The Fever And The Fury

It was quite out of character for Comrade Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ to go after a group of Nepalis living in the United States while updating reporters on his eagerly watched visit to that country.
Not that the former Fierce One is a stranger to acerbity and causticity. In his incarnation as Maoist supremo, Dahal would routinely rail against individuals (i.e. ex-king Gyanendra and, at one point, the late Girija Prasad Koirala) and institutions like the erstwhile Royal Nepali Army (as he so memorably did during his first public appearance in Kathmandu in 2006). His rant against ‘foreign deities’ while announcing his resignation on national TV in 2009 remains etched in modern Nepali politics.
That the co-chair of the Nepal Communist Party chose to single out a collection of long-time Nepali residents of the United States for opprobrium perhaps speaks of the broader psychology at play.
Dahal’s criticism is far from unwarranted. After all, how many weekend gatherings out there are complete without someone or the other undercutting Nepal? Some of the most vociferous US-based Nepali critics of King Birendra and the partyless regime in 1990 turned out to be the most avid supporters of King Gyanendra’s takeover 15 years later. The deep factionalism within Nepali parties is mirrored in the bigger US cities, sometimes taking an enormous toll on personal relationships.
But, then, such generalizations tend to do injustice to the countless Nepalis who – as the saying there goes –make America work, while closely but quietly following affairs back home. In fairness, Dahal didn’t refer to Nepalis in America generically.
The NCP co-chair’s infuriation is understandable. Much confidence-building must have gone into planning the visit (the Venezuela brouhaha notwithstanding). The Americans have creatively dealt with the issue of whether the Maoists were ever on par with Al Qaeda in terms of Washington’s terrorism lists. For individuals, officials waivers abound. The humanitarian purpose of Dahal’s visit was enough to suggest that the federal government wasn’t going to arrest the former Maoist chieftain.
What about other tiers of US government and the plethora of human rights groups? If President Donald J. Trump, who has just been let go by special counsel Robert S. Mueller, is still on tenterhooks over what prosecutors at the Southern District of New York are poring over, why should Dahal have lowered his guard?
The bloke who sent in that “address correction requested” complaint to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) got great publicity. FBI sleuths weren’t going to dent this particular joist of the Indo-Pacific plank of the US establishment’s long-term foreign and security policy imperative – at least not until Dahal even had a chance to discuss the quid pro quos.
Still, you can help wonder whether other dynamics might have been in play. For one thing, the two foreign governments most displeased with the prospect of a US-Nepal strategic partnership each have the heft to show their sentiment on US soil. For another, there are all those people committed not only to ending impunity in Nepal but also to making an exemplary public demonstration of that. What if there were, say, undisclosed complaints or even indictments against Dahal that myriad local law-enforcement bodies were expected to act on?
Despite their evident preparation, Nepali diplomats in Washington DC didn’t have to sneak Dahal out of the airport. Our former prime minister stayed at the embassy, held talks with junior-level US officials and visited places like the Maryland state legislature. Pre-visit speculation that Dahal might meet with Vice-President Mike Pence remained just that.
If Dahal indeed had a close shave, could his public fury be directed at individuals he may have suspected of aiding and abetting the foes that he could not name?

