The Government We Deserve…

Candor is not uncharacteristic of Dr. Baburam Bhattarai when it comes to public pronouncements. It’s just that our former prime minister usually trains it on those governing us.
This time he has challenged the governed to assume our portion of culpability for the rampant malgovernance we have been complaining about.
Paraphrasing words variously attributed to the likes of Joseph de Maistre and Alexis de Tocqueville, Dr. Bhattarai ostensibly limited his remarks to the ongoing clean-up campaign in and around the Ring Road. (Don’t expect the government to keep picking up every cigarette butt you abandon, or something.) His colleagues in the political fraternity are probably relieved that someone has finally told us as it is.
Granted, it is difficult to acknowledge – much less appreciate – the exasperation collectively gripping our political class. After all, we choose them to do what they promise to do and pay them quite decently for trying. In addition, our taxes fund their housing, travel, communication and everything else they need to do their job properly.
Top, mid-level and rookie leaders alike prosper in the public limelight to the point that many end up making a career out of public service. If brickbats happen to exceed the bouquets they get, it’s more than likely because they aren’t doing a wonderful job.
Consider things from the politicians’ point of view, though. Sure, voters elect them to do their assigned job. But what kind of job is it? It’s hard to be held accountable to specific and binding pledges when the electorate doesn’t know what it wants. Over the last seven decades, we’ve been struggling to figure out the political system we can live with. In the national trial-and-error mode, maybe the best politicians can do is try and err?
Today a unified communist government enjoying a two-thirds majority in parliament can’t seem to sustain the republican, federal and secular edifice that is new Nepal. We can blame Oli, Dahal et al all we want for this sordid state of affairs, but they can take only their share of the responsibility.
For every egghead who saw in this three-pronged prescription a cure-all for our accumulated ills, there was another who counseled extreme caution. Yet newness was so eclectic a proposition that we missed it nebulousness. If Dr. Bhattarai has been able to establish himself as the prime sustainer of the eternalness of newness, it’s because our entrenched perplexity has allowed him to shift the goalposts with utmost ease.
It took a decade and two constituent assemblies for our political class to produce this constitution. We may not have names and capitals for every province yet, but we do have a basic law that seems to be functioning amid all the domestic acrimony and geopolitical jockeying.
Instead of contemplating ways of doing things better, many of us are having second thoughts about the very enterprise. Callous as they might seem, the political class can’t call us out. So they are going through the motions: internal party conferences, external war of words and inelegant pledges to perform better.
No, our politicians don’t have the temerity to request hardship allowances and probably never will. A little appreciation would be nice, though.

Antsiness In An Unsettled Arena

It started all over again with an innocuous dance.
Former king Gyanendra Shah took some time to sway in mirth and merriment at what he considered was a private party. The management of the restaurant where the family gathering took place chose to release a few pictures.
Nepal Communist Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ wasn’t too thrilled by the ex-royal motions. Unable to shield himself from the splatters of derision and mockery provoked by a government his party predominates, Dahal saw a conspiracy of sorts.
Public response to Dahal’s reaction probably forced the ex-Maoist supremo to wonder why chose to speak at all. If a federal and secular republic of Nepal couldn’t withstand a few gyrations by its last monarch, perhaps it is the fault of new Nepal’s architects.
The Vivah Panchami celebrations in Janakpur attended by India’s most vocal advocate for the restoration of the monarchy and Hindu statehood in Nepal, the anti-republic slogans raised by supporters of the former king at Pokhara airport and the signature campaign in favor of Hindu statehood at the Nepali Congress mahasamiti meeting provided the background for claims of a vast right-wing conspiracy. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli, under fire within his own party for hobnobbing with a controversial Christian organization, warned the ex-king to, so to speak, curb his enthusiasm.
If Oli was tepid in his admonition, it was probably because he is the only person party rival Madhav Kumar Nepal could credibly accuse of being pro-monarchist. (Remember that episode when Nepal cut short a foreign visit after learning that Oli had met the then monarch in what was seen as an effort to legitimize the first royal takeover. Nepal’s ‘offense’ was that he merely applied for the premiership as common candidate of the agitating parties.)
Never one to let go of an opportunity, Kamal Thapa of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal sought to burnish his monarchist credentials after having let the Hindu-statehood part of his dual agenda predominate. After meeting with the former king in Pokhara, Thapa declared that the agitation his party had already announced for February would now include the restoration of the monarchy.
Gesticulations in and around the crucial Nepali Congress meeting prompted Dahal to remind the party of its three illustrious premiers’ commitment to secularism. Bisweswar Prasad, Girija Prasad and Sushil Koirala all took religion out of the politics they preached and practiced. What were today’s Congressis smoking? Dahal’s gambit fell flat on Nepali Congress secularists, who seemed fonder of the Koiralas’ staunch anticommunism. The party’s spokesman retorted that the Nepali Congress didn’t need lectures on religion from communists.
The death of Tulsi Giri while the Nepali Congress was engrossed in its conference gave that party a respite from an uncomfortable situation. A former Nepali Congress stalwart, Giri served three monarchs during the height of their assertiveness. Ideologically and temperamentally, he was more monarchist than those monarchs. As head of government, Oli offered his condolences on the passing of a predecessor. But Giri had preemptively declined state honors, cementing defiance as part of his legacy.
As we move ahead, Oli’s outreach to the Americans amid this tumult remains a key imponderable. First, it’s unclear who reached out to whom. If the Americans want Nepal’s help on North Korea – and assuming we can do something – that’s Madhav Nepal’s province, counting the number of times he has visited Pyongyang. If Oli wants to empower Madhav Nepal, it would be merely to emaciate the Dahal-Bam Dev Gautam alliance. Our prime minister realizes that it is best to let the wider geopolitical ramifications to play out among the principal external protagonists.
The fact that India and China haven’t reacted significantly to the American outreach doesn’t mean they are apathetic. The United States may consider Nepal an important component of its Indo-Pacific strategy, but New Delhi and Beijing won’t be distracted from the Quad, ASEAN and the vast expanse of salt waters. This reality dawned on Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali who sought to parse the US State Department’s official tweet after his meeting with Secretary Mike Pompeo into the geographical and strategic dimensions of the term ‘Indo-Pacific’.
For our immediate neighbors, the immediate interest here has been and always will be Tibet. So, any Indian and Chinese response – individual or collective – to the latest American overtures will be tailored to exigencies in the context of the advancing age of the 14th Dalai Lama. Ironically, Washington’s erratic policies have encouraged Beijing and New Delhi to work toward stabilizing bilateral relations as far as Tibet goes.
What all this suggests is that nothing is settled here. We can continue searching but we won’t get it without knowing what it is that we want, regardless of our jives, jibes or jinks.

