The Doctor’s Dilemma – And Ours

For the all the bluster and bravado they exuded in public, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli and his allies must have been truly worried by Dr. Govinda K.C.’s latest hunger strike. This time, our serial self-starver was on his longest spell of self-abnegation that pushed him to the outer edges of his mortal existence.
Had our estimable doctor perished, there was no telling what might have ensued. Both sides were rattled by the ominous uncertainty.
At times, Dr. K.C. must have grappled with his own predicaments. He recognizes that civil society and public support for his cause is rooted in its nobleness. This time, there was a distinct political color as well. Leaders and parties that were wont to dismiss Dr. K.C. as a rabble-rouser during their time in power rallied behind him in strength.
For the first time since the elections, the Nepali Congress seemed assured of its relevance. The party may not have been able to put its house in order, but it certainly seems rejuvenated in the elected house lately. A bevy of smaller parties, too, took the opportunity to appraise their self-worth and look quite sanguine.
True, in the aftermath of the KC-government agreement, some parties have sought to clarify the extent of their solidarity with the doctor. But, then, they are also engrossed in political calculations.
Dr. K.C. knows that his heart and mind are in the right place. So he isn’t perturbed by the viciousness of some of the criticism he has provoked. One ruling party legislator even called him a murderer because of the lives lost on account of the hospitals closed as part of his protest.
What he must be pondering, though, is the pass things have come to. Here we have an elected government enjoying unprecedented support in the legislature. When the government doesn’t behave in accordance with its critics’ preferences, such broad support easily becomes a brush to tarnish it with.
The authoritarianism tag was hung on the Oli government as a preemptive strike by an opposition enfeebled in the electoral arena. Over the months, the government has made the Nepali Congress’ task a lot easier through its haughtiness and impetuosity.
Does such collective bypassing of the normal political process really bode well for us? The qualifications and character of a sitting chief justice matters. So does the foundation and future of medical education in the country. Whether people in a free society have the right to assemble freely in any public space needs to be deliberated upon. But do we really need an individual to go on hunger strike, the Supreme Court to intervene and opposition parties to get so worked up?
With internal and external contradictions papered over for more than a decade now coming to the fore, Dr. K.C. – and others sharing his noble intent – will have no dearth of causes to espouse. Political parties on the sidelines are going through internal realignments and will grasp at any opportunity to alleviate their core contestations while maintaining outward resilience.
Geopolitically, it is becoming clearer by the day that our two immediate neighbors are determined to keep those farther afield at bay. And the West, having invested here so heavily over the decades, is not about to give up without a fight.
Dr. K.C. sees many things ailing our body politic. Deep down, does he really believe he has the right remedies?

