Saturday, May 25, 2019

Flashback: Modi-fying Our Hopes And Fears

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s electoral triumph has triggered predictable reactions across our political spectrum vis-à-vis its impact on Nepal’s troubled polity.
From Foreign Minister Mahendra Pandey, representing the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist, to Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal (RPP-N) president Kamal Thapa, representing the right end of the spectrum, disparate voices have emerged. But when you boil it down, expectations of calm continuity or critical change depend on the hopes and fears of who is speaking.
The status-quoists, so to speak, do have a point. The Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh may have anointed our Maoists as the drivers of republicanism. Still, it was the BJP-led government that had opened channels to the rebels, while still labeling them terrorists in public.
For adherents of the international-conspiracy angle of the Narayanhity Massacre, at least, the fact that the entire line of King Birendra’s family was wiped out while the BJP was at the helm says a lot. So does the fact that the BJP-led government tried hard to use the Indian Airlines hijacking to bring Nepal under New Delhi’s security umbrella. And when that failed, the Indian establishment’s attempt to feign outrage at the Hrithik Roshan controversy was a poorly disguised effort to pursue that objective in a different way.
So when Foreign Minister Pandey and other members of the ruling establishment hope that Nepal’s post-2006 republican political order is safe, they have some justification. RPP-N president Thapa, for his part, has grasped the other side of the story.
Even before the BJP won its own majority, and was still expected to return to power at the head of an alliance, there was reason to believe that the Sangh Parivar would exert a far greater influence over a Modi government than it ever had over Atal Behari Vajpayee’s.
Constituents of the wider Hindu nationalist base the Parivar embodies have been more vocal in their opposition to the secularization of the world’s only Hindu state. As the Parivar pushes the BJP’s campaign to take over the state governments in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar – after sweeping the parliamentary constituencies there – and tries to build on the opening it has made in West Bengal, Nepal is likely to come under greater weight from events in the three largest Indian states it borders.
It would not be unreasonable to expect the BJP and its base focusing exclusively on the restoration of Hindu statehood in Nepal. But, then, you don’t really have to be a rocket scientist to conclude the inevitability of a restoration of the Hindu monarchy to operationalize a restored Hindu state. If some things are sometimes left unsaid, it is because they are too obvious.
Thapa’s public comments on the monarchy’s role in the future of the RPP-N agenda can best be understood in this spirit. His latest attempt to blame the monarchy for its irredeemability, at least in its constitutional form, was bound to be taken as brazen impudence, given his status as home minister in the royal regime. But, then, Thapa can afford to take some political license in the circumstances.
He does not merit too much of our opprobrium. After all, as Maila Baje has often pointed out, if the monarchy is ever to be restored in Nepal, it will be through the Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML and, specifically, their ownership of the spirit of the 1990 Constitution.
As for the debate raging in Nepal over the outcome of the Indian election, it could have been tempered with a little realism: Whatever a Modi government does vis-à-vis Nepal, it will have done to advance India’s core interests – regardless of our hopes or fears.