Dilemmas Of Hindu Statehood

The momentum the Hindu statehood agenda seemed to have gained against the backdrop of the Universal Peace Federation-sponsored Asia-Pacific Summit at the beginning of the month slackened with the defeat of India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in key state elections.
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 referendum.
Although his comment was not new, it prompted Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal 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 next year’s 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.
Thapa, for his part, hasn’t quite budged from his announcement that the RPPN would launch a decisive campaign for the restoration of Hindu statehood. To be sure, he finds himself in the perfect place. In power, the RPPN was too inconsequential to make a difference. In opposition, it is too insignificant to heat up the streets. Thapa has acknowledged that the RPPN blew the chance Nepali voters gave the party in the 2013 constituent assembly elections. In that sense, its debacle in the parliamentary elections last year was deserved.
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.
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 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, 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 the majority of 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 start talking about the restoration of Hindu statehood, you have to consider the individual/institution needed to officiate such a state. True, our presidents have presided over Dasain and other religious observances with admirable gusto. (This year, the president and prime minister seemed 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.
A Hindu republic by definition 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? Maybe Yogi Adityanath chose to be circumspect for reasons other than Indian state election results.

Flashback: What’s Leaving Left Unity Behind?

From the way things are going, it sure does look like ethereal elements are trying to prevent the unification of our United Marxist-Leninist (UML) and Maoist factions into that single imposing communist party.
Unity looked like a done deal before last year’s landmark elections. Nepali voters were so impressed by the idea that they preemptively endorsed the effort.
There was some logic there. If Nepal was to proceed irreversibly along the lines of republicanism, secularism and federalism, why not let its organic advocates lead the way? The Maoists articulated the three-pronged agenda most effectively and almost singlehandedly achieved it. After they grew out of their obsession with emulating the Great Helmsman all the way to state capture, a turning point was inevitable.
The Marxist-Leninists, for their part, had given only qualified support to the 1990 Constitution. But they had not given up on people’s multiparty democracy. Moreover, that notion had a more benign ring to it than, say, people’s war. If the new order provided such fertile ground for both, why bother why the once-bitter rivals really decided to join hands.
Alas, if only logic dictated Nepali politics. Today, both sides insist that the Baisakh 9 deadline was never written in stone. Leaders of both parties certainly didn’t sound tentative when they were touting the date till the very end. More seriously, though, they are shifting the goalposts. While senior leaders are giving the impression that they are merely ironing out minor details, their surrogates point to something more pernicious afoot.
UML leader Keshav Badal put things quite vividly the other day. “Opponents of unity are importuning Goddess Dakshinkali, ready with their sacrificial black goat.” But all Badal could do after that was to assure us that unity was unavoidable. Critics of both parties such as Mohan Bikram Singh, too, see a web of national and international conspiracies.
Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba, facing the most serious challenge to his leadership, has begun warning of the emergence of a new totalitarianism. Far from a shriek of desperation, Deuba’s warning sounds like a full-fledged rallying cry. If the Nepali Congress is good at anything, it is at fighting totalitarianism (as long as it’s not within the organization).
In the wider neighborhood, the Indians believe they embraced Prime Minister K.P. Oli tightly enough to have adequately tamed him. The Chinese must be having much more than passing interest in what actually might have transpired between Oli and Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their one-on-one session.
How successful was Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali in assuring Beijing of Kathmandu’s continuing commitment to its northern engagement? That would depend on how soon Oli ends up visiting China. If early reports trickling out of the Chinese capital are to be believed, Beijing has told us that henceforth it would take into consideration New Delhi’s sensitivities before making investment decisions in Nepal.
The impact of the Modi-Xi Jinping talks in Wuhan will no doubt play out here with its own ebullient rationality. If Oli happens to find himself playing host to Modi in Kathmandu before any northern sojourn, well, that’s for then.
For now, official Beijing has reverted to praising the virtues of trilateral cooperation, while the Indians still can’t stop thinking out aloud how they can beat China in Nepal. Maybe they’ve figured out one way.

Originally posted on Sunday, April 22, 2018

When The Gods They Create Fail

Aung San Suu Kyi

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

All Together Now?

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

When It’s All About Looking Busy

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

Hold The Applause – And Affronts

This hasn’t been a good time for India’s geo-strategists appraising their recent ebullience.
Consider the latest confluence of events. US President Donald J. Trump turns down an invitation to attend India’s Republic Day celebrations as the chief guest, as Japan and China step up cooperation on Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative all but in name, and Sri Lanka’s supposedly India-friendly president sacks the prime minister to appoint a known hawk vis-à-vis New Delhi.
In the general tumult, it is easy to miss the import of the declaration by our Deputy Prime Minister, Ishwar Pokharel, in the Chinese capital that Nepal would never again have to endure an Indian blockade because of the new connectivities established up north.
True, the Indian news media are covering Trump’s latest decision with careful caveats. Somebody somewhere in Washington DC said something about this to someone high up in New Delhi. Regardless, the message is unambiguous. You can’t hobnob with the Russians, Chinese and Iranians at the same time and expect to get away with it – not in Trump’s America. When strategic autonomy keeps looking and sounding like unadulterated Nehruvian sanctimony, America can still act.
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, for his part, seems to have taken a leaf from the Indian playbook. Sure, Tokyo is locked in an inexorable grand contest with its traditional rival, but China is also a neighbor geographically closer to Japan than India is. If economic cooperation with Beijing can help Tokyo manage its political disputes, maybe the BRI shouldn’t be deemed as dangerous as, say, the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. Moreover, it’s not as if Japan is going to drown in Chinese loans anytime soon. Of course, Abe didn’t say that to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi during their meeting in Tokyo, a day after Abe returned from China.
Closer to home, when news reports surfaced a couple of weeks ago that Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena had accused India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing, of plotting to assassinate him, everyone expected Sirisena to come out and deny it. His denial didn’t answer the underlying question. How could such a severe accusation leak if something ominous wasn’t afoot in Sri Lanka.
As New Delhi rejoiced in pro-Chinese President Abdulla Yameen’s failure to win reelection in neighboring Maldives, there was little indication that it would be Sirisena who would go to the extent of provoking a constitutional crisis to put anti-Indian Mahinda Rajapaksa in the premiership.
It’s certainly fascinating to see some prominent Indian hyperrealists jump for joy every time a recipient country reconsiders the anticipated benefits from proposed Chinese-aided projects, irrespective of whether they are indeed part of the BRI or not. As much as it might be gratifying, rooting for the BRI’s failure has a flipside: overt insensitivity to development needs of the country concerned. Those warning of Chinese debt entrapment the loudest aren’t rushing in to build projects for free, are they?
Does all this warrant the kind of rhetoric Pokharel deployed regarding India on Chinese soil? Rubbing it in certainly won’t help. We all know that Indira and Rajiv Gandhi got away with their blockades because Nepal was not a democracy then. New Delhi could separate the people from their government. Modi’s government failed to acknowledge how Nepali democracy had changed the dynamics to the point where damage control impels him to invite himself here at least once a year. Still, the last thing we should be doing is underestimating India’s capacity for creativity at a time when China’s viability as a solution to our landlockedness remains vague.
That’s why sentiments such as those Pokharel conveyed in Beijing – even as statements of fact – should not be part of our leaders’ public pronouncements, especially in contexts where others are more likely to construe them as a deliberate and emphatic declaration of an inconvenient reality. Leave those to blokes like yours truly.