B.P. Between Reds and Royals

Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba finally has discovered why his party’s presiding deity so consistently counseled against cooperating with communists.
Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala died an inveterate anti-communist and circumspect constitutional monarchist. As someone who was once a communist, B.P.’s disenchantment with our variant of ideologists – if not the universal ideology per se – may have arisen from what he saw up close and personal. How deep his antipathy for the dictatorship of the proletariat ran no longer matters. How much of the dislike was dictated by Cold War calculations and configurations is similarly irrelevant.
B.P.’s turnaround on the monarchy was no less vivid. From the leader of a party that joined hands with a monarch to usher in democracy and then went on to mount assassination attempts on two other monarchs – albeit failed ones – B.P. propounded the Theory of Two Necks in a Noose. Over time, that concept went on to convey how the Nepali Congress and the crown would swim or sink together.
At the time of B.P.’s death in 1982, the Cold War was in post-détente flux. Internally, the monarchy seemed firmly entrenched in the aftermath of a referendum that validated the partyless system as the preferred polity over the multiparty system.
B.P.’s role in that validation was as significant – if not more – than the 55-percent support the palace-led system garnered among the people. As inexplicable as the outcome was to him, B.P. contended, as a democrat he was bound to accept it. This posture ran counter to the predominant mood in the opposition – including the Nepali Congress – which saw the exercise as heavily rigged in favor of the victor.
B.P. probably only had to recall that the referendum, announced after weeks of often violent and unprecedented student protests, came against the background of the Janata Party government in India, which his allies populated. When the referendum was actually held a year later, the Indian National Congress was back in power.
Personal experience with the Nehru-Gandhi juggernaut over the previous two decades must have convinced B.P. that only clear evidence of massive irregularities in favor of partylessness would allow the opposition to mount a successful challenge to the popular verdict. If such massive rigging had indeed taken place, the panchas were smart enough not to leave fingerprints.
What was also unclear to B.P. was the extent of communist backing for the partyless system in the guise of the ‘active boycott’ launched by the best-organized faction (and forerunners of today’s dominant faction in power). At once, B.P.’s support for a reformed Panchayat also sealed his anti-communist credentials.
One poignant emblem of B.P.’s enduring anti-communism was his refusal to reconsider support for partylessness even when the palace and panchas immediately made it clear that their idea of reform contained no place for the Nepali Congress as an organized force.
Eight years after B.P.’s death, when anti-Panchayat protests went on to threaten the monarchy, his youngest brother, Girija Prasad, held firm as a supporter of a crown that had considered him no worthier than a candidate for cabinet minister. (G.P., we understand, was equally firm on nothing less than deputy prime minister until the first convulsions of the fall of the Berlin Wall arrived in Nepal.)
Under the restored multiparty system, G.P. instantly inherited B.P.’s title as Nepal’s principal Red-baiter. It would take two streams of communists – Marxist-Leninists and Maoists – to command G.P.’s attention. Even then, the palace’s shunt was instrumental to the requisite geo-strategic realignments. When the ultimate push came to shove, the palace recognized the perils of equating the Nepali Congress’ anti-communism with its pro-monarchism.
In contemporary terms, the lesson for the Nepali Congress has been more profound. Alliance with the communists resulted in the Nepali Congress ceding ground to them. Having spitefully ditched the monarchy, Nepal’s premier democratic party discovered the sheer difficulty of going it alone. Marginalization may have enlightened Deuba enough to currently cancel a trip to India. But selective education may not help him draw proper conclusions.
Although politically incorrect, it might be useful for us to ponder whether B.P., had he lived a decade or two longer, would still have been against communists and for the monarchy.

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?

Prostration, Poles And Posturing

The post-China-visit atmosphere was expected to provide a twist to the ‘lampasarbadi’ smear our main opposition leader has splattered on our prime minister.
Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba has indeed amended the slur, but in a surprisingly creative way. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli hasn’t reversed the direction of his bodily incline, according to Deuba. He is now prostrating simultaneously in both directions.
If that imagery has left your head spinning or feet wobbling, consider the way Oli has been using the train and ship metaphors in his recent pronouncements vis-à-vis Nepal’s position between China and India. Our prime minister is least bothered how his words sound as long as he thinks the image they conjure is alluring enough.
Not exactly known for certitude, Deuba insists the Chinese train will never cross the border. Considering how long the mandarins up north have been dangling that carrot – dating back to when it wasn’t even thought technically feasible – it becomes easier to take Deuba at his word.
What Deuba didn’t – but probably wanted to – say may also be closer to the truth: Indian trains could be chugging in here first, and far sooner than anyone thought. Oli should probably stick with ships, you might say.
Still, Deuba’s portrayal of two-directional prostration merits closer perusal. And here, former communist firebrand turned royalist turned independent Radha Krishna Mainali has stepped in to sharpen our view of Oli’s compulsions.
What Mainali, who has burned bridges with the left and right through his independence, said the other day makes some sense amid the general silliness around us.
Oli the man has a profound inferiority complex, according to Mainali, wherein he considers any criticism a personal attack on his abilities. The premier’s public pronouncements seem to suggest someone so sure of himself that he reflexively laughs everyone/everything off. From the way Mainali sees it, Oli uses breeziness and banter to show that he is in control. Of course, packing his cabinet and party committees with loyalists and keeping straight-shooters at bay helps.
Mainali sees Oli’s mindset meshing with the political psychology of a new party whose two principal constituents rushed headlong into unity resolving to iron out their differences later. An assortment of Maoist factions morphed into a formidable party vowing and waging a ‘people’s war’. The Unified Marxist-Leninists emerged from a more generational baseline wherein the older Marxists allowed themselves to be taken over by the more youthful Marxist-Leninists under the fig-leaf of people’s multiparty democracy.
Just as the Maoists are now struggling to wage peace, the Marxist-Leninists have never figured out whether ‘people’s multiparty democracy’ was more of a contradiction or redundancy. That’s probably how we got a new party which has its abbreviation tagged as a full and formal part of its name.
Oli’s problem is that he jointly heads a party of two equals who can’t agree on who’s more equal. Mainali thinks factionalism will worsen in the weeks and months ahead as Pushpa Kamal Dahal becomes a more prominent standard-bearer of the pro-Western faction.
As nominal Oli allies like Madhav Kumar Nepal, Bam Dev Gautam and Subhas Nemwang weigh their prospects, our prime minister would be impelled to fortify himself. Alone, neither the Indians nor the Chinese are likely to ‘patronize’ an Oli faction. Together, they just might – if they happen to see Oli as their best bet vis-à-vis India-China bilateralism on Nepal.
Call it courtship or capitulation, simultaneously facing opposite poles is no easy task for Oli, who probably considers a circus contortionist more comfortably placed. But, then, you do catch Deuba’s drift.

