Our Real Millennium Challenge

Talk of missed opportunities.
Just imagine if we had the kind of patience and resolve on Kalapani the Indians have demonstrated in the latest iteration of the long-running dispute. We chose to squander our national energies on tangents, while the Indians zeroed in on the issue, alas, to oblivion.
Today, with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government on the defensive domestically and regionally on the question of citizenship, we might have at least stood a chance of securing an appointment for our ‘special envoy’.
Indian opinion-makers – particularly those reflecting official opinion – have consistently dismissed the Kalapani protests as part of seasonal outbursts of anti-Indianism our national psyche needs to survive. Unfortunately for us, today India feels vindicated. New Delhi is now blaming us for allowing anti-Indian elements to cross the border and fan unrest. (Translation: learn to take care of the territory you own first.)
Deliberate or otherwise, Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s retweeting of Indian opposition leader Sonia Gandhi’s searing message on the controversy has pushed us deeper into the pit. No worries, though. We’ve done what we do best and moved on: to the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) grant the Americans are begging us to take.
The Nepali Congress sees the endorsement of the relevant agreement as its single-point agenda for the winter session of parliament. The main opposition party probably thinks it’s being responsible here. It was during its stint in power that the two countries made an official commitment to take the money. However, the ruling Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) is demurring. Not because it is prejudiced against its predecessor. The CPN still can’t figure out whether the MCC grant is or isn’t part of the Indo-Pacific Strategy (IPS) Nepal has or hasn’t joined under its watch.
The head honcho of the Millennium Challenge Account Nepal, a body the government formed to eventually manage the programmes, has urged the government and parties in Parliament to endorse the agreement, arguing that it is not part of the IPS. Maybe not officially. But, then, China’s Belt and Road Initiative hardly has ‘debt trap’ stamped all over it, either.
Let’s assume the impossible: that the MCC grant has no overt or covert military/strategic strings attached. Does it mean that it is truly free of considerations that could constrain Nepal’s sovereign options in any shape, manner or form? Does it make sense for us to take the $500 million because it is supposed to be free? Haven’t we learned from the past how more stringent conditions for grants are than for interest-based loans? Should we be committed to spending $150 million on our own on the inane premise that energy and infrastructure connectivity would boost regional peace and prosperity?
How did Nepal suddenly qualify for the program – as astute observers such as Dipak Gyawali have pointed out – after having been told for years not to raise its hopes? In view of the scorecard publicly available, is the money actually free? The three broad conditions of eligibility: commitment to ruling justly, encouraging economic freedom, and investing in people may sound innocuous enough. Let’s not even pretend to comprehend what might be inherent in the font, size and spacing of the fine print.
Moreover, how unreliable could the disbursement tap become amid divergences in perceptions of compliance? You can get a fair idea from the fact that Nepal gets passing grades in corruption today. What extraneous considerations may or may not sway the evaluator on the other indicators?
This is not to say that offers of assistance from the Chinese, Indians or anybody else are somehow more benign. We need to figure out what’s good or bad for us ourselves – regardless of whether it is free or for a fee. We shouldn’t stop trying just because we haven’t been good at doing that so far.

Look Around And Look Within

If you expected the recent by-election results to force the Nepali Congress to sit up and think, well, there has been a spasm of sorts. Except, all the factions have decided to dig in their heels deeper.
The main opposition party has developed an odd capacity for observation. It sees its loss in Kaski-2, the contest most approximating a referendum on the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) government, as a victory, insisting that local dynamics played out there. The Nepali Congress’ victory in Dharan’s mayoral contest, where local issues did predominate, is projected as having national implications.
Where party president Sher Bahadur Deuba sees sabotage, his principal rival Ram Chandra Poudel sees staid stewardship. While the lesser factional chieftains have competing interpretations, they are united in singling out the incompetence of the party president. And the Nepali Congress wonders why fewer and fewer Nepalis are taking the party seriously.
Deuba thinks appeasing Poudel – in full glare of the media – can rejuvenate the party. Poudel still sees rejectionism of the status quo as the roadmap. In the process, the party is rapidly squandering the capital history has bestowed on it.
The Nepali Congress’ current strategy of letting the Nepal Communist Party government dig itself into a deeper hole might have made sense if the main opposition party were less crude in exhibiting its infighting. As the man who headed the party to its worst electoral defeat, Deuba could have taken moral responsibility and resigned as president in 2017. But, then, Deuba was elected by his party convention.
Moreover, there is a point in Deuba’s refusal to succumb to the morality imposed by people who lost in the general election, when he was among the few party leaders who won. Krishna Prasad Sitaula served the party’s purposes in a specific context which does not exist today. The Koirala cousins need to conclude their internecine battles before they can hope to rejuvenate the party. Minor scions like Prakash Man Singh and Bimalendra Nidhi need to do much more than switch camps in the afterglow of family legacy.
If the factionalism is too deep to paper over, then maybe Nepali Congress leaders should stop making public pronouncements on seminal subjects. One day the party is in favor of restoring Nepal’s Hindi identity, the next day it refuses to entertain advocates of that agenda at a key meeting. Soon thereafter general secretary Shashank Koirala comes out loud and clear in favor of revisiting republicanism and federalism as well before claiming the next day that he was misquoted.
If history is what drives the party, why not draw the right lessons. The Nepali Congress cannot out-left the left any better than it can out-flank the right. It is in the right place and at the right time. When it had perceptive leaders, the party firmly stood by constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy in good times as well as bad. It did so not out of personal predilections or prejudices but because it believed it was in the nation’s ultimate interest.
Today, that conviction is maturing among the masses amid a spontaneous appreciation of our collective values, attitudes, needs and expectations. Yet this is the only part of Nepali Congress history the party continues to repudiate.

Marveling At Our Mawkish Instinct For Survival

Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s discernably declining health has led to rival theories on succession.
The first – and quite peculiar – school involves the appointment of Bidya Devi Bhandari as head of government. Whether she would step down – quite literally – from the presidency to take a more active role in leading the country or hold the two offices concurrently is unclear. Either way, it would mark something unforeseen by our Constitution. (Not that the humble basic law of the land stands in the way of anything these days.)
As trial balloons go, advocates of this line – albeit no one is openly identifiable with its genesis yet – contend that it is part of the innovation Nepali politics has been compelled to undergo as part of our own circumstances. Moreover, since Nepalis tend to know what they do not want better than what they do, eternal experimentation alone can be the most encouraging way forward.
This ostensible effort to empower Bhandari is also a clear attempt to checkmate Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s chances to return to the premiership. Oli’s presumed successor – presumed most strongly perhaps by himself – has been making his own moves. After skipping what was deemed a crucial visit to China – citing reasons so amply varied to be equally plausible – Dahal has been amplifying his contention Nepal would be internationalizing the Kalapani dispute with India at its own peril.
While that would certainly be music to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ears, it might not be enough to salvage Dahal’s prime ministerial candidacy from that end. And it’s not if Dahal is about to publicly chastise Oli for attempting to send a special envoy to Modi without ascertaining whether the Indian premier would receive him. If Oli and the special envoy – Madhav Kumar Nepal – both have eggs on their face, Dahal surely doesn’t see the urgency of extending facial tissues. He has more pressing matters.
The crucial first party meeting Dahal convened after acquiring executive powers as co-chair of the NCP wasn’t too solid on either symbolism or substance for him. The fact that key members stayed away didn’t give Dahal a strong start. The futility of waiting for biology to honor his prime ministerial power-sharing deal with Oli having been so unexpectedly exposed, Dahal can hope for the Bhandari experiment to fail. That might even help to materialize his long-held desire to become executive president of Nepal.
Ordinarily, the Bhandari option would have merited all-round derision if not outright dismissal. We’re here today because a constitutional monarch empowered by the then-constitution to safeguard the basic law dared to assume executive powers to conduct local and national elections and hand over power to an elected government in three years. A ceremonial president taking over a government enjoying a near-two-thirds majority is something that can happen only when there are too many contenders in the ruling party cancelling out one another. The fact that Dahal couldn’t place himself as the front-runner among the NCP’s list of ex-premiers emboldened a former deputy prime minister, Bam Dev Gautam, to advance himself as the best candidate.
The prime minister is sick, the speaker is behind bars and the chief justice is entangled in the contradictions of the judiciary. Yet all is well, we are told. Maybe it is. After all, who is to say that Oli can’t or won’t name an executive/co-premier as he strengthens his survival instincts, politically and physically?