Another Punctured Trial Balloon

As trial balloons go, this one wasn’t supposed to come crashing down – at least not so spectacularly.
Fully inflated and activated, this blimp had shed traces of tentativeness before it was floated. The sitting Communist Party of Nepal (NCP) member for Kathmandu-7 constituency, Ram Bir Manandhar, resigned to make way for party leader Bam Dev Gautam’s candidacy in a by-election.
This blatant crystallization of the Gautam-Pushpa Kamal Dahal alliance in the ruling party followed serious rumblings within a party that once took pride in its discipline. Barely had Dahal’s high-profile geopolitical sojourn faltered in its original purpose than Madhav Kumar Nepal took advantage of Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s absence to mount a virtual insurrection.
Oli, for his part, sounded least bothered and continued on to Costa Rica after addressing the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. When he arrived home, he did so with a countenance that conveyed everything was in order. Days later, when key Madhesi leaders met the prime minister, one interlocutor couldn’t help telling reporters how wearied he had found Oli.
Now, even if the burdens of his second premiership were so unbearable, Oli wouldn’t be one to chicken out, would he? Wouldn’t he benefit from a party coup – even one he could easily quell? After all, a casualty is far more respectable than a coward. So you’re force to wonder whether this whole Bam Dev thing had Oli’s imprimatur all along.
Who really knows? But our premier certainly seemed to let Messrs. Dahal, Nepal and Gautam feel that way, while went sniffing around the neighborhood. Predictably, the Bishnu Poudels and Ishwar Pokharels were up in arms. Raghubir Mahaseth endorsed the sordidness of inflicting a costly byelection, saying he, too, would be prepared to quit if the party asked him to.
As the notion of a Mahaseth speaking for a party of proletarians had long ceased to be amusing, Gautam’s assertion that he wanted to enter parliament to speed up development didn’t spark too many uncomfortable smirks among his peers. (To be fair, Gautam seems to have retained much of his 1990s-era ebullience, going by his full-blooded rebuttal of parts of former Inspector-General of Police Achyut Krishna Kharel’s newly published memoirs.)
Oli allowed the balloon to float for a few days more, enticing the principal players closer to what they considered a fait accompli and allowing the public mood to sour further. Whether Gautam felt the first intimation of doom in Bibeksheel Sajha Party convener Rabindra Mishra’s impending electoral challenge is unclear. But the former deputy prime minister was smart enough to read the real message in Oli decision to postpone a crucial party meeting that was to have finalized the matter.
Gautam bowed out, giving Dahal an easy exit as well. The ever-wily NCP co-chair instantly went into damage-control mode, praising the great things the Oli government had accomplished but had not been credited with. Manandhar, a onetime Oli loyalist, learned the bitter lesson of prematurely switching camps as others continue to take in the message in different ways. 
Wearied or not, Oli has worsted his critics. For how long is anyone’s guess, though. If he’s smart, he’ll keep us all guessing.

Flashback: All Worked Up By Works In Progress

If reality is a work in progress, our polity surely encapsulates the perpetuity of the process. With too many experiments going on at the same time – in parallel as well as in conflict – every appearance of arrival only advances our destination.
After plodding on for a dozen years, the assorted architects of our collective destiny finally seemed to have reached an equilibrium. On the bedrock of republicanism, secularism and federalism, Nepalis could find their equipoise. Sure, the Constituent Assembly turned out to be a Pandora’s Box – and twice. We’re still not sure what came out of it or what’s still inside. But the lid was shut. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli has a hard time keeping it shut.
Oli heads a unified communist party that predominates that end of the spectrum as well as a government that enjoys two-thirds majority support in the elected legislature. Yet those you’d expect to be hailing this relief from fractiousness of the past see in Oli a single successor to the dozen ‘potentates’ that replaced the maligned monarchy.
The practical dimensions of federalism have provided the first validation of critics of this variant of devolution and decentralization. Provinces are still named numerically, as in the Rana era. Provincial officials complain of poor compensation and lack of conveyance. Centre-state conflicts have been largely in check because the people haven’t begun speaking yet.
Early on, secularism energized the faithful. After an initial victory run, Christianity seems to be on the defensive, if you read foreign Christian publications. Hinduism was never this ebullient even when Nepal was the world’s only official Hindu state. Where we have bucked the global trend is in the placidity of our Muslim brethren. In term of inclusion and representation, we have come out ahead numerically. That should count for something when we don’t have any other yardstick over the short to medium term.
Yet the Oli government is besieged. The Supreme Court tends to reverse almost every decision it makes. And that’s even before we have a permanent chief justice. Civil society tends to act as if nothing has changed since the final decade of the partyless Panchayat system. A prominent media house changes its key editors in a decision tenuously linked to the supposed appointment of a senior Indian management executive and we begin debating how that affair might affect our national destiny. An activist medical doctor with a penchant for Gandhian deprivation of nutrition chooses a remote district to make his valiant stand against the government. And the government and the doctor’s supporters both act as if the sky is about to fall.
Oli & Co. should be enthused by the new respectability their ideology, at least its socialist variant, is commanding among millennials in the West. Instead, our elected comrades are being demonized as crude incarnations of Stalin, Mao, Beria and Kang.
The roots of this apathy lay in the amorphousness of the April 2006 Uprising. For all outward appearances, it was a massive popular uprising. The principal trigger was the people’s desire to see the monarchy shed its authoritarianism and the Maoist rebels come into the mainstream. Beyond that, it was a blank canvas. Diverse interests drove their own narratives which easily set the national agenda.
The external dimensions of the distortion were starker. By the end of it all, the Chinese – who backed the monarchy against the Maoists until the last moment – welcomed the new constitution in 2015. The Indians, who set the ball rolling through the 12-Point Agreement on their soil, couldn’t come out with anything more than a tepid acknowledgement of the change in Nepal.
The Americans, Europeans and, yes, the Russians couldn’t be expected to relinquish the ground they invested in so carefully since 1950. For some further afield, our landmark elections were not representative enough. Others don’t see enough new rights upheld. Still others have their fingers firmly on the pulse to detect the outbreak of Cold War 2.0, if it hasn’t already. How could Nepal not be part of this Second Coming?
The Indians and Chinese want to turn their contest over Nepal into a neighborhood brawl. When they try to split the difference, others far afield are naturally agitated. What they lack in geographical proximity, they more than make up through money and other instruments.
Like us, the external players don’t like what Nepal has become. Again, like us, they don’t know what they want it to become. A work in progress by definition embodies eventual achievement of clearly defined and implemented initiatives. Equally, it can be an undertaking subject to the vagaries of attitudes, intentions and resources. With perplexity so entrenched in the internal and external environment, how can we not be so worked up?

