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