If You Can’t Beat ’Em …

After much grousing and groaning over China’s eternally expanding footprint in Nepal since 2006, Indian officialdom grudgingly acknowledged its inability to match Beijing’s deep pockets. The Indian refrain became that New Delhi should focus on such advantages as political, social, cultural, religious links with Nepal.
While more and more Indians privately acknowledge their government’s role in smoothing China’s path in Nepal, they understandably abhor making a public show of compunction. After all, you would have to acknowledge the profound irony behind the campaign to oust the monarchy for being excessively pro-Chinese. Yet democracy being such an enormous fig leaf, open-ended experimentation in self-defeating desolation continues to provide smug satisfaction to its architects.
What is also palpable of late is the new phase the Indian establishment has entered in its reconciliation with the reality of China’s growing presence in Nepal. According to the new thinking, Chinese-built infrastructure in Nepal would actually be in India’s interest. The latest spokesman for this school of thought is Maharaj Krishna Rasgotra, a former Indian ambassador to Nepal who went on to serve as his country’s foreign secretary.
Instead of getting worked up about Nepal turning to China for travel and transit solutions, Rasgotra counseled at a public function the other day, India should welcome it. “If at all China does build a railway line from Lhasa to Kathmandu, it could someday be connected to the line that India is taking from Raxaul to Kathmandu. And if we have, in the meantime, come up with a practical definition of the Line of Actual Control, the railway line could be extended right through Sarnath and Gaya, to Bangalore and Hyderabad and even connect the ports on the west coast,” Rasgotra suggested, emphasizing the possible emergence of economic hubs along the transit route.
Rasgotra was speaking after receiving the Professor M.L. Sondhi Prize for International Politics 2018 in New Delhi. Sondhi was among the rare Indian academics who continually emphasized in 1989-1990 the need for understanding Nepal’s compulsions in seeking to bolster security relations with China, instead of embarking full speed on a punitive course that would ultimately end up alienating the Nepali people.
A close confidant of Indira Gandhi and her Congress Party, Rasgotra in his latest speech was full of praise for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s diplomatic skills. Thus, it shouldn’t be too surprising that the thrust of his comments should comport with the foreign policy vision being articulated by External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar.
In a recent speech in Singapore, Jaishankar argued: “India’s diplomatic agenda has broadened considerably, as indeed have its partners in those endeavors. We share with the international community the objective that a multi-polar world should have a multi-polar Asia at its core. And to ensure that, India needs to follow an approach of working with multiple partners on different agendas. Obviously, they would each have their importance and priority.”
While the theme of Jaishankar’s speech was represented as ‘beyond non-alignment’, some audiences might be inclined to see the emerging doctrine as an attempt at being everything to everybody. Indeed, leaving quarters as distinct as Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo and Brussels in perpetual suspense would require enough dexterity and skill to qualify the endeavor as a foreign policy school in itself.
Deep pockets India may not have, but no one can accuse it of having a shallow imagination. Might China balk at India’s desire to free-ride on Beijing-built infrastructure in Nepal or band together?

Grappling With Realities On The Ground And Under

As sob stories go, this one came to a joyful end quite swiftly.
Barely had Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal lamented how his lifelong contributions were likely to go unrecognized in death that Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli leapt to comfort him. In exchange for letting him retain the premiership for the remainder of his full five-year term, Oli agreed to allow Dahal to wield executive authority in the party. A dry-eyed and bouncy Dahal now says the road ahead is all clear.
The rest of the country can keep scratching their heads over how the least-tainted ministers ended up getting the boot from the Oli cabinet while the most controversial – and publicly unpleasant – ones got to keep their jobs. Or whether this latest attempt to manage the factional equations within the NCP would amount to much in a party that is united only in name. The operative fact is that Dahal gets to decide what goes on in the party, provided he can stand straight long enough on the infinitely fluid ground under him.
Clearly, Oli had little to lose in this trade-off. He can no longer hide the fact that he is too incapacitated to hold the premiership with much steadiness. Still, the choice between the head of the party and head of government was a no-brainer. It’s not as if Nepal is the People’s Republic of China or the former Soviet Union in terms of its communist institutional evolution.
Yet Oli might have a more sinister motive. A Dahal preoccupied with the internal fractiousness of the NCP animated by the presence of two other former prime ministers in the tent is one Oli would certainly like. The challenge of managing Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal amid all those minor – but no less maddening – satraps is in a different league altogether from contending with often pesky albeit pusillanimous ministers much more reliant on the prime minister’s pleasure and prerogative.
Amid the approaching party convention, Dahal can be expected to be more detached from the premiership. That development might even speed up Oli’s medical recovery sufficiently in time for the next election. If not, well it won’t be Oli’s problem anymore.
To be sure, Dahal is not oblivious to the spot Oli has put him in. Given the alternative of a further diminution of his role, the former supreme commander of the ‘people’s war’ can easily feign contentment with the latest arrangement. Like most agreements Dahal has entered into, this one is an interim step until the ground realities shift next.
The imponderables abound before the people. Would Dahal feel compelled to abide by the current power-sharing deal should Oli’s health falter. If Dahal sees himself as the natural successor should that happen, might Oli or enough people who matter necessarily share Dahal’s claim? And, most importantly, should he get the premiership, would Dahal be ready to relinquish the party presidency?
A gentlemen’s agreement is as good as the gentleness of the motives of the men who enter into it. But, then, perhaps we have become too used to the ground defining reality to be unduly disheartened.

Trapped Between Time And Space

If events in Nepal tend to move in clock-like precision, they also simultaneously defy other laws like those of proportionality. In other words, we are caught between time and space.
The Kalapani controversy – shortened to its generic catchiness also to avoid the cartographic complexities involving the other two terrains of Limpiyadhura and Lipulekh – was not on our minds when soothsayers and politicians warned of a post-Dasain/Tihar conflagration against the existing political order.
Still, Newton’s Third Law prepared us for an uneasy aftermath of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s state visit. Caught between the Belt and Road Initiative and the Indo-Pacific Strategy, Nepalis also had to contend with the fact that Xi arrived after informal sessions with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in southern India where Nepal was said to have figured in some way. This detail starts making greater sense after you recall how studiously Chinese leaders once delinked those itineraries.
India’s new political map – which triggered our latest outburst of patriotic fervor – did not change that country’s disputed status quo with Nepal. That reality may have prepared some Indians to digest the ensuing Nepali opprobrium. If their real prize was the concurrent anti-China protests – the most serious in Nepal since 1967 – forbearance has paid off.
The extent of the land the Chinese are being accused of encroaching on pales in comparison to India’s infringements. The equivalence of Nepal’s two giant neighbors as equal-opportunity plunders may have energized those Indians who roundly reject the Wuhan Spirit/Chennai Connection roadmap in favor of the Indo-Pacific Strategy and the Quad. Still, those grinning the widest are constituencies farther afield who fear being edged out of the grand succession struggle in Tibet creeping upon us.
If Nepalis seemed to have a better chance of extracting payments for India’s leasing Kalapani et al than securing an outright return of those territories, the former prospect can only recede in direct proportion to the theatrics and tantrums surrounding the latter. (Just imagine how rich our coffers might have been had we set a price on the cusecs flowing south instead of just grandstanding on Tanakpur/Mahakali.)
Our territorial dispute with India has defied a bureaucratic/political solution to the point where it may have now become moot. When Nepal Communist Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ advised us against the hastiness of internationalizing the issue, he was not shooting from the hip. The street, that other arena of practical action, is bound to lose its clout as the financial taps turn dry. Even the most profligate donors know where and when to put their money.
Locked or linked by it, fate has inextricably entwined Nepal with land. The only ‘political’ solution that can be conceived is the return of the territories as part of a grand bargain masquerading as a gesture of goodwill. Given our accumulated experience, who’s to say the solution might not end up being worse than the problem? This may be a good time to delve deeper into why Xi might have chosen to coarsen the overall cordiality of his visit with that ‘crush bodies, shattered bones’ comment.