Originally posted on Saturday, July 14, 2018

Rising Up From Hurt And Hubris

Is Madhav Kumar Nepal’s near-insurrection against K.P. Sharma Oli’s leadership at a time when our prime minister and ruling party chief is abroad an act of cowardice? Or is it a brilliant incursion based on the perfect convergence of time, context and personalities? It’s hard to say.
What you can’t say is that it wasn’t coming. The creation of an overtly formidable communist party through the amalgamation of the influential Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) and Maoist factions was hailed as a harbinger political rejuvenation.
The jubilation seemed inherently contrived, though. The leaders of the two factions sat together in secret for hours over several sessions and couldn’t agree on much. Then, presto, they resolved everything, including ways of massaging their massive egos. Other egos were bound to be bruised.
The grumbling on the Maoist side was gaudier. As the newest kids on the block, the erstwhile ‘people’s warriors’ had a greater incentive to rue what they had become. The disaffection on the UML side sounded more substantive and cerebral. More experienced in power and patronage, these comrades were bound to ruminate more on the erosion of influence than on that of idealism.
The united communist party held critical decisions in abeyance. The co-leadership of Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal couldn’t even get the new party’s name right for registration purposes. So, they added the abbreviation as part of the proper noun to fulfill the imperative of novelty. Individuals shunted out of the party hierarchy had to be accommodated accordingly in the government.
Dahal had it a bit easier. His principal challengers like Dr. Baburam Bhattarai and Mohan Baidya were outside the party. Oli, on the other hand, had to keep in check the restlessness and desires of former premiers Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal from within the party. With perennial deputy premier Bam Dev Gautam as motivated and malleable as ever, that task became all the more daunting.
Once the contradictions grew thicker, Dahal sought to strike the first blow through his much-hyped Indian and Chinese trips. Through their egregiously hospitality, the Indians ended up thwarting Dahal. If the Chinese were ever planning a warmer reception to our erstwhile Maoist chief, they must have been dissuaded by the Indians.
Clearly, Madhav Nepal saw his opportunity. The Nepal-Oli camaraderie that was at its apotheosis in the months immediately before and after the tragic death of Madan Bhandary never concealed the Jhapali v. non-Jhapali rift gripping the Marxist-Leninist faction. As men like Oli were either hunting other heads or scratching their own behind bars, other comrades were leading double lives to evade arrest. Oli and Nepal were entrenched on opposite ends of that divide, regardless of whatever came after.
With the Oli government under siege, the opposition Nepali Congress has built enough momentum to make us forget its drubbing in the last election. The media – social and the traditional variant – amplifies every act of government dereliction, real and otherwise, pushing the government further on the defensive.
Amid all this, Oli sounds unruffled. Brushing aside the hullabaloo back home, he headed to Costa Rica from New York City. How can the prime minister afford to be so blasé? Or is he merely putting on an act – for the next turn in our interminable spectacle he, too, so assiduously awaits? 

The Guinea Pigs That Went To School

Even in exasperation, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli excels at enlivening things.
“Attempts to make the country a guinea pig to experiment rights and make it a playground for elements with untoward objectives cannot be accepted,” he declared on Constitution Day. The phase of experimentation in Nepal was over, asserted Oli, with a proviso: “If anything is yet to be experimented here, they are models of speedy development.”
Implementing our new Constitution was not going to be easier than drawing it up. Still, we are in a ditch that is deeper than anyone could have determined. Obstacles – perceived and real – seem to emerge from every corner.
Of new Nepal’s three props, republicanism and secularism were going to be contentious. The monarchy and Hindu statehood never stood a fair chance in the political climate whipped up during and after People’s Movement II. Advocates of republicanism and secularism – domestic as well as external – knew they had to strike the proverbial iron when it was hot. Even in the heat of the moment, they had to sneak in such sweeping changes through the backdoor.
True, more than 90 percent of the elected assembly eventually endorsed the Constitution. But, then, this overwhelming support emanated from the only constituency that was allowed any consequential participation in the political process. Demonization and defamation were scarcely conducive to collective coolheadedness. The surprise, then, is that the constitution did not receive 100 percent endorsement.
The monarchy and Hindu statehood, to be sure, were not established as a political reality based on the popular vote. So it is disingenuous at one level to rue their departure without direct popular sanction. Still, a country that has practiced seven constitutions in 70 years also comprehends how everything eventually becomes political – in aspiration as well as appraisal.
It is confounding how precipitously the third peg – federalism – has fallen into disrepute. Oli’s present position and scope of participation in the past might have precluded him from greater candor. The occasion and venue of his remark have certainly amplified his message. Debating whether federalism was right for the country was useless, he said, stressing that leaders had to implement decisions that had been made.
The guinea pig analogy is vivid enough to encompass our times as well as those bygone. Counterfactuals are invariably entertaining. In this case, they may even be instructive. Take, for example, our 1950-51 revolution. With the benefit of Indian, British and American archival material, it would be fair to wonder whether King Tribhuvan would have been restored to the throne had British and American communication and forward-deployment abilities been able to compensate for India’s geographical advantage.
Conversely, had the British and Americans proceeded to act on the imperative that Nepal was vital to upholding their common interests in South Asia in the aftermath of the Raj, might the Indians have kept quiet? In the worst case, would the 1950 Treaty have receded into the irrelevance Nepal’s full incorporation into the Indian Union would have dictated?
History has a cold logic that engenders an abundance of ‘what ifs’ that looks backward and forward. Nepal has not lacked for a string of seemingly unrelated events in and around the neighborhood that have created fertile ground for experimentations of all sorts for those with the will and wherewithal.
As the Red Scare provoked the Free World to contrive an alternative that drew enough from tradition to preserve the present and pinpoint the future, the two communist behemoths weren’t sitting idly by either. If international communism could co-exist with the monarchy in Nepal, could those staid and stolid comrades be that all that bad?
Basic democracy, guided democracy, partyless democracy were all local variants of initiatives funded – if not entirely fashioned – by the leading democracies in search of a halfway house in a turbulent world. Stalin and Mao had their communes, we got our American-funded cooperatives. Such consideration makes it easier to comprehend the correlation between specific episodes of détente and those of liberalization of our Panchayat polity.
When the Berlin Wall came crashing down, things perforce took another turn. Amid the hubris of the ‘end of history’, democratization had to be pursued at all costs. Again, the imperative was to strike when the iron was hot. China after the Tiananmen Square massacre and a Russia smoldering in the wreckage of the Soviet Union provided a rare window of opportunity. If liberal democracy could succeed in places like Poland and Nepal, well, then, history could be deemed to have truly ended. Structural adjustment and macroeconomic stabilization were bold supplements. Except that the Fukuyamans failed to appreciate that the Russians and Chinese weren’t going lay low forever. Nor were the likes of RAW and ISI to lack new missions.
As the Maoists complemented the Marxist-Leninists in our communist contingent amid democracy’s discontents (while Poland’s comrades reincarnated themselves as the Democratic Left Alliance), new thinking was required. Could development and security be somehow integrated to the satisfaction of all? How about a separate Armed Police Force to maintain internal security? Might an integrated command of security forces work better? We tried those and more and ended up with a still unexplained massacre in the heavily fortified palace.
Long before King Gyanendra dismissed him the first time, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba ended up a helpless bystander as US Secretary of State Colin Powell proceeded to discuss Nepal’s needs directly with the monarch and the military chief. The global war on terror was as ambiguous as it was all encompassing. Defensive imperialism and enabling the state were ideas desperately in need of a laboratory.
When the axe did fall on Deuba, most influential foreign governments supported the palace. Our ground had lost none of its fertility. But, this time, external agents were more than willing to and capable of experimenting at cross purposes, and far beyond Nepal’s carrying capacity. No surprise, therefore, that Deuba’s second dismissal prompted such severe condemnation.
In view of those and subsequent developments, Oli perhaps want us to pause and ponder. If we want to keep contriving victimhood, manufacturing grievances and inventing new rights, we certainly won’t lack external patronage and pelf. We can still marvel at how a movement against autocratic monarchy ended up producing republicanism, secularism and federalism and where else it might take us. But at some point, we need to get real. We have what we have and must at least try to make it work.
As for guinea pigs, they have to be very fortunate to survive the experiments and live the aftermath. Human beings – and nations – need more fortitude.

