Breach Over Troubled Water

Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli returned home from Davos to what is becoming a bleakly familiar reception. Oli’s rivals – especially within the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) – have a knack for using the premier’s absence to stir the waters. Reporters, then, throng the airport arrival lounge for Oli’s reaction.
This time, Oli tried to play down developments. Yet you could see through his composure. Oli’s trademark allegorical deflections couldn’t contain his underlying exasperation. The joint statement issued by the United Nations Office and nine embassies in Kathmandu on the need to accelerate transitional justice had irked Oli so bad that he felt compelled to lash out in Switzerland.
Insisting that Nepal’s peace process was moving in the right direction, Oli added: “We managed the conflict and the fight is now over. Some wounds have been left, but we will cure them as well.” Astonished by the emergence of an alliance of sorts, he couldn’t resist adding that the western powerhouses held an ideological bias against the Nepali government because was led by a communist party. Having to remind the world of his government’s communist orientation might have been a net plus at the world’s largest gathering of capitalists. But, alas, not so on the sidelines.
It would be tempting to see ideology as the prime driver of NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s latest outburst of acerbity. The man hasn’t sounded this infuriated since that televised address in 2009 during which he resigned the premiership. 
Still, Dahal’s condemnation of an American-instigated ‘imperialist coup’ in Venezuela seemed to be aimed less at President Donald J. Trump. If the Americans were expecting swift reciprocity to their nascent overtures to the Oli government, they now know that Dahal isn’t about to give the prime minister a free hand. Central to the Indo-Pacific or not, Nepal will always be strategically placed in any China containment/encirclement endeavor. If there is a price for Nepal’s participation, the proceeds will have to be distributed equitably.
NCP senior leader Madhav Kumar Nepal, adept at landing punches at the most convenient moments, used Oli’s absence to voice displeasure at the way the party was being run. With our communist government’s ostensible rightward drift having started making headlines farther afield, Madhav Nepal saw another opening.
Rejecting the notion that the recent – and hugely controversial – Asia-Pacific summit had anything to do with Christianity, Madhav Nepal listed all the dignitaries who arrived to take part and how that heightened Nepal’s international profile. If the event was indeed so great, you would have expected Madhav Nepal to take full credit. But, no, he generously acknowledged that he had convened the summit jointly with Oli. Given the grief the prime minister got for his overtly Hindu public persona during Dasain, Oli might have expected to evade some of the summit splatter.
The opposition Nepali Congress, for its part, is in agitation mode following the passage of the Medical Education Bill through what it considers the government’s underhand means. Congress luminaries have started reminding the NCP not to forget how the Ranas and the monarchy were swept into the dustbin of history.
Our comrades’ grasp of history is certainly no sloppier than anyone else’s. They remember that the Nepali Congress’ two-thirds majority didn’t matter a whit when the axe fell in 1960. More broadly, they also know the Nepali Congress needed the monarchy to oust the Ranas and the Marxist-Leninists to overthrow the partyless Panchayat system. And when it came to the monarchy, the Nepali Congress needed the Maoists as well as the Marxist-Leninists.
It will take Oli much more than mockery of the main opposition party’s swollen sense of significance when the danger he needs to watch against lays within.