The Optics Are Good. Why Spoil The Atmospherics?

As the going gets tougher for Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, he surely wants to be the toughie who’s getting going. But somewhere things don’t seem to be working.
Sitting atop the government and party with the tightest grip conceivable – at least theoretically – the man is spending an inordinate time in a reactionary mode, i.e., responding to his critics. Not that his parables and allegories have lost any of their characteristic entertainment value. The amusement is getting too addictive.
The optics of Oli’s interfaces with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping are quite attractive. If you can still be a lampasarbadi vis-à-vis our Indian neighbors while you’re virtually dragging a Chinese railway extension into Kathmandu, then it is up to Oli’s critics to show how.
Our prime minister doesn’t seem to be thinking or working that way, though. Take his response to the ‘authoritarianism’ smear hurled by the Nepali Congress. The main opposition party is still struggling to recover from its electoral shock to do anything going forward. The senior leadership is filled with people who want party president Sher Bahadur Deuba to go. The district leaders’ conference, however, punted.
Deuba, for his part, insists that he can’t be blamed for losing to a united communist party. (In that light, Deuba’s claim that Congress leaders who lost in the last election seem to be the loudest ones demanding his scalp should resonate better.)
Instead of seeing the Nepali Congress’ turf war for what it is, Oli finds its necessary to respond to every iteration of the A-word. First, he dismisses the allegation as political hallucination. Then he cautions the Nepali Congress not to expect much from such a futile revitalization slogan. Then the premier sends out his minions to mock the main opposition party for a thinly veiled attempt to gain power through the backdoor.
Granted, Oli has his own worries. The Nepal Communist Party (NCP) isn’t as unified as the new organization makes it out to be. Sneak into any limited gathering where leaders are wont to let their guard down. You hear bitterness and resentment in a multiplicity of hues. And we’re only talking about the erstwhile Marxist-Leninists here.
The former Maoists are no less disenchanted by what they see as a wholesale takeover by the ex-Marxist-Leninists. That might work for top leaders still haunted by the possibility of war-crime trials. Those lower on the rung who fought the People’s War firmly believing that the momentary bad they did would ultimately be for the greater good of the country aren’t thrilled.
If anything, Oli should be facing charges of authoritarianism from within the party. Or maybe that’s what peeves him: an inability to make his critics see things the way his party does in public.
Regardless, the prime minister should be focusing on what he has started. Prime Minister Modi and President Xi seem to be quite content with how Oli’s been balancing his geopolitical act – so far.
If Oli has indeed figured out Nepal’s place between the two Asian behemoths, maybe he should zero in on stabilizing the ground to cope with the vagaries of India-China relations. The Nepali people seem to have given the prime minister the benefit of the doubt on the geopolitical front. Why spoil the atmospherics by looking like you’re unsure of what you’re doing?