Dark Waters, Darker Clouds

Map courtesy: bordernepal.wordpress.com

An upsurge of patriotism has united Nepalis after India unveiled an updated version of its political map. By incorporating the Nepali regions of Limpiyadhura, Kalapani and Lipulekh firmly within the Indian Union, New Delhi has reignited a territorial dispute that has been smoldering for nearly six decades.
While this is not the first time New Delhi has done so, there are some novel twists. The dissemination of a full-fledged official map has placed the dispute squarely in the Nepali public sphere. With China and Pakistan already involved as disputants in this latest instance of Indian cartographic legerdemain, Nepal’s grievances have acquired clear regional ramifications.
What next? Much will depend on how Nepalis address the issue. The familiar calumny that King Mahendra bartered the territory in exchange for Indian support for his active rule following the abolition of multiparty democracy has returned to the debate. There is little value in beating that drum apart from, say, foiling attempts to revive the monarchy as the defender of Nepali nationhood. Even there, the ploy may have run its course. The fact that successive elected governments have failed to lift a finger seeking a return of the territories has forced Nepalis to probe deeper into the context and circumstances surrounding the dispute. Given the character of the regime circa 1962 – when India is said to have begun occupying Kalapani in the context of its war with China – only one Nepali personage could best address the issue. He departed the world in 1972. The credibility of anyone claiming to speak on behalf of King Mahendra or his regime is bound to be compromised by the profound partisanship surrounding the monarch.
New Delhi cannot be expected to come clean without addressing the ‘quid pro quo’. Even if King Mahendra had bartered away the territories, the fact remains that India was the beneficiary. Given New Delhi’s consistent claims of having championed Nepali democracy, Kalapani is not a can of worms it would want to open. The wholesale rejection of the Kali River as identified as the western border of Nepal under the 1816 Sugauli Treaty would put India on a slippery slope. That treaty, which Nepal signed with British India following its war-induced dismemberment, is in a league of its own. India cannot contemplate picking and choosing its provisions without tipping the balance in favor of (Greater?) Nepal.
Despite the controversy surrounding the text of the Nepali government’s response to the publication of the Indian map, Kathmandu has made a solid assertion that it considers Kalapani as part of Nepal.  Our Foreign Ministry statement added that “any unilateral actions along the Nepal-India border will be unacceptable” since the two foreign secretaries have already been assigned by the Nepal-India Joint Commission to find a solution on the unresolved border disputes in consultation with border experts.
New Delhi, too, has accepted that latter stance. While insisting that its new map has in no manner revised India’s boundary with Nepal, a Ministry of External Affairs spokesman also conceded that the delineation exercise with Nepal is ongoing under the existing mechanism.
So far, so good. Beyond the official channels, however, there is enough potential for mischief on both sides. Within Nepal, the temptation to play politics has proved to be irresistible, especially at a time when unity of purpose is required the most. As alluring as one-upmanship can be in these politically charged times, it can hardly matter which Nepali leader raised the issue with which Indian counterpart unless government-to-government channels were activated to follow up on a solution. Nor can we afford to subvert our cause by obsessing with the fact that every political faction across party lines has been complicit in this national injury.
On the Indian side, the potential for malice has taken a new turn with the assertion that Kathmandu this time is somehow animated by third-party vested interests. Then there is the attempt by sections of the Indian media to play up the angle that China has encroached upon Nepali territory.
Granted, New Delhi has opened multiple breaches with its new map, and it must have contemplated ways of navigating them. Nepal’s stand is rooted in its understanding of the Sugauli Treaty and its delineation of its western border. If questions of ‘ridgelines’ or the ‘origin’ of the Kali River have emerged, they have done so subsequently in a way that do not impact Nepal’s understanding of and adherence to the Sugauli Treaty.
How Nepali territory ended up in Sino-Indian bilateral agreement on trade in 2015 needs to be taken up separately and together with India and China. There is already too much going on to muddy the waters externally to obfuscate the issue and present Nepal with a fait accompli. Excessive public jingoism at home at the cost of patient bilateral – and, if need be, international – diplomacy could prove extremely counterproductive.

Buyer’s Remorse, Seller’s Restiveness

We’re almost midway through the five-year term of what should ordinarily have been Nepal’s most powerful elected government. Yet, our best-case scenario is avoiding either a mid-term election or a split in the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP).
Certitude amid uncertainties is a treacherous trait in the best of times. We may not know how poor Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s health really is. We do know that he is fiercely determined to prove the non-existence of that much-ballyhooed premier-sharing deal with NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’. Or, if it does exist, establish its irrelevance.
Dahal, for his part, is so remorseful of his decision to merge his Maoist Center with the erstwhile Unified Marxist-Leninists that he has started blaming everyone else for going along with the unification sham just because the two chairmen happened to jump off the cliff holding hands.
In his intensifying stupor, Dahal may continue to ponder the extent of his ideological bona fides and invite the sympathetic banter of his one-time lieutenant Baburam Bhattarai to our collective merriment. Deep inside, the political class knows how deep the rot runs. Although they might not be quivering publicly, they do recognize the perils of taking their placid posture for granted.
The promise of change was always nebulous. The outcome has been dear and dreadful. New taxes have been levied to fund and facilitate additional layers of the federalism-driven political/administrative machinery, with little to show for the people. Secularism is being promoted as affirmative action for a religion that has been the farthest from our roots. Republicanism has spawned neo-royalism with a pomp and splendor beating the ancien regime.
If ‘new Nepal’ is all about demolishing the old only to resurrect its worst attributes, then it’s scarcely surprising how tedious and taxing the show has become. As the Krishna Bahadur Mahara case now seems to suggest, external investors in our enterprise are doing their math. The former speaker may be their first defaulter, but chances are he is not their last.
The greatest – and perhaps only – thing going for the ruling class is the TINA factor. To be sure, there is no alternative – yet. With the three pillars of the status quo tottering so critically, however, total collapse cannot be predicated on what may or may not rise from the debris.
Today, more and more Nepalis are asking themselves whether it was worth it all. All those new compromises to protect the awful old ones. The headlong quest for inclusivity that has risked erasing our identity. Then there’s the temerity of people like Dahal and Bhattarai, who want to lead another ‘revolution’ but refuse to recognize how badly they have lost credibility the first time around.
There is much more than buyer’s remorse involved here. People are regretting their decision to take what was thrown at them in the name of hope and change. But Nepalis, like people everywhere, aren’t about to kick themselves in the teeth for having been fooled so brazenly. And certainly not when they have such ready targets. That’s what scares the political class most about ex-king Gyanendra Shah’s Tihar salvo – because he spoke from experience.

So Not All External Affections Are Created Equal, Eh?

As Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli appears tangibly and temperamentally re-energized by the visit of Chinese President Xi Jinping, the fraternity of former prime ministers in his Nepal Communist Party (NCP) is acting out in different ways.
NCP co-chair, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, has started becoming malleable in all directions, suggesting that politics might take any turn. While Jhal Nath Khanal has been circumspect in his appraisal of the Chinese President’s visit and its implications, Madhav Kumar Nepal is ostensibly overcome with a fresh burst of patriotism.
If Dahal felt snubbed during the Xi sojourn – as is being suggested from some quarters, including those close to him – the NCP co-chair’s comments in the aftermath certainly make it look so. One moment, Dahal yearns for an alliance with the Nepali Congress, even to the point of dismissing his party’s massive legislative majority. The next, Dahal wants to launch another rebellion, almost oblivious to how low his stock has plummeted on that floor.
After that kindergarten brawl with Oli a couple of months ago during what was supposed to have been a warm send-off to the prime minister to his hospital in Singapore, Madhav Nepal has sought spiritedly to partner with Dahal in hopes of polishing his prime ministerial prospects. With Dahal mired in his own morbidity, though, Madhav Nepal has found a refuge that tends to be associated more with, well, scoundrels.
Following Xi’s departure, Madhav Nepal, as the head of the Department of Foreign Affairs of the NCP, exulted that Nepal proved its caliber to host the head of the state of one of the most powerful countries of the world. The Chinese President’s visit had helped enable an environment conducive to investment and augmented international attention and concern toward the country, the NCP senior leader added.
Merely days after issuing that formal NCP review, Madhav Nepal warned – not too cryptically –against the abundance of affection that might flow from our northern neighbor. He didn’t have such qualms about the surfeit of India’s love in 2005-2006, perhaps because he probably still believes the 12 Point Agreement was among the finest examples of positive foreign intervention.
Indeed, Madhav Nepal was among the most prominent people who described the 1990 Constitution as one of the best in the world, until, of course, it wasn’t. Surely, he had a vested interest there, considering that he was among the principal drafters. By that standard, we can safely assume that the ex-premier hasn’t seen enough to change his mind on the extent and impact of India’s tenderness coinciding People’s Movement II. (And let’s not broach the issue of ‘vested interests’ on this count.)
Balancing the interests of all major nations with our own national interests is a key challenge, Madhav Nepal said the other day. Nepal should maintain relations with neighboring countries ensuring the principles of independence, dignity and non-interference.
No nitpicking with such noble sentiments. Still, that shouldn’t stop you from asking why Madhav Nepal thought it fit to offer such erudition only after Xi’s visit? Can’t just be tit-for-tat for Xi’s emotive – and even excruciating – enumeration of the qualities of a good communist, could it?

Xi Said, We Said

Cutting through the customary platitudes communicated by both sides, Chinese President Xi Jinping’s two-day state visit to Nepal has been eventful in some novel ways.
Capacity, cordiality, connectivity, containment, and commitment stood out as some of the catchwords during public pronouncements, ostensibly broadening the scope and content of the bilateral discourse. Beijing’s aspirations in and expectations from Kathmandu found suave and discreet expressions in Xi’s public engagements. More substantive issues must have come up during private discussions, including ones both sides wished to keep secret.
What was most remarkable was the robust and candid discussions surrounding Nepal-China ties at the broader public level. Smashing the staid parameters of China being a vital counterweight to India’s traditional vexing preponderance, Nepal’s relations with its northern neighbor were finally being discussed on their own merits.
The Nepal Communist Party (NCP)-led government initially seemed tempted to portray Xi’s visit – the first by a Chinese President to Nepal in nearly two dozen years – as an ideological vindication of its existence, as if its massive popular mandate were not enough.
However, the government and the ruling party wisely acknowledged the imperative of shunning such parochialism in the interest of advancing Nepal-China relations at the broadest possible level. Technically a member of the ruling coalition, Baburam Bhattarai adroitly kept urging Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s government not to go overboard, as Nepal still needed to maintain strong and friendly relations with India and the United States. (One wonders whether he might have also been speaking from his own experience as prime minister in early 2012 when he hosted then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao).
Leading an increasingly vocal constituency, the opposition Nepali Congress consistently counseled careful deliberation before embarking on new projects, particularly under the Belt and Road Initiative, lest the country lurches headlong toward the quagmire of eternal indebtedness. It would be easy to fault the main opposition party for inopportunely espousing third-party talking points, but that would not diminish the validity of the underlying argument, especially amid its pronounced global expression.
On the Chinese railway to Nepal – that unmistakable emblem of the promise as well as the practicability of bilateral ties – the joint statement said a feasibility study would be commissioned. That’s not quite a snub to the Oli government, as the prime minister and his key cohorts ceased hyping the imminence of the project after Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi issued her not-so-subtle public admonition a few months ago.
To be sure, the train from China has embodied the notion of breaking the Himalayan barrier through technological prowess ever since Chairman Mao Zedong brought up the idea as distant promise in a meeting with King Birendra in Beijing in the early 1970s (in exchange for Kathmandu immediately acting against CIA-trained-and-backed Tibetan insurgents based in Mustang, one might add.)
That Beijing eventually developed the capability to bring that train to the rugged terrain of Tibet did not necessarily mean the tracks would cross the border immediately.  It took a while for Nepalis to recognize that technical, commercial and strategic viability takes on a different meaning altogether for the Chinese – or anyone else, for that matter – when we are talking about another country. That we have done so should bode well for us and ultimately our relations with China.

Scrappy Strands Of A Shameful Story

This is not a defense of former Speaker Krishna Bahadur Mahara. Nor is it an attempt to divert attention from the despicable crime he has been accused of. It is an effort to see whether there is more to the story than meets the eye.
A man who has maintained a public record of probity and propriety is accused of raping a women employee of the parliament secretariat who is a former foot soldier of the Maoist rebellion. The Nepal Communist Party – almost erasing factional fault-lines – demands Mahara’s scalp.
Mahara drags his feet, but to little avail. He must go – and does. By then, in a bizarre twist, the accuser recants her story, now even portraying the guilty as a guardian. The accuser’s marital life is destroyed while Mahara’s professional one is undoubtedly in tatters. How the case has impacted the ex-speaker's family is largely a private affair. The legal process has been activated and must take its course, nevertheless.
That’s that, is it? It shouldn’t be. There must be more to the story.
Why the alacrity to do away with Mahara? The allegations around this time nine years ago over the leaked audiotape in which Mahara was heard soliciting money from a Chinese operative to buy legislators ostensibly to form a new government was far more damaging to the country – even treasonous, perhaps. But the Maoists circled the wagon and induced the wider political fraternity to do the same. Mahara went on to assume greater political responsibilities.
Is this time different because of – to borrow the lexicon of the American liberal/left – the seriousness of the allegation? Or is it because the accused the head of the supreme legislature? Or both -- and much more?
Maybe a government under fire for its growing anarchic tendencies needed a public relations elixir. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli and his ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ must know that the questions lingering from the Mahara affair are too stark to let the government claim much credit – even if Mahara turns out to be guilty as accused.
Maybe Mahara’s speakership is the reason, but from another angle. He has long been the public face of the Maoists, having led the first peace talks with the state. Mahara dominated the international media when ‘Prachanda’ was a shadowy creature. Since the Maoists entered mainstream politics, Mahara served in eight of the dozen or so governments.
Soft-spoken and well-informed, he seems to have enjoyed the trust of the Indians, Chinese, Americans and other stakeholders. Sure, his private life – like that of most public figures – was the subject of tawdry talk. Through discretion and deliberation, he remained secure where others stumbled. During party fissures and fusions alike, he studiously avoided rocking the boat. During many raucous sessions of parliament, Mahara could easily have lost his cool. His meticulous yet equally mundane – conduct alienated both sides of the aisle.
Now, let’s suppose that our political order is on the cusp of convulsion – as most of us have been saying. No matter how precipitously the hammer was to fall, there is little doubt that the multiparty system would suffer. Republicanism, secularism and federalism are the issues in contention.
In such a scenario, the speaker would likely retain his role, a la Tara Nath Ranabhat in a different context and era. Did someone rock that boat? Or, put in another way, what if the boat got rocked while Mahara thought he was conducting business as usual after hours? Just asking.