Talking Up The Threat To Democracy

When Sher Bahadur Deuba starts saying democracy is in trouble, well, that is saying something.
Never denounced as a dictator, the Nepali Congress president has been accused of facilitating despotism. In a political milieu so mesmerized by repetitions of history, critics often portrayed Deuba as the latter-day version of Dr. Tulsi Giri, i.e., a Nepali Congress luminary turned enabler of royal autocracy.
Temperamentally mild-mannered and at times self-deprecatory, Deuba, if anything, is a status-quoist. He began his first term as prime minister in 1995-1996 with an image of a conciliator, atop a coalition compromising votaries of the past and the future. But that label didn’t last long and the perjorative ‘Pajero’ became his legacy.
The Japanese SUV was emblematic of the corruption underlying the compromises Deuba expected to make to keep democracy alive. He had assumed office following a Supreme Court ruling that reversed the earlier, minority government’s decision to dissolve parliament and hold fresh elections. The constitution emerged victorious at the price of polluting politics.
In that warped environment, Deuba’s exit was no less twisted. The prime minister was forced out of office not because he lost his legislative majority but because his own party president, Girija Prasad Koirala, conspired to prevent two crucial legislators from voting for the government.
What goes around comes around. In the aftermath of the Narayanity carnage, Deuba took back the premiership from Koirala, only to be accused of handing democracy on a platter to King Gyanendra in 2002 by first dissolving parliament and then postponing elections.
In between, Maoist leader Prachanda called him brave for declaring a ceasefire that allowed the rebels to reorganize to mount deadlier strikes against the state. Deuba declared a state of emergency, deployed the military against the rebels and set prices on their heads. When Deuba dissolved parliament and called fresh elections, that automatically disqualified him as a democrat for the Koirala faction of the ruling party. Deuba walked out of the Nepali Congress to form his own party. When Deuba postponed the elections, he got the royal sack. But he kept protesting that he wanted to hold the elections but was pressured by other parties to put them off. If anything, he pleaded, he was a latter-day B.P. Koirala. The country didn’t have the time or patience to hear him out.
As the opposition alliance refused to recognize him as part of them, Deuba returned to the premiership as a royal appointee. He stood accused of enabling a more assertive palace takeover by, it turns out, doing nothing. Never mind that the king had dismissed Deuba both times for incompetence (and resurrecting the real Tulsi Giri in February 2005).
After the April 2006 Uprising, Koirala seemed to have come to his (political) senses: If he could do a deal with the Maoists, Koirala could certainly afford to allow Deuba back into the Nepali Congress. The logical successor stepped in when the old man departed. Not many people were thrilled. And that’s always been the crux of Deuba’s woes.
You sense almost a visceral feeling in some Congress sections that Deuba never deserved to be where he is. Not quite a usurper, but something very close. Those with a Koirala pedigree have an obvious dislike. Others hate it that Deuba became the most prominent commoner Congressi who married into the reviled yet secretly coveted Rana clan. Poor diction and a drought of original though never stopped others, but they always counted against Deuba. In the post-2006 milieu, he has worked with the Maoists with the same facility he once worked with the monarchy. (Although he’d never admit it in public, Prachanda has probably wanted to repeat the B word.)
The Nepali Congress blowout in the last election was supposed to spell the end of Deuba. His critics have turned out to be their worst enemies. There are too many people ready to step in with the same eagerness they have in blocking everyone else. Ideologically, too, the party can’t figure out which Koirala brother to emulate: the newly republican Girija Prasad or the constitutional monarchist Bishweshwar Prasad. The Hinduism caper at the recent party conclave may have camouflaged that dilemma for now, but the Congress will have to make a choice sooner rather than later.
Ram Chandra Poudel seems to be the most aggrieved Congressi around. And he has good reason. When it came time to contest for the premiership amid the deadlock in the constituent assembly, the party put him forward over a dozen rounds of voting. From Poudel’s vantage point, being an incompetent prime minister twice may be better than not becoming one at all. But Deuba may never forget how Poudel promised to assume the presidency of his new party in 2002 before caving to Koirala.
The wide-body aircraft scandal has come in handy for Poudel. He’s been trying his best push Deuba into the net that has ensnared Oli and Dahal. Yet Poudel has the class to share the stage with Deuba to rail against the threat the communist government now poses to democracy.
Deuba might find that comforting, too.

What’s Going On Upstairs?

