A Hundred Days Of Incertitude

However you want to score the first 100 days of Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s second government, you have to admit that the man has not lost his capacity to confound us.
Those measuring Oli’s government against his specific election promises will understandably be disappointed. What should hearten them is that our prime minister has zeroed in on specific actions that weren’t in his original line of sight.
The government’s campaigns against transport syndicates and gold smuggling rackets, among other things, have been gutsy. Its clampdown on construction contractors failing to meet their deadlines and paring the heavy calendar of public holidays has won similar public support.
The odds were getting pretty heavy against the unification of Oli’s Unified Marxist Leninists with the Maoist Centre. Yet through some still-hazy last-minute sleight of hand, Oli formalized the amalgamation. Of course, discontent persists on both sides over the wisdom of unity.
Oli and Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ couldn’t name the new party right. Nor could they distribute posts to the satisfaction of the principals’ ambitions or the Election Commission (in terms of women’s representation in the latter’s case). But, hey, everything is a work in progress these days.
On the external front, a man who was widely expected to bolster Nepal’s ties to China ended up building new bridges with India. It probably won’t matter whether or how much Oli’s stock has risen or fallen up north because the Chinese and Indians seem primarily to be talking to each other over Nepal. Meanwhile, we’re too busy measuring whose promises are taller to ponder who might fulfill them first in earnest. One direct effect of this preoccupation is the limit it sets on the opposition’s lampasarbad line, which enjoyed an incredible initial run.
The main opposition Nepali Congress shrewdly hyped the ‘creeping totalitarianism’ line once Oli began consolidating power in the Prime Minister’s Office. Clearly, the government’s amnesty plan for Maoist convicts, failure to make key appointments and looming signs of a center-province collision provided extra fodder to the opposition. Yet the Nepali Congress’ 100-day report card reflected a reticence to go on a full-blown offensive against the Oli government.
A party riven by internal dissension may see the communist resurgence as an opportunity for its own rejuvenation. The window of opportunity is narrowing quickly, though. Veer right, left or stay put, the Nepali Congress cannot afford to allow too much fuzziness surround what it intends to do.
The other opposition parties and personalities are understandably intent on making the most of the situation from their respective points on the ideological spectrum. Collectively, they are doing what they do best: oppose the government.
And Oli has made that job easier through some glaring anomalies. While basking in public adulation over its transport-syndicate busting, the government transferred the key bureaucrat who spearheaded that effort. The official response to media and public reactions went on to raise more questions.
Similarly, the Oli government made much about ordering the closure of the Indian Embassy’s Biratnagar field office. New Delhi, however, insisted that it was planning to do so anyway.
The upshot: Oli hasn’t fulfilled all of his promises. But he has done a lot of things he hadn’t promised. Now, what grade does that kind of record merit?

