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?