Enact First And (Maybe) Ask Later

In what must be one of the wildest 180s in our modern political history, Nepali Congress General Secretary Shashank Koirala the other day spurned the need for a referendum on republicanism and federalism.
A day earlier, Shashank, who has in the past stressed the need to democratically revisit Nepal’s decision to declare itself secular, had extended that test to the country’s republican and federal character as well. In his revised comments, Shashank accepted that republicanism and federalism are achievements of People’s Movement II.
Despite that correction, Nepali Congress president Sher Bahadur Deuba is among those objecting to the general secretary’s statement. Deuba is in a peculiar position. While the party officially stands behind the three pillars of the current constitution, he also knows that the stance makes it no different from the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP). More importantly, Deuba knows that the Nepali people know that even better.
But Deuba still carries the royalist tag. Two royal dismissals for incompetence and extended incarceration on corruption charges haven’t washed away the perception that he enabled renewed royal assertiveness in the first place.
Ram Chandra Poudel, for his part, is unhappy with Shashank, Deuba and a lot of other senior people in the party. But he is not prepared to don the royalist tag to take on his rivals or take over the party – at least, not yet.
Shekhar Koirala recognizes that he can never mount a challenge for B.P. Koirala’s legacy – the most prized one in the party – as long as the direct line of Nepal’s first elected prime minister contains viable contenders. If Shekhar realized that he stood even a smidgen of a chance, he would not let constitutional monarchy stand in the way. Very prudently, he has settled for G.P. Koirala’s mantle, confident of overcoming Girijababu’s daughter, Sujata. (Again, the operative word here being ‘viable’.)
As someone who owes his political rise to his bold slogans of republicanism at a time when party elders considered that heresy, Gagan Thapa’s opposition to Shashank’s remarks is far more than understandable. Nepalis in his age group and under may be reluctant to equate monarchism with lack of modernity. Thapa has locked himself too tightly in a do-or-die pose.
You can be pretty sure that Shashank didn’t make that comment in haste. And you can be equally sure that he withdrew it with the deftness and daftness of a trial lawyer with an eye on the jury, i.e., the wider Nepali people. If the country’s leading secessionist C.K. Raut can seemingly abjure his demand for a referendum on an independent Madhesh and then rename his organization the Janmat Party, you’ve got to wonder how many doors have been opened on this constitutionally enshrined exercise.
The political drivers can talk all they want about the necessity to strengthen the gains of People’s Movement II. The people have long begun to wonder whether those ‘gains’ have contributed to far serious losses over the long run.
Nepalis have long been flustered how republicanism, federalism and secularism could be deemed an intrinsic part of the 12-Point Agreement when the document never specifically mentioned them.  It must mean that the Indian architects of the mainstream-Maoist alliance are finally catching up with the Nepali public that Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s cabinet wants Indian Ambassador Manjeev Singh Puri to clarify the circumstances and context surrounding his purported talks with former king Gyanendra in Janakpur recently.

Flashback: When It’s All About Looking Busy

As the post-Dasain/Tihar political momentum picks up, introspection seems to be the byword on the left center and right alike.
Former prime ministers Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Madhav Kumar Nepal of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) have promised that the government will begin showing more life. It is significant that the assurance comes from the two men most responsible for disrupting Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s government from within the party.
Dahal’s much-hyped geopolitical excursion turned out to be a dud, largely owing to the excessive hospitality New Delhi showered on him. Madhav Nepal’s use of Oli’s absence from the country to mount a virtual insurrection didn’t turn out be propitious in its timing, either. Still, the two ex-premiers can’t escape part of the blame for our political plight. Dahal has little compunction in accusing the bureaucracy of impeding a government enjoying a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Madhav Nepal hasn’t been as callous in deflecting responsibility, but he hasn’t been terribly receptive of what is arguably his share of it.
Over at the Nepali Congress, president Sher Bahadur Deuba has lost none of his newfound zeal for going his way. The nomination of Bijay Kumar Gachchaddar as vice-president is proving hard to swallow for many party functionaries, including who have nothing personally against the man. The party hadn’t quite suffered such a drought of qualified candidates that Deuba had to turn to someone who left and rejoined the Nepali Congress in circumstances that still are largely obscure. Gachchaddar’s skills as a leader are not in question here. What kind of message does Deuba want to send by rewarding, so to speak, a water pot without a base, regardless of the shininess of the brass? (If you ask Deuba privately, he’d probably have a short and easy answer: personal loyalty.)
The Nepali Congress is so divided that the anti-Deuba factions can’t be sure that anything of significance really unites the dissidents. So Sujata Koirala talks about Deuba’s last chance, while cousins Shashank and Shekhar speak of the imperative of checking the ideological and institutional disarray the party finds itself in. Little wonder that non-Koiralas like Ram Chandra Poudel feel the need to tip-toe around things: letting everyone know how mad they are but not enough about what they intend to do.
The right is once again animated by talk of reunification among the three principal factions. Kamal Thapa of the Rastriya Prajantantra Party seems to be preparing for the storm he predicts will rage after India’s national elections next year. Pashupati Shamsher Rana of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Democratic) insists he will restore Hindu statehood, without elaborating how he intends to achieve that. Prakash Chandra Lohani of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party (Nationalist) insipidly maintains that unity will be achieved sooner than later.
The fusion/fission cycle on the right has become so routine that most people aren’t too bothered about what really unites and divides the men and women on that end of political spectrum. The mere process is exciting enough to drive the larger narrative that politics is alive.
Still, the fact that all three points on the ideological spectrum are undergoing a form of overt introspection can’t be coincidental. At a basic level, it underscores the tentativeness Nepali politics hasn’t been able to shed even after the promulgation of a new Constitution and elections at all three tiers. Politics, like most other things, shuns a sense of finality. But haven’t we been loitering around the starting line for far too long? Maybe the key to Nepal’s destiny still isn’t in the hands of Nepalis.
A glance around the neighborhood does little to clarify our outlook. Is Doklam or Wuhan the operating word regarding Sino-Indian relations? An election in the Maldives is said to have thrown out a pro-Chinese government. But it only seems to have shifted geopolitical rivalries north-eastward to Sri Lanka. Pakistan was said to have become a shining emblem of the inherent senselessness of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). But the joint statement announced after Prime Minister Imran Khan’s visit to China appears to have given new impetus to the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, the flagship of the BRI.
In such a situation, you can’t blame our political class for not knowing what might happen here next and when. The best they can do is prepare for the indefinite. How do you do that best? By looking like you are busy preparing all the same.