Fraternal Ties Fraught With Frightening Thoughts

He’s really messing with us, right?
The memorandum of understanding signed between Nepal Communist Party (NCP) and the Communist Party of China (CPC) on establishing fraternal ties has triggered an array of suspicions and speculations. Beijing has tried to allay those misgivings, but almost with deliberate tepidity.
NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ – the man assumed to have taken many of Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s party responsibilities – has also borrowed a key Oli personality trait: speaking allegorically. One moment it’s the chicken-versus-eagle parable about the NCP’s present and future. Before we even started scratching our heads, Dahal affirmed he would not rest until the NCP became the Nepali people’s only political party.
Forget the monarchy, such impenetrable profundity would be enough to stir the spirits of the Ranas, Mallas, Lichhchavis, Kiratis and everyone preceding them in the bygone.
Ordinarily, the people wouldn’t bother too much about political fraternizing. We all tend to hang out more and more with people we agree with. Institutionally, the Nepali Congress’s links with Socialist International gave it vital international legitimacy. (Although not enough to prevent the chairman of the Rastriya Panchayat from leading the Nepali delegation to the International Parliamentary Union.)
But training Nepali comrades in the virtues and wisdom of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era? Forgive our ignorance, but the only thing new the incumbent Chinese President is trying to do is break the term limit imposed by Deng Xiaoping.
Now, Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi has made it clear that while Xi Jinping Thought does provide a new underpinning for, among other things, global governance, Beijing does not seek to impose its political ideology on any country. Well, probably not.
Still, the context and coincidences are too chilling. With the swiftness of a magician’s wand, Nepal’s two major communist factions that were once set on obliterating the other decided to join hands ahead of parliamentary elections in 2017. If there was a magician anywhere, it sure seemed like s/he was domiciled across the Himalayas.
The promise of unity was enough to allow the two factions to jointly win a majority in parliament, and subsequently formalize their unity. Since assuming power, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s government has worked unapologetically toward abridging civil liberties as well as freedom of speech and expression. During this same period, communist luminaries representing both the erstwhile Marxist-Leninist and Maoist strands have been praising the Chinese political system as one worthy of emulation.
Dahal, having graduated from co-chair to de facto executive chairman of the NCP, has brought back some of the ‘people’s war’-era radicalism in his rhetoric. Even the seemingly innocuous words he uses are scarcely reassuring in context. For example, Dahal says the Oli government is not in ‘favor’ of ‘controlling’ the press, all the while signaling an intent to establish a one-party state.
What are the Chinese up to? Sure, they have been seeking a more forceful assertion of Nepali commitment to upholding Beijing’s interests here. The politburo up north might not be terribly interested in Nepal as part of their usual agenda. But it’s fair to assume they have Nepal in mind whenever the issue of the Dalai Lama’s death/succession comes up. Also, we can’t be that far away from their deliberations on China’s relations with India, the US-led Indo-Pacific Strategy and the Himalayan front of the containment/encirclement threat.
Now, those political managers certainly wouldn’t want to honor Nepal with a Xi visit in exchange for nothing. Training Nepali communists – those in power, at that – on Xi Jinping Thought might be deemed as a big-enough fig leaf to serve as quid pro quo. After all, Xi has been dangling the prospect of a visit for far too long that Nepalis have prepared themselves to believe in it when they see it happen.
But, then, might the Chinese be up to something else? Maybe this snake-scorpion-frog equilibrium has become so tedious that they have decided to make a move in anticipation of the responses of the two other protagonists?
So, no, Dahal may not be exactly messing with us. But he sure seems to be having some fun while he’s at it.

It’s Not What You Say, It’s What We Hear

Did our head of state publicly make fun of the way the leader of the opposition speaks?
A spokesman for President Bidya Bhandari insists that she was merely commenting on the venue’s poor public address system. In his characteristic magnanimity, Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba says he isn’t offended even if Bhandari had indeed dissed him.
The episode took Maila Baje back to the aftermath of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation summit held in Kathmandu in early January 2002. Then prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba had declared a state of emergency and deployed the military against the Maoist rebels. The Nepali Congress was still united and Deuba was on professional, if not entirely pleasant, terms with party president Girija Prasad Koirala.
At one point, Koirala felt comfortable enough to tell his one-time protégé that he should have addressed the South Asian summit in Nepali, as his English speech pattern was near-incomprehensible. Deuba instantly responded: “My Nepali is scarcely better, Girijababu.”
Not that Deuba is always able to let things go so easily. When he gets mad, he really blows the gasket. But, then, during such times, he is more likely be operating ‘under influence’, as they say. Broadly speaking, this innate tendency toward self-deprecation has helped Deuba professionally as well as personally.
So why haven’t we been able to shrug off this Bhandari-Deuba thing? Maybe because it is symptomatic of our political times. What matters more is what the president, prime minister, or any other public figure is perceived to have said. Bhandari’s words are there in the ether for all of us to see. So are her facial expressions and physical gestures.
There is a palpable feeling that the political order has given the people the right to speak their minds but also guaranteed the leaders’ right not to listen. Even then, freedom of expression is being curtailed on one pretext or the other. We can debate ad nauseum how valid or widespread such popular perceptions are. That’s immaterial. The fact is that it is there. And since it will be a convenient rallying point for every kind of discontent that is bound to grow, the perception, too, can only grow.
In defense of the president, public speaking is an art not everyone is naturally proficient in. Improvisation comes easily to a rare few. Others must have in reserve a recovery strategy, if they are intent on taking the risk. A president already under fire for extravagant pomp and ceremony should know better than to admire the preceding speaker for the applause he received while complaining of the incomprehensibility of his content.
Moreover, who nitpicks with the sound system at a solemn function held in remembrance of such an iconic personality as Ganesh Man Singh, especially when the audience hasn’t complained? True, Deuba’s tirades at her government must have become too unpalatable to the president, but it’s not her job to defend it. For one thing, why relitigate the ‘my government’ controversy that’s barely been put to rest? For another, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli is far more adept – institutionally and individually – in defending his government.
The people may be full of prejudices – nothing personal here, Madam President. It’s a hazard of our touchy-feely times. The last thing a public figure should do is give the impression of fueling those prejudices – unless, of course, there’s something else going on here.

When Words Collide So G(eog)raphically

Our former Fierce Once has stepped in it again.
What instigated this latest expression of geopolitical acuity? Or, to put it less charitably, was this the time to ingratiate himself to the Chinese so obsequiously?
In terms of burnishing his credentials as the next prime minister, Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ might have seen the meeting with visiting Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi as too good an opportunity to miss.
While briefing the dignitary on his new role as the executive head of the NCP in all but name, Dahal could easily have been carried away by recent developments in the country and outside. The shakiness of the existing Nepali political order, the dampening of the spirit of Wuhan between the Asian giants and the sole superpower’s penchant for perpetuating perplexity did provide a somber backdrop. Amid all this, might Dahal have attempted to explain all the wonderful ways in which he would steer relations with China as premier?
If so, it would not have been out of place for the US-led Indo-Pacific Strategy to enter the discussions. Dahal has been quoted as assuring Wang that “Nepal firmly adheres to the policy of non-alignment, disagrees with the so-called Indo-Pacific Strategy, and opposes any attempt to contain or thwart China’s development.”
Dahal’s allies insist that he merely reiterated his party’s line on the US-led strategy and its implications for Nepal’s neighborhood. Still, the NCP co-chair could have been more sensitive to the fact that his party also leads a government that has had a hard time confirming or denying Nepal’s precise place in the Indo-Pacific Strategy.
Is that lapse sufficient reason to pursue Dahal? After all, the brouhaha is based on a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs news release on the Wang-Dahal meeting. One key point of contention is that the release used the antecedent so-called – without quotes – to describe Dahal’s characterization of the Indo-Pacific Strategy. The clear implication thus would be that one of the two leaders of Nepal’s ruling party rejected the notion that the American policy on and approach to a vast geography even amounted to a strategy. But, then, all we have is the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ word.
If Nepal is indeed a part of a US-led initiative to maintain a free and open Indo-Pacific as part of sustaining peace and prosperity, that doesn’t mean it has opened itself as another front for the containment of China. So Dahal shouldn’t be made to answer for Beijing’s misapprehensions. Nepal’s inability to reassure China on this count is not tantamount to its complicity in the original charge.
But, then, words regularly tend to conceal more than they clarify. And who knows this better than Dahal? He has perfected the amalgamation of bloviation, equivocation, obfuscation and prevarication into a profitable political tool.
Indeed, the Americans and Chinese want him to clarify matters for their own reasons. In the process, the Americans have provided clarification of their own. The Indo-Pacific Strategy should be understood as only policy and not a club which would welcome Nepal as a new member, the chief of the Political Section of the American Embassy in Kathmandu said, almost validating the qualifier attributed to Dahal by the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs news release.
Maybe Dahal can pull this off to his advantage. Heck, he may already have done so: by keeping alive the notion that the Indo-Pacific Strategy is not aimed at containing China and letting all parties grandstand on its underlying nature and significance.

