre before I’d decided what I’d call my blog. Relatively new, the blogosphere beckoned with all its breeziness. A notebook on Nepal on the net. Bingo.
King Gyanendra’s royal rule was at its toughest. The Seven Party Alliance and the Maoists had signed the 12-Point Understanding but so much was unclear. Geopolitics, public opinion, hope, despair—the imponderables were too many. Powerful as the royal regression narrative was, I never bought it—and still don’t. 

Our triangular fight had become too drawn out for anyone’s good. I don’t think King Gyanendra had any specific plan when he took over on February 1, 2005. He wanted a realignment of forces into a bipolar one, and thought he could pull it off. If not, well, others were free to try. They did and here we are.

I’d been defending the royal takeover in that spirit, drawing all the venom I expected to. I’d been defending the royal takeover in that spirit, drawing all the venom I expected to. There seemed so much going on that seemed so unreal. Yet, a lot of what seemed to be going on seemed too real to discount... Read more at nepalitimes.com: ‘Maila Baje’ is Sanjay Upadhya

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.