Originally posted on Saturday, November 10, 2018

The Dynamics Of Ambiguity

Photo courtesy: onlinekhabar.com

Above everything else, the surprise agreement between the government and Chandra Kanta Raut, president of the Alliance for Independent Madhesh, must have come as a punch in the gut to Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’.
Okay, not the 11-point agreement per se, perhaps, but surely Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s characterization of Raut’s abilities as being akin to that of the former Maoist supremo.
In the dozen years after the decade-long ‘people’s war’, Dahal & Co. have been the subject of colossal historical revisionism. In terms of the tripod of republicanism, secularism and federalism that carries Nepal today, you can’t probably say the ‘people’s war’ was a monumental waste of time. But, then, what good could it have been if those three legs turned out so wobbled at birth?
Still, the Maoist insurgency broke out and spread amid a pronounced public desire for change. Five years of restored multiparty politics had failed to address the aspirations of People’s Movement I. Novel exercises in constitutionalism and economic restructuring had begun during those years, but the popular imagination was almost singularly scarred by public corruption and the impunity that surrounded it.
The Maoists may not have had the best answers but they did at least represent a widespread quest for course correction. It was only when they compromised with one half of the status quo they rose up against in an ill-defined roadmap for national renewal that they began to lose their shine.
The landing was safe enough for the Maoist personally but their legacy was far from secure. Perpetual adjustments to ground realities provided a survival strategy for a while but factionalism and splits ensured that the ex-rebels had exceeded their shelf life. The bulk of them simply dissolved themselves into a larger communist party.
Raut’s agenda of Madheshi separatism hardly enjoyed the kind of across-the-board off-hand approbation – if not outright embrace – the Maoists did. Raut’s diehard supporters, too, must have wondered whether his agenda was viable beyond a slogan. Even if an independent Madhesh were to emerge, could it survive? More to the point, would it be allowed to survive by an India always apprehensive of fissiparous tendencies.
Even if outright amalgamation into the Indian Union were palatable to some advocates of a Free Madhesh, wouldn’t India first weigh the cost to the benefit of maintaining its traditional direct leverage in a territorially intact Nepal? Moreover, in the fluidity of the region’s history and geography, what’s to say that our own Greater Nepalis would not have seen greater legitimacy to their brand of give and take?
If non-Indians perched farther afield are actually behind Raut’s agenda – as many do suspect – how long would they have carried him? In his own way, the Dalai Lama has been asking himself that question since 1959. The imperative of a Sino-Indian concord on Nepal now being acknowledged by more and more Nepalis, maybe Raut was astute enough about his political future.
From Naya Shakti coordinator Baburam Bhattarai to Rastriya Prajatantra party president Kamal Thapa, the 11-point agreement has raised questions galore. The ruling NCP and the main opposition Nepali Congress have produced more than enough critical voices. One pesky issue in particular has confounded everyone across the political spectrum. Did Raut seek – and the government acquiesce to – a referendum to settle the Free Madhesh question?
If so, doesn’t that keep the Free Madhesh issue alive, contrary to the government’s insistence that this brand of separatists have been fully and formally mainstreamed. Or does that ambiguity merely serve to cover a larger one?
The Madhesh in Raut’s mind does not conform to Nepal’s political map today (which, in retrospect, the government appears to have released very conveniently). A referendum would require the enactment of appropriate legislation, a process, given political passions, that would easily wade into uncharted waters. If a province decided to go its own way, would the remaining provinces have to provide their imprimatur as well? If a Free Madhesh incorporated territory running from east to west across provinces, how many worms would wriggle out of that can? (Take another look at the demeanor of the people pictured above.) 
Does the ambiguity really matter? In 2005, the Maoists and the Seven Party Alliance did not jointly sign the 12 Point Agreement in New Delhi. Subsequent developments validated that document as the core of their common commitment to change.
Upon reflection, as galling as it might be, Comrade Prachanda, Oli may have a point.