What’s Sauce For the Goose …

It’s taken more than a couple of days, but we’ve finally woken up to the ‘fact’ that the much-ballyhooed expose by that retired Indian gumshoe might not have been so unvarnished.
To be fair, Amar Bhushan has clearly labeled his latest thriller Inside Nepal/The Walk-In as a work inspired by true events. Based on the novel’s assertion that Indian intelligence agents plotted the emaciation and eventual elimination of Nepal’s monarchy, Rastriya Prajatantra Party President Kamal Thapa went to the extent of demanding a parliamentary probe.
Let’s be honest, here. Those mocking how easily Nepali reporters, editors and analysts could be taken for a ride, too, were no less stunned for the first few days after a reputable Indian newspaper published a story based on Bhushan’s book.
Not that there aren’t other curiosities galore. When the book, originally released in June, went out for early reviews, the title was The Walk-In, one of the two stories in the volume. By the time Daily News and Analysis wrote up a story conveying the impression that the book was a memoir by a former special director of India’s external intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), the title had changed to Inside Nepal, the other story.
The three-month lag time, the turnaround of the title and the relative respectability of the newspaper are enough to convey the subplot. And from the perspective of those who wanted the story out in this way at this time, the mission was accomplished.
With enough plausible deniability, RAW has helped enough Nepalis believe what they have always wanted to about their recent history, i.e., that the abolition of the monarchy was not an indigenous undertaking.
When something is said to have been inspired by true events, what proportion of fact and fiction are we talking about? Any Hollywood scriptwriter taking a best-selling book to screen can tell you that he or she would feel comfortable with retaining about a quarter to a third of the original. These days, the proviso is invoked mostly to ward off ruinous lawsuits.
It’s hard to believe that someone with Bhushan’s rank and experience in his field could have come out with the book without a thorough vetting process from his former employers. Still, who’s to say that Bhushan hasn’t used the based-on-true-events stipulation to shield himself from the consequences of revealing the truth RAW originally intended to? After all, he was active on the ground when a trade-and-transit embargo not-too-furtively turned into an uprising against the palace-led partyless polity in 1990. 
In the old days, truth was the best defense when it came to libel, slander and the like. Would it be misplaced to surmise that RAW has decided to send a deeper message to its local cohorts. When the Nepali monarchy was eventually abolished in 2008, the prime external instigators surely considered it a done deal. If the institution is inching closer to restoration these past months, according to the RAW’s line of thinking, it is must be because of the local collaborationists’ incompetence.
Clearly, Comrade Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ and his erstwhile Maoists are under pressure here. Instead of sharing the spoils of the parliamentary mainstream they once derided, maybe the ‘people’s warriors’ should have worked harder to ensure that the monarchy remained lifeless. What must have additionally sensitized RAW is the fact that the monarchy’s support is growing among people who were once steady republicans or had reconciled themselves to the change.
If the monarchy were to be restored, the Nepali Congress would have the easiest way out. It can blame Girija Prasad Koirala for putting personal vengeance above national viability without the grand old man available to respond. Those Congress leaders like Krishna Prasad Sitaula and Bimalendra Nidhi anxious to defend Koirala would be doing so at their own peril.
The erstwhile Unified Marxist-Leninists can all rally behind Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli and resurrect his you-can’t-go-to-the-moon-on-a-bullock-cart refrain. Dahal seems to have gotten the memo, at least considering his avowal to deploy his full might against those opposing Nepal’s momentous changes.
As for those of us LOLing at how easily some of us swallowed the fiction-as-fact ruse, maybe we should take a deep breath. Didn’t we lap up every detail about a supposedly seedy and scandalous palace when the guy who brought out Blood Pond or whatever it was called had described his book as a work of fiction? And what about the short-lived Bhandaphor series after the 1990 political change? Just because White Tiger remains a bestseller after all these decades doesn’t mean that it's the last word on what Jang Bahadur Rana was or wasn’t.

Familiarity Breeds Contretemps

Amid modern India’s persistent and perspicuous anxieties over Chinese motives, intentions and influence in Nepal, there has always been a small silent and serene constituency in New Delhi confident that all would be well once Nepalis got to know their northern neighbors better.
A peculiar opportunity arose in March 2006 when Beijing pulled the rug from under the royal regime by sending state councilor Tang Jiaxuan to open a dialogue with anti-palace parties. This must have buoyed Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, whose organization Beijing had denounced for having tarnished the Great Helmsman teachings.
The development also had a sobering lesson that would have come in handy during Dahal’s ill-fated premiership in 2008-2009. Having made grandiose statements about all-round newness, Dahal soon felt the gravitational pull from the north too discomforting. After all, Dahal was too human not to have a spine. His eventual resignation speech was a tirade against the ‘gods’ of the south. That he also intended the message for northern audiences became apparent by the deftness with which he shifted his (geo)politics.
Dahal didn’t need to detail his unidirectional disenchantment. Someone once so keen on establishing discontinuities, Dahal was merely the latest in a string of Nepali leaders befuddled by the nature of state-to-state reciprocity when it came to relations with China.
Bahadur Shah could be forgiven for misunderstanding the content and quality of China’s friendship and support because Nepal had not yet become a tributary to the Middle Kingdom. The Chinese were under no obligation to interfere in his power struggles with his nephew, King Rana Bahadur Shah. However, Bhimsen Thapa and Chandra Shamsher Rana were justified in wondering whether the trek up north every five years with goodies-laden beasts was worth the trouble if Nepalis were expected to contend with the British juggernaut alone.
Prime Minister Tanka Prasad Acharya’s desire to establish a road link between Nepal and China was rebuffed, even though Zhou Enlai had so eloquently described our two peoples as ‘blood brothers’. Acharya must have wondered whether worsening Sino-Indian relations alone were responsible for Beijing’s sudden enthusiasm for the project a few years later during B.P. Koirala’s premiership.
King Mahendra is accused of agreeing to the road project only to spite India. His ‘communism-doesn’t-come-in-a-taxicab’ quip entrenched his pro-Chinese image among those already so persuaded. Even if the king had let Tulsi Giri sign the relevant agreement in order to endure the expected blowback from New Delhi, can that explain subsequent events? Chinese propaganda against Nepal during the early years of the Cultural Revolution may be partly explained by the madness of that decade. Still, don’t we need to explore why King Mahendra never visited China again or why no senior Chinese leader landed in Kathmandu as part of their regional sojourns?
Sure, the Chinese played host to Crown Prince Birendra, who subsequently as monarch was a regular visitor up north. That ties into another question. Was China’s seeming indifference in Crown Prince Dipendra rooted only in the fact that his father was actively engaged in steering Nepal-China relations regardless of the nature of the political regime in place? During his brief incumbency, Crown Prince Paras seemed to have a better standing up north than did Dipendra.
On paper, at least, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli has inaugurated a new era in bilateral relations. The Indians continue to make noises here and there. But they seem to have grown used to a more assertive Chinese presence in Nepal. Nepalis, for our part, have long marveled at the miracle the Chinese have produced in the past four decades. Technology has overcome geographical barriers to connectivity.
Yet tough questions persist. Are high-speed trains arriving here anytime soon? And what might they carry to and fro? Can petroleum products come through Chinese ports at prices Nepalis can afford? Chinese pledges to uphold and safeguard Nepal’s sovereignty and territorial integrity have always sounded good. Does the record inspire enough confidence?
The recent arrests of Chinese human traffickers, bank hackers and on-flight robbers can be construed as confirmation that our northern neighbors are as human as those of the south we know so well — and, for that matter, as ourselves. The contretemps that familiarity with the Chinese have bred should encourage Nepalis to know ourselves better in order to navigate the neighborhood more easily.