Flashback: Trilateral Omission

Darn it, they couldn’t let our exhilaration last a little longer.
When news broke of the surprise trilateral meeting between the leaders of Nepal, China and India on the sidelines of the Goa BRICS summit, it really felt, well, good, to say the least.
Finally, our two closest friends seemed to have gotten together to help us get our act together – and in full public display. Instead of continuing their perennial turf war over a sliver of mostly stony real estate, China and India seemed to have decided to join hands to keep the ‘distant barbarians’ out of the arena.
The initial details, too, were credible enough. Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Chinese President Xi Jinping were engrossed in bilateral talks when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi suddenly dropped in. (Of course, you could impute any motive here, but let’s be charitable for the purpose of this post.)
The trio continued talking as the fourth person there, our premier’s wife Sita Dahal, looked on. (Although she still had her arms folded, Madam Dahal seemed a bit more engaged with the goings-on than she was at Rastrapati Bhavan in New Delhi a month ago. Moreover, her multi-hued handbag on the coffee table sat well with the adjacent flowers and provided a quaint harmony to both Xi’s and Modi’s jackets and the sofa pillows.)
Then the next batch of details trickled in. Xi and Modi responded positively to a proposal Dahal had made earlier on enhancing trilateral cooperation among the three countries. Emphasizing the need of tri-party strategic understanding, Dahal said Nepal’s unique geography positioned it as a ‘dynamic bridge’ between the Asian giants.
Modi and Xi agreed, but Dahal hadn’t finished. He seemed to suggest that Nepal could help to maintain cordial relations between India and China. Xi, for his part, praised Nepal’s role in maintaining equidistant relations between China and India, while Modi acknowledged the geographical, emotional and cultural relations among the three countries.
What happened? Weren’t we told that the Chinese president had cancelled his visit to Nepal (scheduled around this time) because he considered our government too India-friendly, or something like that? And hadn’t the Indian prime minister conspired with Dahal to oust the K.P. Oli government because it was too China-friendly?
Okay, Pakistani-backed incursions into Kashmir precipitate Indian military action inside Pakistani territory. The Russians seem to tilt towards Islamabad as Donald Trump assiduously courts the Hindu vote in the United States. And what? Xi and Modi suddenly decide to sit in a joint meeting with Dahal?
Man, this was nail-biting stuff but also sounding too good to be true. Alas, it was. A spokesman for India’s Ministry of External Affairs said that the meeting was ‘informal’, entirely coincidental, and just a ‘little chat’.
Describing the sequence of events, the spokesman said that after their bilateral meeting, Dahal and Xi were waiting in the lounge to go to the informal dinner. (Gosh, what’s with this obsession with informality?) Modi also happened to be there. So, the Indian spokesman said, there was no reason to call it a trilateral meeting.
All that high-minded sentimentalizing, nodding and elevating of eyebrows amounted to nothing? Nah, somebody somewhere just cast an evil eye. And, yes, that’s being charitable.

Originally posted on Sunday, October 16, 2016

Reshuffle Decoy and Regional Dynamics

Having left on a high-profile visit to New Delhi indicating that a cabinet reshuffle was imminent, ruling Nepal Communist Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal returned home conceding that Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli had the final word on the matter.
While Dahal was busy meeting with top Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Oli candidly quashed reports of any impending ministerial reorganization. Our premier was evidently wary of what he considered this unwarranted encroachment upon his prerogative. He went on to accuse those spreading such rumors with attempting to destabilize his government.
Interestingly, Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa ‘Badal’, too, rejected such reports with considerable vigor. The obvious explanation would be that Thapa, whose performance has come under much criticism, wants to save his job, even at the cost of undercutting his one-time supreme commander.
Technically, though, you can’t accuse Thapa of anything bordering on disloyalty. There are no Maoists or Marxist-Leninists in the unified communist party. Dahal may be sharing leadership of the organization with Oli. But Oli is the prime minister. And as a party member and minister, Thapa would be well justified in aligning himself with Oli.
Even after making allowances for the factionalism and expediency inherent in our politics, it is hard to divorce this episode from broader developments, primarily on the geopolitical front. Why Dahal should visit India on an overtly official and bilateral undertaking – with more than inferred sanctification from his hosts – at a time when the Oli government is managing relations reasonably well is, well, intriguing. (The term 'well' being espoused entirely from Nepal's perspective.)
And why Dahal should be publicizing his ensuing visit to China – again with palpable glee in the Indian media – adds to the mystery. Unless the Indians are more worried about Oli than China when it comes to Nepal.
The volatility of international dynamics has left China and India carefully choreographing their moves vis-à-vis one another, which has only added to Nepal’s precariousness. How do you strike a balance between two powerful neighbors who themselves aren’t sure about each other with regard to the world’s increasingly impulsive yet exclusive superpower?
Uncertainty over Chinese-backed projects in Nepal amid international anxieties over the Belt and Road Initiative, the organization of the BIMSTEC summit in Kathmandu, the opening of Chinese ports to Nepal, the withdrawal of Nepal from BIMSTEC military exercises and its participation with China in similar maneuvers are closely linked developments. If we start losing sight of ourselves in our eagerness to accommodate others, there will be ample opportunity for action – all to our ultimate detriment.
Returning home, Dahal told reporters that Indian leaders sought a stable government and prosperity in Nepal. Would they have said anything to the contrary even if they wanted to? Dahal also reiterated that his visit was aimed at reminding the Indian leadership of the need to implement existing bilateral agreements promptly and effectively. And he needed to fly to New Delhi to reiterate what Nepalis have been saying since 1950?
Six months into office, this government is under siege. It has itself to blame for much of its woes, given its early smugness and insouciance. Still, the challenges Oli faces are arduous and have been accumulating for over a decade. Wouldn’t we be doing ourselves a great favor if we heaped on the government only the blame it truly deserved?