Head Fakes And Fertile Hopes

You can’t help marveling at our Marxist-Leninist and Maoist comrades. The odds were heavily stacked against unity – ideologically, organizationally and, yes, personally.
The drawn-out process almost validated skeptics who considered that promise little more than an electoral ploy. K.P. Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ were so tight-lipped about the succession of hours-long one-on-one sessions that their efforts were apt to be dismissed as mere face-saving.
Disputes over power-sharing, organizational equality, process and form, real as they were among the rank and file, were all deemed convenient covers to explain that inevitable reality: Nepal’s communists just don’t have it in them to coexist.
Then, presto, the comrades coalesced fully and formally. It really didn’t matter that they couldn’t even christen their new entity right. Having discovered that the appellation Nepal Communist Party had already been taken, the Marxists-Leninists and the Maoists creatively underlined the name and created something new.
If the main opposition Nepali Congress seemed most shocked by this development, it had good reason. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was widely seen to have planted a kiss of death on Oli. Our prime minister, excepting the lampasarbad slur, kind of went along with the narrative of political evisceration. We knew Oli had quite a reputation for sharp humor. The head fake was a new one.
The Maoist ministers, too, turned kabuki masters for a while. They collectively chided the prime minister for having marginalized their party during Modi’s sojourn, a stance that led some on the sidelines to finally rule out the prospect of unity.
The Nepali Congress is still acting as if the unification of our two biggest communist parties poses a mortal danger infinitely greater than the one posed by King Mahendra’s dismissal of B.P. Koirala’s government in December 1960. Why, the communists were never worried by the Nepali Congress’ super majority when the comrades had a paltry four seats in the first parliament, Oli reminded the main opposition party the other day.
Confronted with Nepali Congress claims that the rejuvenated communists would debase its opponents, Oli retorted that the comrades wouldn’t have time for such pettiness. Stung by growing public perceptions of defeatism in their reaction, some Nepali Congress leaders have begun putting on a brave face.
It is the smaller parties that have come up with sharpest questions. Why would Oli and Dahal plant a tree (the Nepali Congress electoral symbol) to mark the occasion instead of, say, improvise a version of ‘Here Comes the Sun’?
Wasn’t the decision to announce the unification on the 25th anniversary of the deaths of Madan Bhandary and Jibaraj Ashrit tantamount to tarnishing the ‘people’s war’, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai asked in a tweet. Dahal doubled down by recalling Bhandary’s immense contributions to Nepali communism. After all, when the Maoists rose up against the state in 1996, they did so against the late Marxist-Leninist general secretary’s people’s multiparty democracy ideology as well. But Dahal seemed to want to remind the rest of us that he had forgotten that reality.
Narayan Man Bijukchhe proclaimed that unity wouldn’t be durable. But, then, we’ll never know how the brain of the Nepal Workers and Peasants Party leader works, will we? After all, he’s the same guy who flew in to New Delhi to co-sign the 12-Point Agreement in 2006 only to fly back home to criticize it as being anti-national.
It’s okay to be skeptical – even cynical – about what led to this development and how things might unfold in the weeks and months ahead. It would be instructive here to consider the big picture.
We have a secular state where Christians say they face the worst persecution ever, Muslims can’t really feel the difference and Hindus have become, if anything, more faithful.
We have seven provinces that have neither names nor permanent capitals and whose functionaries are already complaining about having to do a lot with virtually nothing. Sure, we are a republic, but one where most are tuned to what the ex-king says and does. Yet the sun continues to rise each morning.

The L-Shaped Lump In Our Throat

What a beleaguered Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba had discharged as pre-emptive disparagement finally seems to have caught up with Prime Minister K.P. Oli.
Anticipating the post-election backlash within the party, Deuba began portraying Oli’s India policy as ‘lampasarbad’. Not that the appellation was novel by any means. Any tough talker vis-à-vis our southern friends inevitably got the tag once in the premiership. But our incumbent prime minister was still so new that the poor guy hadn’t even gone to New Delhi on his customary first foreign trip. In fact, Oli had barely begun to delineate his government’s China policy as one aimed at enhancing Nepal’s bargaining position with India.
By the time Oli returned from the Indian capital, even Deuba’s bitterest critics in the Nepali Congress had begun hurling the L word against the prime minister. The Nepali Congress refrain was that the country’s relations with India were always good. If Oli improved anything through his visit, it may have been his personal relationship with the Indian establishment.
While the L word didn’t entirely cushion Deuba against criticism from his party, it did start putting Oli on the defensive. The prime minister’s pain was becoming apparent in some of his public pronouncements.
Why Modi had to pay a return visit so soon after hosting Oli wasn’t ever properly articulated by either side. Oli’s best defense was the imperative of any prime minister to play the good host. Even the Maoists began using the Modi visit as an explanation for the delay in finalizing their unification deal with Oli’s Unified Marxist-Leninists.
An Oli visit to China tentatively planned after his return from New Delhi was put off for additional preparations. Instead, Modi jetted off for a hastily convened informal summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. Not coincidentally, the Nepali Congress began to remember the Indian blockade just as Oli wanted to forget it.
Still, Nepalis were open to evaluating the outcome of Modi’s visit. Officially billed as a state visit, Modi landed in Janakpur saying he arrived as a pilgrim. Of course, that deflected to a degree why he would bypass the capital as the port of entry. He spent his two days Nepal more than as just a pilgrim. Yet the trip lacked the kind of surprise that might have necessitated camouflaging it with an air of informality.
After all, the inauguration of a bus service between Janakpur and Ayodhya didn’t need such a high-profile event. Nor did laying the cornerstone of a hydroelectric project the two countries had agreed to build a decade ago.
Modi wanted to pray at additional religious sites? Fine and dandy. Two public felicitations of an Indian prime minister here on his third visit in the fourth year of a five-year term? Beats us. Since he virtually invited himself in, Nepalis went along with the good-host bit. (Kind of like when Pakistan’s Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi suddenly knocked on the door a few months ago and got an honor guard at Tundikhel.) So when Modi began resorting to his trademark devices in Janakpur, Nepalis ho-hummed.
When the Oli government began clamping down on any Nepali remembrance of the blockade, the L word acquired instant validation of sorts. True, some saw the European Union behind the resurrection of the bitterness of the blockade in an apparent attempt to derail any India-China understanding on Nepal that would edge out third parties. Given the EU election observer mission’s recent shenanigans, it would be hard to put anything past our European friends these days.
Still, the blockade was real even if the Indians never gave it that name. In that vein, even those demanding a public apology from Modi recognized the futility of seeking one. Yet the Oli government wasn’t prepared to tolerate even such a tepid articulation of Nepali sentiments as one inscribed inside the premises of a minor political party.
What happened to Oli and who are we supposed to be mad at? China?