It’s Still Foggy Out There

These days, Nepali Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba is increasingly worried about the future of democracy in Nepal. It must be a source of immense satisfaction to the former prime minister to be able to turn the tables on his political adversaries.
Sure, you could argue that failure to relinquish the leadership of the Nepali Congress after having led the party to its worst electoral defeat is no great service to the cause of democracy. The reality that the party’s internal dynamics have more to do with Deuba’s survival is too discernible to allow it to detract from the point of this post.
The democracy-is-under-threat cry has lost much of its rallying power because Nepalis recognize all too well its aftermath. Everyone tends to use it as a ladder to power and immediately kick it away lest someone else should aspire to ascend. Today, the notion that the nation itself may be imperiled by its politics has begun creeping on the population in a foreboding if not fatal way.
If a government enjoying a two-thirds majority, unencumbered by neither the opposition nor the more ominous restraints of the military or monarchy, cannot be seen as upholding its basic constitutional responsibilities, the people are compelled to search deep within their souls for the purpose of it all. When the government pretends it is succeeding in its job and becomes intolerant of everyone it considers a critic, the people are correct to be afraid.
Clearly, the Nepali Congress, the military and the ex-monarch cannot do much individually. Deuba knows that it would be easy to repudiate Girija Prasad Koirala and rehabilitate Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala in the party’s official platform today because both men are dead. What he comprehends better is the far greater challenge of managing the living Congressis adhering to the rival legacies.
Thus, Deuba would like the military or the ex-monarch to make the first move. The latter two institutions are more circumspect, having had far more time to learn the lessons of the 2005-2006 fiasco. External stakeholders – those who set the current process in motion as well free-riders – are too busy grappling with their own contradictions to draw confidence in any credible preemptive/reactive posture.
This overall climate of distrust plays to the advantage of Khadga Prasad Oli, Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ & Co. How can this be authoritarianism when Nepalis know what full-blown communism has left in its wake around the world? If fear of what may happen next is allowed to reverse a process so many have invested in for so long, what else do Nepalis have that they have not tried and tested?
The Oli and Dahal factions – along with the assorted sub-cliques – in the ruling Nepal Communist Party can continue their rivalry as the frantic news cycle tries to keep up at the same time with natural, manmade and other tragedies. 
If our NCP leaders are smart, they will desist from pushing Nepalis to the point where they begin to wonder whether the current experiment in democracy and our accumulated experience of nationhood may be mutually exclusive. As for the rest of us, alas, we have to contend with our collective tendency to overestimate the wisdom of our leaders.