Unhappy Warriors

Our brand-new Nepal Communist Party (NCP) has come with a shelf life of five years, if you believe Dr. Baburam Bhattarai.
The former Maoist chief ideologue, ever since ditching the once-imposing party to form his Naya Shakti, has kept his ideological fealty very close to his chest. He may not have formally renounced his commitment to the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat in the Great Helmsman’s prototype. But he hasn’t been terribly excited about the idea lately, either.
Dr. Bhattarai’s Naya Shakti encompasses all of the nebulousness of the new Nepal he so arduously pushed during the ‘people’s war’. Although the man triumphed in the last election, his party’s message seemed too muddled to attract enough people. In that sense, the individual is the institution.
A couple of weeks ago, Dr. Bhattarai revealed that he had become a communist because B.P. Koirala and the Nepali Congress veered dangerously close to the crown. If things were as simple as that, Dr. Bhattarai could easily have reversed course once B.P.’s brother, Girija Prasad Koirala, almost single-handedly abandoned the Nepali Congress’ founding ideological commitment to the monarchy. For all practical purposes, Dr. Bhattarai and his Maoist colleagues may have done that not too furtively through the peace process. Yet the Maoist tag was too tightly wrapped around them.
Dr. Bhattarai offers his five-year NCP prognosis against the backdrop of the perilous global scenario unfolding today. If the world’s young are increasingly attracted to socialism, they are also lured by right-wing populism. In this dichotomy, the ambiguity of Naya Shakti fits well just as ‘No Labels’ or ‘Third Way’ do elsewhere.
It also allows Dr. Bhattarai to put himself ahead of the curve and diagnose the ills traditional politicians have wrought on the rest of us, pretending he is not one of them. The internal contradictions of the NCP, he avers, have sown the seeds of the party’s demise. (Since the Nepali Congress is older than the communists, Dr. Bhattarai evidently sees no wisdom in setting a time-frame for its extinction.)
The notion of the NCP as a nonstarter conforms to what Dr. Bhattarai’s onetime Maoist colleague Chandra Prakash Gajurel recently said (and on which yours truly had ruminated elaborately last week).
Disparagement from two directions prompted NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ to react. You can’t be a leader just because you want to, the former Maoist supremo stated. History and the people would dictate that. Dahal, to be sure, has been reassessing a lot of things in his life lately. But he doesn’t seem to be in a mood to tolerate erstwhile colleagues posing as challengers.
Let’s try not miss the broader picture. Although they have disappeared as a visibly viable organism, the various constituents of the Maoists are speaking from all directions and conveying all kinds of messages. Through republicanism, federalism, secularism, they have created their trinity against heavy odds. The price they paid – amalgamation with the parliamentary system they had also rebelled against – doesn’t seem that steep, considering how they have camouflaged it in pragmatism. Still, these people don’t sound like they relish their victory, do they?

A Revolution Devoured By Its Parents?

Amid the dreariness of daily political narrative, it is refreshing once in a while to proceed along parallelisms no matter how outlandish they might sound.
How does a country’s journey from point A to B end up at a lower-case e in light italics? And can we be sure we have arrived?
A unified communist party fusing the two best indoctrinated and organized comrades drives a government enjoying a massive legislative mandate. Instead of administering ‘new Nepal’, it is muddling from crisis to crisis. Of the three pillars of our redesigned state, secularism was first to shake. The only reason it still stands is the split between the monarchical and republican advocates of Hindu statehood.
There are other intriguing aspects to the precipitous rise in anti-secularism sentiments. Was the impetuous and enigmatic declaration on the abolition of Hindu statehood the culmination of a decades-long conspiracy to break one of the last barriers to the worldwide dissemination of the Good News? Was it aimed at removing what was construed as the most formidable plank of monarchy to cut it down to size? Or was it just another way of perpetuating destabilization? If anything, Hinduism has had an unprecedented and unexpected revival in secular Nepal.
Still, our astonishment at the plight of secularism pales in comparison to that vis-à-vis the dark clouds hovering above federalism. Not even a year into its existence, that pillar is slowly but surely being questioned on structural grounds. The controversy over the additional tax burden is symptomatic of a wider re-evaluation likely to ensue sooner rather than later.
Republicanism has proven more resilient. It has become fashionable to attribute its success to the unpopularity of the ex-monarch which is only surpassed by that of the ex-heir apparent. Less conspicuous in our collective consideration is the continuing childhood of the candidate for ‘baby king’. The more critical factor, though, may be the relative success of the presidency.
Compared to the occupants of other institutions of state, Ram Baran Yadav and now, Bidya Bhandari, have discharged their duties with remarkable decorum and dignity. Granted, they have been able to dodge serious controversy because of the ceremonialism of their office. Yet it is the individual that has made the institution count.
Even if the presidency were to maintain its record of probity and rectitude, would it be able to compensate for the ricketiness of new Nepal’s other two pillars? That remains in the realm of the future.
There is value for all stakeholders – external and internal – in revisiting and reevaluating how it all began and what went on midway to grasp where things are now.
Chandra Prakash Gajurel, who once headed the Maoists’ international relations department, put things very succinctly the other day in an interview with BBC Radio’s Nepali Service. Gajurel is now languishing in the sidelines as a member of Mohan Baidya’s more radical but rump group.
In the interview, Gajurel conceded that the Maoists ended up furthering India’s interests in Nepal. However, he was not prepared to concede that the Maoists had served as fifth columns. When the ragtag band of Nepali radicals rose up against the monarchy and the parliamentary system, India had little use for them. Having kept the Maoists in reserve, in Gajurel’s telling, the Indians brought them out when they needed to chastise the monarch.
Despite the palace’s coziness with China and Pakistan, New Delhi wasn’t ready to dispense with Nepal’s royalty. When events took their course, India didn’t feel terribly sorry. Nothing ground-breaking here. Where Gajurel gets interesting is when he describes how the Maoist leadership went on to join hands with the parliamentary forces. Gajurel has some credibility in calling this a betrayal of the revolution because both he and Baidya were in detention in India while the events leading up to the 12 Point Agreement unfolded in New Delhi.
On the other hand, if Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Baburam Bhattarai ultimately chose to side with the parties against the palace and split the difference, it was the triumph of pragmatism over principle. A one-party people’s republic of Nepal was always inconceivable, even in the event of a full and formal Chinese takeover.
Pragmatism in input implies the inevitability of practicality in the outcome. If Dahal and Bhattarai created history in the annals of revolution by effecting a betrayal from the top, as Gajurel avers, he himself has grasped the opportunity latent in letting ‘what should be’ prevail over ‘what is’.
China, India and the West – in that precise order – have benefited from new Nepal, after having committed so heavily to suppress the Maoist rebellion on the back of the monarchy. Each of the three external stakeholders is still probably engaged in long-term cost-benefit analysis. If their collective objective is to keep Nepal in suspended animation as the significant acts of the Great Global Drama continue to unfold elsewhere, then they have succeeded.
The cycle thus continues as the new empowerment creates new alienation. Maybe that’s why, in the interview, Gajurel sounded quite sanguine about his aims and ultimate accomplishments. Nepalis ignored Dahal and Bhattarai once only to marvel at their machinations. Would we dare ignore Gajurel or Netra Bikram Chand? Maybe. Not doing so might be the more pragmatic way, though.