He wants to do something good for Nepal for a decade and ‘go upstairs’.
At one go, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ has sought to silence the term-limits crowd and shore up the standing of his profession. If he succeeds, it would be a heck of an accomplishment. Even to attempt it is no mean feat.
Yeah, you could quibble over our former Maoist supremo’s audacity to aspire to the abode of the angels, given his official atheism and blood-soaked legacy. But, then, the man does deserve a break, given all that he has gone through.
No longer the inscrutable Fierce One, Dahal has molded himself to the times with such facility that we’ve stopped counting his flips and flops. Gone is the I-won-the-world insolence of 2006 in the afterglow of the April Uprising.
Of course, you can’t read his mind. But some things are clear, even from deep within his recesses. The sad part wasn’t that that Nepal’s first elected republican prime minister couldn’t fire an army chief he thought was insubordinate. Nor was it Dahal’s decision to resign in 2009, citing his refusal to kowtow to ‘foreign masters’. It was the reality that few Nepalis took seriously what he considered a principled stand.
If rigidity could prove so costly, why not change course? Indeed. And Dahal’s dexterity has been dazzling. Flexibility has allowed him to flex his muscles no less formidably than firearms once did. Amid the never-ending compromises under the peace accord and his departure from the premiership, ideological drift began endangering Dahal’s hold on the Maoist party.
His return to the premiership in 2016 did little to reverse the damage done by party splits. Before his detractors could force him to cede control, Dahal mounted a hostile takeover of the rival communist party. He lost his only son and perhaps closest confidant, Prakash, at the height of the election campaign. But he carried himself stoically in public events, eventually helping the unified communists to win a two-thirds majority in parliament.
Today, as Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli muddles on atop the communist government, his party co-chair is consolidating power among Oli’s erstwhile Unified Marxist-Leninists. When the Bam Dev Gautam trial balloon burst last year, Dahal didn’t resort to recriminations. He has left us guessing about his next move.
It’s hard to overlook the fact that each Oli misstep emboldens Dahal. But Dahal is in no hurry to jump in, at least not going by his public posture. Instead, he lashes out against the former monarch’s personal affairs, reaches out to the opposition Nepali Congress in a spirit of conciliation, and speaks out soaringly about tomorrow.
Dahal says the Communist Party would have no meaning if it failed to make the country prosperous. Moreover, he says, prosperity is not possible from the government’s effort alone. Deng-ism alright, but heresy without doubt. And not for the first time – or last.
Someone who spoke incessantly of ‘discontinuities’ during his first term as premier, Dahal is stringing together the past, present and future seamlessly. Maybe he means the same thing. But it does sound better now.
Dahal is good at learning from his mistakes. Perhaps he even takes pride in that, which may help explain his heavenly aspirations.

When We Live In Different Worlds

A populace anxiously awaiting its government’s response to vital questions of the day ends up with an earful of prime ministerial censure of the very notion of criticism. Maybe that’s what you get when the governors and the governed live in different worlds.
The country speaks in specifics; the government responds in generalities. In his hour-long speech to parliament, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli mounted a spirited defense of his 10-month government. He blew his opportunity to assuage the opposition – if not the nation per se – by failing to mention such burning issues as the controversy surrounding the purchase of a wide-body aircraft for the national carrier.
Firm on fulfilling his pledges on developing rail and sea transportation, our prime minister seemed quite embittered by the mockery and ridicule criticism of his government has sometimes bordered on. But, then, Oli has distinguished himself through the efficacious use of sarcasm and satire as a tool of public speaking. If he can’t take it, maybe he shouldn’t dish it out.
To Oli, criticism of the president is tantamount to criticism of the republic. Just because that rule seemed to work against the monarchy doesn’t mean it is applicable today. Questioning the unmerited perks and privileges some in power have been tempted to enjoy does not sink the system. It’s meant to cleanse it.
A government enjoying a two-thirds majority in parliament has been on the defensive since its formation. Communist rigor and regimentation have not been able to check the ruling party’s inner turmoil. That turbulence tends to define the government’s response to events. Instead of solving the rape/murder of a hapless teenager, the government resorts to harassment and obfuscation.
Questions prompted by reasonable suspicions of sleaze in the purchase of the wide-body aircraft results in a crude display of the narrowness of the government’s mind. In the 1990s, the Unified Marxist-Leninists had used the Dhamija and Lauda scandals to denigrate the entire Nepali Congress. Today, when the tables are turned, everything becomes a conspiracy against the system.
Sure, aspects of the parliamentary investigation were bungled, such as the fingering of the home secretary who as tourism secretary (and Nepal Airlines Corporation chairman) had actually attempted to strengthen transparency and accountability in the purchase. Such investigative malpractice should have counted against the principal investigator, the Nepali Congress.
The government’s strident defensiveness, however, has emboldened the main opposition party. And not just on this issue. A party routed at the polls and riven by deep factionalism is showing signs of new life among the wider public. So much so that Oli’s party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ has started warning the government that its insensitivity to public grievances could doom the system.
The system can only be as good as the people running it. Oli keeps stressing that his government is not your usual revolving-door variety. He compares it with the ones formed after the 1959 and 1991 elections. And how well did they turn out!