Beijing Via New Delhi?

If the idea of Nepal publicly felicitating Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to gall many Nepalis, it’s not hard to fathom why. The wounds inflicted by New Delhi’s 2015-2016 economic blockade are still raw.
But, then, there’s the flip side. What kind of fella could even contemplate accepting such honors with a straight face? Maybe the kind that doesn’t think the blockade was a blockade?
In some ways, we’re an odd lot. When Indian prime ministers successively ignored us in their international travels, we were sore. When Prime Minister Modi arrives here on his third trip in four years, we seem no less upset. Meanwhile, Chinese President Xi Jinping continues to dangle the prospect that he might deign to visit us. Instead of anger, it’s our anticipating that keeps building.
Things have gotten so bad that Sher Bahadur Deuba, leader of the opposition Nepali Congress – not your typical India-baiter – has been describing Oli’s southern strategy as lampasarbad [‘prostratification’] with great relish. Deuba’s critics in his faction-ridden party agree on one thing: failure to call the blockade a blockade cost them votes. You can tell how stung Oli is by that appellation by his exertions in rebutting it.
The Indians, meanwhile, are working over time to project Modi’s visit as a pilgrimage. It has a pleasant ring, more than enough to assuage the most unenthusiastic host. What that could also mean is that the Indians have decided that Nepal is the best place to test their soft-power strategy. The leader of a Hindu nationalist party up for re-election can see how doubly delightful the visit can be. But what if that kinder and gentler strategy also contains a hardening of India’s commitment to pursue what it wants.
In other words, if cultural/religious affinity also means that one side can force its way to tapping into it for purely domestic reasons at will, that should be cause for concern. And all the more so when Kamal Thapa, the president of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party Nepal – the prime advocate for the restoration of Hindu statehood in Nepal – is on record criticizing Oli’s alacrity to indulge Modi’s sudden devotion to faith-based diplomacy.
It doesn’t look like we can look up north for succor in this instance. ‘Tis the season of China-India geniality, at least in terms of style. Trilateral or trans-Himalayan cooperation, call it what you will. There seems to be a pronounced proclivity in New Delhi and Beijing to treat Kathmandu jointly. Trumpian capriciousness may have become riotous elsewhere, but it has cultivated some certainty here.
The two principal protagonists may never be able to figure out which beats which in Nepal, Indian geography or Chinese history? But for the Indians and Chinese to even begin debating that, both need a field clear of a third team.
In the best of times, they say familiarity breeds contempt. Modi may want to cozy up to us all he wants, but why does Oli seem giddier than his guest? Bizarre as it may sound, one is forced to ask: Is Modi’s pilgrimage a Chinese precondition for an Oli visit to China?