Nepal In The Vajpayee Vortex

With the first waves of tributes to the late Atal Behari Vajpayee now subsiding, it may not be inopportune to reflect on the man through the prism of political developments in Nepal.
A steadfast friend of Nepal, Vajpayee was at ease with Nepal’s royalty and its detractors alike. Having spent much of his early political career building the Hindu nationalists into a viable electoral force, Vajpayee served as foreign minister in the short-lived Janata Party government that ousted the Indian National Congress in 1977.
Ideologically close to King Birendra, Vajpayee was a committed democrat with an affinity for B.P. Koirala and the Nepali Congress. Reconciling those imperatives was a difficult job in the best of times. The post-Sikkim-annexation environment was hardly assuring for Nepal.
As one coalition partner of Prime Minister Morarji Desai, Vajpayee was scarcely in a position to influence policy based on his Jana Sangh’s political ideology. Moreover, while Koirala allies dominated the Janata Party, they were at a loss over how to accommodate Nepal’s most prominent democrat’s quest for a return to the kingdom's political mainstream. Amid the shakiness of the Desai coalition, the best one could have hoped for was a sort of modus vivendi between the partyless Panchayat system and the Nepali Congress.
Months earlier, Koirala had returned to Nepal from exile in India, ostensibly fed up with the restrictions Indira Gandhi’s Emergency-era government placed on him. Although he alighted the aircraft with a message of national reconciliation, Koirala was a wanted man back home and was treated as such. In the near term, Koirala’s hopes of political reconciliation with the palace were heading nowhere.
With the advent of the Janata government, there were some expectations of progress and, gradually, subtle signs of movement. Vajpayee worked behind the scenes together with ideological adversary George Fernandes and personal rival Subramaniam Swamy.  King Birendra held consultations with Koirala and sanctioned his trip abroad for medical treatment over the objections of key palace advisers, some of whom were still advocating the death penalty for the man. (Asked by a reporter whether he would return to Nepal and almost certain reimprisonment, Koirala responded by propounding the famed Two Necks in a Noose Theory.)
From the break it so energetically sought to make from the overt Nehru-Gandhi overlordship of Nepal, the Janata government might have gone along with any verdict emerging from the national referendum in Nepal in 1980. By then, however, Indira Gandhi had returned as prime minister. How she could have reconciled her personal antipathy toward Koirala with a restored multiparty system that he would have dominated remained an academic question. Koirala himself made things easier for Gandhi by offering a prolix yet principled endorsement of the popular verdict, going against the prevailing mood in the opposition camp.
The next decade and a half were a period of often-convulsive conversion for both Nepal and Vajpayee. His new Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) increased its legislative tally from two seats to head the federal government in New Delhi. Nepalis, emerging from shockwaves sent by the fall of the Berlin Wall, were living under a restored multiparty democracy but were growing disenchanted with the attendant political shenanigans. Maoist rebels were pouncing from the sidelines.
Vajpayee’s fortnight-long first premiership in 1996 was a dry run for the second two years later. How a Hindu nationalist-led government might engage with the world’s only Hindu monarchy was something keenly watched on both sides of the border and beyond. The early signs seemed promising. When the Vajpayee government invited King Birendra as the chief guest at the Republic Day in early 1999, many saw this as a solid affirmation of India’s recognition of Nepal’s sovereign existence.
By the end of the year, bilateral relations took their worst plunge ever. India’s RAW intelligence agents, through carefully calibrated leaks, projected Nepal as a haven for Pakistan’s spy agencies obsessed with anti-Indian subversion. A Christmas Eve hijacking of an Indian aircraft shortly after takeoff from Kathmandu was immediately cited as evidence of Pakistani destabilization. But, then, the flight went on a murky path with intriguing twists to weave a story that couldn’t be kept straight. When the ordeal ended in Afghanistan with Indian External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh escorting the imprisoned militants the hijackers demanded in exchange for the passengers, everyone wanted the story buried.
Krishna Prasad Bhattarai, our prime minister then, isn’t around to recall the pressure he was under to incriminate Pakistan. But his foreign minister, Ram Sharan Mahat, can perhaps still remember how it was US President Bill Clinton who ended up letting him off the hook by rejecting the notion of official Pakistani complicity in the hijacking.
The succeeding year fared little better and ended with protests sparked by an Indian film star’s purported derogatory words for Nepalis. Few, if any, could confess to hearing those words or to knowing where or when they had been uttered. As Kathmandu burned, the usual suspects came up. Only this time, they were now-exiled elements of India’s underworld supported by Pakistan.
Of course, the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan and the Kargil War, among other things, had heightened regional tensions. Yet the Chinese were uncharacteristically subdued in their backing – if you could even call it that – of Pakistan in both instances. The Americans were hardening their stance against China politically and economically. Although officially US-India ties were on the upswing, privately, according to subsequently published memoirs by some key players, the Americans were having a hard time overcoming the BJP-led government’s emulation of Nehru-Gandhi-era sanctimony and moralism in an effort to preserve their strategic autonomy. President Clinton’s brief stopover in Pakistan, recently the venue of a military takeover, was more of a rebuff to India than an embrace of the Pakistani generals.
In Nepal, there was a flurry of high-level visitors from China, including Premier Zhu Rongji. That burst of diplomacy culminated in the Chinese government’s invitation to King Birendra to the inaugural Boao Forum as a special guest, followed by a state visit to the country.
Of course, sections of Indian academia and media voiced concern over this sudden surge in activity on the Nepal-China front. Representatives of some leading Western governments were said to be advising King Birendra to take a more assertive political role in view of the political parties’ ‘mismanagement’. One outgoing ambassador’s audience with the monarch was said to have turned testy on both sides when the king reminded him that his government’s undue pressure in 1990 was partly responsible for Nepal’s tumultuous politics.
Although buried in the post-9/11 narrative, American relations with China under the new George W. Bush administration were so fraught that in early April 2001 Beijing forced a US military spy aircraft to land in China and held it for three months before allowing its dismantled pieces to fly out three months later.
What was noteworthy was that, in the midst of this mayhem, the Vajpayee government was in the initial phases of striking a grand bargain with the Chinese on Tibet. Was the trilateralism we are talking about today making its first stirrings then? (Last week, the Chinese were fulsome in their praise of Vajpayee for having made “path-breaking contributions to the development of Sino-Indian relations”.) We were never to find out, the Narayanhity Carnage having intervened on the night of June 1, 2001.
Even those most convinced of India’s hand (or a couple of fingers at least!) in the palace massacre were at a loss to explain how it could have happened under Vajpayee. Reports emerging years later that the BJP-led government had opened contacts with Nepali Maoists served to underscore the cold unsentimentality underpinning our bilateral relations.
Vajpayee’s personal reaction to the massacre was no different from the official messages pouring in from world capitals. At a private gathering of party workers in Nagpur weeks later, Vajpayee was said to speak of having been presented with a fait accompli in Nepal. That cryptic clarification was extended to imply that Indian intelligence agencies, long-time foes of Nepal’s monarchy, were working on their own plans as part of competing Nepal policies being forged by Indian institutions. (Years later, after the BJP lost to the Congress, Rabindra Singh, a senior RAW agent defected to the United States via Nepal purportedly with a cache of classified files on Nepal.)
If accurate, this reasoning would not only explain the BJP’s opening to Nepali Maoists but the entire subsequent script unfolding from India.  Amid the studiousness of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government’s effort to shield its Nepal policy from any overt ideological tilt, we have come to accept it as axiomatic that India, like any other country, makes cold foreign-policy calculations in the pursuit of its national interests.
Yet during the Vajpayee years, either out of sheer Nepali naivete or belief in the genuineness of personal relationships among leaders of two countries, it was hard to grasp the tragic confluence of events of the times. It is still so.