Comrades (Up) In Arms

Newly bestowed executive authority seems to have straightaway shifted the outlook of Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ – and quite significantly.
A man who barely two weeks earlier was warning of hounding all remnants of the ancient regime into oblivion now fears for the political system he sits atop. And nowhere does he cite a vast right-wing conspiracy this time. Instead, Dahal rues the way royal pretensions have crept into the ways of those driving republicanism. Of course, he is quiet about his own role in the development and display of this disfigurement.
The party Dahal has to run for the next couple of weeks in the absence of Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli is in a real mess. Barely had the controversy over the distribution of NCP departments been resolved than the issue of seniority clawed its way back into a bigger storm.
At a party meeting intended to extend best wishes to Oli on his latest medical trip to Singapore, senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal and the prime minister descended into a sordid kindergarten brawl. They have since expressed regret at their conduct, we are told through intermediaries, and pledged to work together. However, the episode was all too emblematic of the effect of the individual arrogating himself above both the party and the state.
The other protagonist, Jhal Nath Khanal, a one-term former prime minister like Madhav Nepal, was in China pledging to go after those bad-mouthing the Belt and Road Initiative. Yet he has little to celebrate after recovering his rank from Madhav Nepal, if that is indeed what he has done.
The proposal to appoint Bam Dev Gautam – who has been eyeing the premiership for the better part of three decades under three systems – to a newly created vice-presidency of the NCP not only elevates someone else to third position but also underscores the broader realignments under way in the party. No one seems to know how the eventual equation might unfold and its implications for the party and state, thereby sharpening individual insecurities and aspirations.
In fairness, Madhav Nepal has a point. Oli and Dahal today speak of consensus as if it were an integral characteristic of the party and seek its firm application. That wasn’t how the NCP was formed, though. What went on during all those one-on-one sessions between the two putative co-chairs? Most key lieutenants of both are still in the dark about the power-sharing deal underpinning the unification of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist factions. The rank and file can flaunt their ignorance citing that the Oli-Dahal deal not being a party document is immaterial.
Oli and Dahal, for their part, couldn’t even get the name of the new party right, much less its guiding philosophy. Marxism, Leninism and Maoism were aberrantly fused into a political platform that succeeded in winning massive votes but couldn’t begin to govern. Today, after so many self-inflicted wounds, all factional leaders seem to agree that the NCP will complete its five-year term, although they can’t agree under whom. Yet they have the nerve to complain of indiscipline?

Chasing Ghosts in Ghoulish Clothes

Is Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli deliberately trying to destroy the system he represents? The question is no longer sacrilegious. In fact, it is becoming starker with each pronouncement he makes.
Oli affirmed in parliament the other day that he would continue for a full five-year term, warning his opponents not to ‘daydream’ about toppling the government. The fact that such resoluteness came just days before the mid-point in his constitutionally mandated term is significant.
With abundant clarity, Oli has rubbished reports that he is bound by any understanding to trade executive power with Nepal Communist Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ as part of the deal leading to the unification of the Unified Marxist-Leninists and Maoists factions last year.
But, then, Oli hasn’t been quite credible lately as a communicator of such affirmations. For starters, what’s really going on with his health? Earlier this month, the premier extended his stay in Singapore even after having his aides tell us he was in perfect health. Did he have to wait to sign his discharge papers?
Barely had the prime minister returned home than reports began to surface of another imminent medical trip to the city-state. As a key Oli adviser rejected those reports, the prime minister cryptically told the nation that nothing would happen to him for another 20-25 years. (And making a pitch for Cetamol.) Now, the Singapore trip seems to be on.
Was apportioning the NCP departments that important to the efficient functioning of the government? Or was rearranging the power balance in the ruling party the real motive here? More importantly, how do we know that Oli’s departure-arrival-departure isn’t part of the ‘broad consultations’ everyone seems convinced is going on abroad but unable to comprehend?
There was much Oli could have said in his address to the House of Representatives by way of assuaging the country’s anxieties. Apart from avowing his staying power and enumerating minor policy priorities, the only other thing the prime minister did was demonize those seeking a restoration of the monarchy. If that cause is indeed such a lost one, surely Oli need not have spent precious time in the august assembly emphasizing the obvious.
The prime minister may have desisted from the kind of threats and vitriol Dahal unleashed on the former monarch a week ago upon gauging the backlash it produced. Or maybe Oli is inherently more charitable than Dahal.
Yet the premier was all over the place on the subject. If monarchists are trying to resuscitate a ghost from the graveyard, wouldn’t letting them revel in their delusion be the best response? Instead, Oli vowed to unleash the full force of the government against such royalist conspiracies. Not without, however, pleading for unity among democratic forces to overcome traditional regressive forces attempting to jeopardize democracy.
Well, what is it, Mr. Prime Minister, that you see right, left and center: a puerile paroxysm or a clear and present danger? If you and your cohorts can’t make up your minds, maybe that signals the system’s time is truly up.

What’s Cooking In Whose Kitchen?

Our olfactory senses don’t betray us. And they haven't been on such a heightened state of alert in a long time.
Foreign personalities with peculiar reputations land in Nepal openly as well as opaquely. Our top Nepali leaders fly abroad with abandon for pleasure, personal errands and medical treatment. Can they really be so callously oblivious of our underlying predicament?
If destinations as varied as Dubai, Bangkok and Singapore should reassure those inimical to New Delhi’s traditional monopoly in the driver’s seat, the amorphousness of the current course cancels things out. Compared to this, Delhi Compromises I and II were as clear as day(dreaming). Small wonder, then, that we are acting out in our uncanny ways.
Nepal Communist Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, barely back from holidaying in Dubai, tried his best to be coherent. When he started out his public speech after inaugurating a bridge in Ramechhap district, it sounded like he was responding to former coalition partner, Rastriya Prajatantra Party chairman Kamal Thapa. A day earlier, Thapa had said it was time to seek an alternative to the current political system, which was certainly enough to infuriate its chief internal architect.
But then Dahal went on to warn former king Gyanendra that the people might force him to vacate government-provided Nagarjun Palace. The former monarch hasn’t said a thing, although he has brought out a book. In the past, when ex-king Gyanendra has upbraided his successors, Dahal has kept quiet. An eviction notice for the former monarch for meeting individually with a trio of PhD’s united in their disdain for the current dispensation and can’t stop telling us what they talked about?
Sharper minds are convinced Dahal spoke with a purpose. When the pedal hits the metal, the ex-Maoist supremo can always invoke the imperative of acknowledging ground realities and exercising maximum flexibility.
But, then, Dahal is no longer the smartest guy in the room. If acting Prime Minister Ishwar Pokharel really didn’t visit Nirmal Niwas, why did he have to park his vehicle in the vicinity of the ex-monarch’s private residence? Pokharel has now challenged reporters to either prove that he held private talks with the former king or apologize.
Maybe our deputy prime and defense minister feels calumniated by perceptions of skullduggery at a time when Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli is convalescing in Singapore. Or maybe in his capacity as defense minister he did meet with the ex-king, who was supreme commander of the Royal Nepal Army.
Perhaps Pokharel as the head of Nepal Trust, which is entrusted with using the property of King Birendra, Queen Aishwarya and their family for the welfare of the nation, sought a meeting with the nation’s most prominent ex-royal to update records. Given Pokharel’s days-long silence, however, you can’t quite let go of the feeling that even if he didn’t exactly enter Nirmal Niwas, he did want to keep his arch-nemesis Dahal guessing.
Admittedly, the ex-monarch’s departure for Bangkok just as Oli announced an extension of his stay in Singapore has thickened the plot. Ordinary Nepalis are caught between public figures confident of the imminence of the monarchy’s restoration and those equally convinced that the institution has receded deeper into anachronism.
Any word trickling out on ingredients, cooks, kitchens would make our existence less excruciating.