The Weight On Our Premier In Waiting

If Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ is delighting in his status as prime minister in waiting, he’s also demonstrating an impassioned longing for the job.
Ever since the unification of his Maoist stream with the Marxist-Leninists to create the Nepal Communist Party (NCP), Dahal has found himself in a fix. As the leader of a party that waged both a people’s war and peace to astonishing effect, Dahal is incapable of playing second fiddle. Yet his current status as co-chair of the ruling party alongside a man who also happens to be the incumbent prime minister constrains the onetime Maoist supremo.
Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s exertions over the past six months must have emboldened Dahal to seek to cement his status as the logical successor. In that sense, his moves are carefully crafted to defend the party but not necessarily the prime minister.
In barely veiled swipes at the government, Dahal has been warning against the emergence of a tax system that could eventually undermine federalism. He has been more candid in criticizing the government for failing to create a climate conducive to foreign investment.
The rejection of Deepak Raj Joshee’s nomination as chief justice has upheld the supremacy of parliament, Dahal said. He could not have been oblivious to the shenanigans preceding the legislative committee’s vote nor the extent of the difficulties such comments could add to Oli's.
Dahal’s assertion that talks were the only way to resolve political differences may have sounded like friendly advice to former acolyte Comrade Biplav and others against wasting valuable time and energy on futile pursuits. But couldn’t it also be construed as an admonition to the government?
Of late, Dahal appears to have been drawing support from meaningful external quarters. When outgoing US Ambassador Alaina B. Teplitz paid a farewell call on the NCP co-chair, the mutual admiration they lavished almost made you forget that the Maoists were once on the US government’s terrorist list. (Or that former US president George W. Bush had advised former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, during their Oval Office meeting, to “finish them off” as part of the unfolding global war on terror.)
During their meeting in Kathmandu last month, visiting Vice Minister of International Department of the Communist Party of China Wang Yajun conveyed Chinese President Xi Jinping’s warm greetings to Dahal. And that was just before Wang thanked Dahal for the political stability maintained in Nepal following the alliance forged among the big communist parties.
And now the Indian media have been playing up Dahal’s scheduled visit to China and India in September, particularly underscoring its potential contribution to fostering trilateral cooperation. You’d be forgiven for thinking that the reporters and editors across the southern border were writing about our serving prime minister. Since there’s hardly any evidence that Oli has subcontracted that vital dimension of Nepali foreign policy to his party co-chair, it’s fair to wonder what our prime minister may be wondering.
The experience of two tenures at the helm must be enough to educate Dahal on what to expect a third time. But what is a politician without ambition? All the better if you can actually cast it as an onerous calling.

Back To School Again

As his government advances toward its six-month milestone, Prime Minister K.P. Oli must be busy wondering what has gone so wrong.
Backed by a two-thirds majority in parliament, Oli expected to lead New Nepal on its first real steps toward peace, progress and prudence. Three tiers of elections under the new popularly drafted constitution had set the country firmly on the path of republicanism, secularism and federalism.
By uniting the country’s two major communist parties, Oli had at least provided the theoretical basis to end the factionalism and instability emanating from that end of the ideological spectrum.
The early signs were impressive. Oli ended the transport syndicate that was fleecing the people, often in connivance with officialdom. His government began regulating foreign volunteer organizations to ensure what they were doing was in fact what Nepal needed.
The government stopped construction activities on cultivable land and began holding contractors accountable to their schedules. Governance may not have suddenly improved. There was the promise that it could become better.
On the vital external front, Oli succeeded in winning the confidence of Nepal’s two powerful neighbors, raising the prospect of ending a divergence of north-south expectations that had long constrained our politics. Braving opposition from countries farther afield, he forced the United Nations to close its political affairs office, deeming it an irrelevant hangover of the UN Mission to Nepal.
When some began describing him as Nepal’s most powerful leader since King Mahendra, Oli seemed to like the comparison. After all, he understood that the more politically apt B.P. Koirala analogy was practically futile, considering that a two-thirds majority eventually meant little for Nepal’s first elected premier.
And yet, our prime minister is being roundly castigated as an autocrat, if not already then certainly an aspiring one. Opposition parties are organizing protests in the defense of democracy with the decibels rising in the media echo chamber. The prime minister, struggling to regain the initiative, imparts an image of sheer helplessness.
When Oli even begins to reiterate his promise of achieving an eight percent economic growth rate and a per capita income of US$5,000 by the end of his five-year term, he provokes howls of derision. The train from China and boat rides to India entered the compendium of ‘Oli-isms’ – entertaining but empty exhortations.
It is tempting to argue that this opposition is contrived by the very domestic and external quarters Oli has alienated the most. That would only ignore the assistance the prime minister and his party are providing his opponents.
In the recent imbroglio involving Dr. Govinda KC and his hunger strike, the government’s eventual conciliation was weighed against its initial callousness. The parliamentary public hearing committee’s rejection of Deepak Raj Joshee’s nomination as chief justice may have been the inevitable outcome of broader systemic and political vagaries. Yet it is being portrayed as Oli’s egregious assault on the independence of the judiciary and democracy.
When Oli continues to speak in parables and proverbs, it can be digested as an enduring personality trait. When ministers try aping their boss – in candor and caginess alike – it creates the kind of unfortunateness the law minister found himself in vis-à-vis Nepali female students in Bangladesh.
Oli’s counterpart as leader of the unified Communist Party of Nepal, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, has invoked a vow of silence of sorts when it comes to the prime minister. When Dahal does speak, he does so in platitudes that can be hardly comforting to the prime minister.
Oli, moreover, is discovering the downside of personal preponderance. With little role or relevance on things that really matter, men like Madhav Kumar Nepal, Jhal Nath Khanal and Bam Dev Gautam can’t be too enthused about defending the prime minister.
All said and done, a ruthless and relentless learning process wasn’t what Oli – or the rest of us – thought these first six months would be.