The Art Of The Visit, Redux

Nepalis are still waiting for Chinese President Xi Jinping to make good on his promise to come avisiting ‘soon’. Well entrenched in his second term as leader of the People’s Republic with powers rivaling – if not surpassing – those exercised by the Great Helmsman, Xi and his cohorts continue to dangle the carrot of a Nepal visit at every opportunity.
As noted in an earlier iteration on the subject, etiquettes of good neighborliness aren’t the primary sentiment driving yours truly here. It is a quest for an assurance that Nepal-China relations are moving in a positive direction. In that spirit, it may be worthwhile to update that earlier post in view of the broader developments that have occurred since.
True, China’s engagement in Nepal has steadily deepened and become more diversified since the collapse of the monarchy. However, a palpable negativity has crept into the process from the outset. Regional and international rivalries always simmered and stirred under the current in terms of our bilateral engagements. Yet, during the second half of the 20th century, there was a sense that Nepal and China had crafted and started enjoying relations as sovereign and independent nations. The monarchy always played a crucial part in that process.
Measured against the fact that it took 17 years for an Indian prime minister to return to Nepal, President Xi’s reluctance to take the plunge is perhaps a bit understandable. Bold Indian reiterations of New Delhi’s abandonment of its ‘one China’ policy since the election of the Narendra Modi government in 2014, with its obvious implications for Tibet and thus Nepal, met with harsh realities at Doklam three years later. From there, the road to Wuhan wasn’t too difficult to build.
The growing convergence of Sino-Indian views on the messy geopolitical fallout from Nepal’s republican, secular and federal order must either crystallize or crumble over time. In the meantime, China’s reluctance to overtly challenge India while having made such remarkable gains in encroaching upon India’s strategic space in Nepal is understandable, even within the ambit of Beijing’s unsentimental foreign policy.
The opportunities and ambiguities surrounding Sino-Indian relations against the backdrop of Washington’s pivot to Asia and India’s warming up to Japan and Australia pointed to the wider dynamics at play. The swiftness with which Nepal has been sucked into the imperative of building a free and open Indo-Pacific cannot be divorced from India’s deepening eagerness to exercise strategic autonomy on the Trumpian doctrine as well as the Quad.
Chinese apprehensions at Nepal’s drift westward may be diminished somewhat by their satisfaction with India’s disquiet.  Still, the cumulative tensions being generated should sensitize Nepalis.
The current political establishment long castigated the monarchy for having brazenly played the China card at every opportunity in an ostensible effort to achieve its autocratic ambitions. That canard suited New Delhi well, as it was the principal party aggrieved by growing Nepal-China engagements.
Oppositional elements in Nepal no doubt were instinctively tempted to parrot the Indian line. But perhaps they should have been cognizant of the imperative of preserving their freedom of action if and when they assumed power.
If today’s leaders have allowed the relationship to devolve into one where Beijing feels comfortable in asserting Nepal’s independence and sovereignty only as part of its engagement with India, they have only themselves to blame.
In the best of times, democratic maturity has not automatically translated into geostrategic vision. Amid Nepal’s political puerility, foreign policy foresight remains elusive. After all, who can forget the mishandling of then Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s visit by the Baburam Bhattarai government from start to finish?
Valid as Chinese grievances may be over their persistent inability to trust Nepal to uphold its commitments to the bilateral relationship during these increasingly turbulent times, the mandarins up north should understand that the feeling is quite mutual. Only then may they be able to begin pondering why.

When I Met The RAW Chief

Denial being the general disposition of the fortnight, yours truly initially didn’t want to broach the subject. But the scattered pieces made a compelling chronicle – a reverie of sorts, if you will.
When Samant Kumar Goel walked into the room hand extended, he evoked little that was, so to speak, spooky.  Wavy hair parted at the extreme, whitening faster at the temples, he could pass for your average mid-level Indian Embassy bureaucrat. Not someone whom our trembling political class would so assiduously deny having met.
After the customary preliminaries, Goel’s smile persisted, exposing a gap between his two top frontal teeth that served to underscore the space between his public and personal personas.
An expert on Pakistan, Goel was reputed to have planned the airstrike on Balakot in Pakistan in response to the Pulwama terror attack in India February. Although the international media was skeptical of the extent of the damage the Indian Air Force inflicted on terrorist infrastructure run by Jaish-e-Mohammed, the strike did help Prime Minister Narendra Modi win massive re-election months later.
The Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) is generally led by China or Pakistan experts, often in turns. China now having replaced Pakistan as India’s primary concern in Nepal, wasn’t Goel’s arrival so early in his tenure a bit incongruent? Unless it was part of micromanaging post-2006 Nepali politics?
“Is there really a distinction between Beijing’s and Islamabad’s footprints in Nepal, considering that they march to the same tune everywhere else?” Goel asked.
That general question was enough to suggest that his mission was aimed at our domestic affairs. Better steer the conversation toward the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) and Nepal.

MB: “What percentage of your time, money and energy is spent on Nepal?”

SKG: “Yeah, like we wake up each morning to figure out how better to subjugate Nepal.”

MB: “Well it does seem that way, considering the plots of your recent Bollywood spy thrillers.”

SKG: “Let’s not get distracted by images.”

MB: “No, really. Wasn’t it RAW’s long-held position that a monarchical Nepal was an inherent threat to India and that you finally won out through the Shyam Saran dimension of the Karan-Saran roadshow?”

SKG: “All that maneuvering between those two royal proclamations, having come to naught. Shyam Saran did persuade us that the Chinese would keep out of Nepal if we could pull off the Maoist-SPA 12 Point Accord.”

MB: “Then what? Prachanda and Baburam turned out to be as unreliable as the rest?”

SKG: “Worse than that. Prachanda rubbed it in at every opportunity. Even today, Baburam pontificates as if he has had no hand in it.”

MB: “Sikkim was a feather in your cap. The political class that replaced the chogyal has played its prescribed part well. How did Nepal turn out so differently?”

SKG: “That’s what baffles us. Just take one example. The official Nepali line after Pulwama was reprehensible, to say the least. It was almost designed to exonerate Pakistan. And all this after an attack on Indian soldiers masterminded by a guy who already humiliated us on that aircraft that took off from Kathmandu to park on that tarmac in Kandahar 20 years ago.”

MB: “Do you really think it was that bad. I mean, Nepal has independent relations with Pakistan. We can’t accuse them of something the way you do without evidence?”

SKG: “If it’s not Pakistan, then it’s China or the United States. What business do you have in a free and open Indo-Pacific when your foreign minister can’t even be honest with his own parliament about what he said and signed in Washington?”

MB: “So you think we’re doing all this on purpose? That there’s some visceral antipathy toward Indian rooted in the collective Nepali mindset that no politician can depart from? Not even those you have carefully nurtured?”

SKG: “It sure does seem like it, doesn’t it?”

MB: “OMG, has RAW finally concluded that an independent Nepal itself is threat to India?”

A smiley silence ensued eerily too long. I had more questions. Would India take over? Would the Chinese? Would they divvy us up? But, then, the gap between Goel’s teeth started expanding faster than my heart rate.
I woke up perspiring and petrified. A bad dream? Sure. But that doesn’t quite convey the haunting feeling that lingers on.

Flashback: 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.

Originally posted on September 23, 2018