Saturday, May 18, 2019

Loud Thinking On The Party Line

If the cart hurtled with an extra jolt before the steed in the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) this week, at least our comrades were trying to instil some horse sense into it all.
Deputy Prime Minister Ishwar Pokharel, a two-time general secretary of the erstwhile Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist, emphasized the urgency of reinstating People’s Multiparty Democracy (PMP) as the guiding principle of the NCP. Ideological dithering would derail the party, Pokharel said at a public function, adding that the PMP was the only effective adhesive.
That plea didn’t go well with Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, supremo of the former Maoists and co-chair of the NCP. While something of value, PMD, in Dahal’s view, is something to construct upon, not cuddle. If ideological purity were the litmus test, the two major streams of Nepal’s communist movement wouldn’t have merged into a grand enterprise, a visibly irritated Dahal said at the same public function.
When the Marxist-Leninists and the Maoists joined hands last year, they cleverly kicked the ideological can down the road. While the new party was to be guided by ‘People’s Democracy’, the concept has remained amorphous precisely because no one wants to go near it while more practical things need to be ironed out. Officially, the NCP abjures both Maoism and PMD, but those ideologies are very much alive throughout the party hierarchy.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli, the other co-chair of the NCP, publicly shares Dahal’s view of PMP. Privately, he is said to be in favor of reviving the erstwhile ideology in the new party. What’s more, many believe Pokharel spoke after consultations with Oli and President Bidya Devi Bhandari, whose late husband Madan Bhandari propounded the thought. Although former UML prime ministers Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal are officially mum, Nepal, in particular, is believed to be supportive of reviving PMD.
On the former Maoist side, Home Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa ‘Badal’ has not taken a particularly forceful stance against PMD’s rehabilitation, which has increased the pressure on Dahal. As Nepal’s preeminent revolutionary, Dahal is averse to tying himself to any single point on what he sees as the continuum of communism. Yet the plea for continual experimentation and practice sounds less like a path to perfection than a convenient platitude – much as PMD is.
Hitherto totalitarian communists of the former Soviet bloc took part in multiparty elections in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Many ditched the communist tag and reinvented themselves as social democrats/democratic socialists.
As Nepali comrades were too enamored of the ‘c’ word, they needed a fig leaf that could pass off as some immense ideological reorientation. True, the lexicon and reflexes of our comrades were unique to the fraternity, but they were just another political party immersed in the messiness of competitive politics.
That is not to say that PMD didn’t inspire the rank and file. It can still energize former UML cadres in a way that nothing else does – and enervate the former Maoists. Many ex-Maoists who aren’t too troubled by the renewed fascination with PMD are animated more by other intra-factional considerations.
Pokharel probably intended to inject a new debate in the party as a way of rejuvenating it. Still, the more likely scenario seems to be one of the cart trying to pull away farther than what the horse can permit. 

Sunday, May 12, 2019

When History And Geography Collide

With Nepal on the cusp of the traditionally portentous month of Jestha, political battle lines of sorts have been drawn at the individual, institutional and international levels.
Fresh from an enthusiastic reception up north rejuvenation, President Bidya Devi Bhandari landed in a storm over her purported imperious ownership of the government while unveiling its annual program and policies. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, unable to comprehend what the hullaballoo was all about, left us scratching our heads.
He departed on a visit to Vietnam and Cambodia, countries that have little political, commercial or cultural relations with Nepal. To many of us, the trip makes sense only as part of Nepali leaders’ traditional political pilgrimages to our southern and northern power centers on the territories of their respective Southeast Asian confederates.
Oli’s Nepal Communist Party (NCP) has been able to put a lid on dissent. The latest step in the organization's inexorable unity drive has only served to widen internal fissures. Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ speaks or maintains silence based on personal calculations.
The main opposition Nepali Congress, for its part, is able to show signs of life only because of the listlessness of the ruling party. Its ‘awareness campaign’ may turn out to be an opportunity for the people to give the leaders an earful.  The smaller parties are united by little else than their antipathy for the Oli government.
Institutionally, too, the fluidity is becoming intense. The sour taste federalism has left in Nepali mouths has been aggravated by the tightening pinch in their pockets. Official state secularism has proved to be the best sponsor of Hindu revivalism. Cursorily, republicanism remains the strongest pivot of the tripod of Nepali newness. That, too, is wobbling under popular fascination with the comings and goings of the ex-monarch and the animation in broader royalist right. If the government feels compelled to think out loud about criminalizing demands for monarchism and Hindu statehood as anti-constitutional, it should give us a fair idea of the stakes involved.  
The broader international lineup is ominous, too. While much of the ‘democratic’ West is rooting for Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s defeat in the elections, traditional foe China joins long-time Indian ally Russia in longing for the reelection of the incumbent government.
There has been feverish speculation over the impact of Modi II on Nepal, ranging from restoration to Hindu statehood to a full-fledged return of constitutional monarchy. On the eve of the Nepali new year, soothsayers became so sonorous about the future of sanatana dharma that Prime Minister Oli felt compelled to denounce their participation in a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Nepal’s predicament is,  however, deepened by growing evidence that the Indian National Congress, too, is troubled by the way things have turned out here. In retrospect, the party astutely hedged its bets through the Karan Singh-Shyam Saran shtick in 2006 so as to revisit things with enough credibility over a dozen years later should Indian electoral realities and national interests warrant.
Our die-hard domestic votaries of the 12-Point Agreement aren’t giving up. It is significant that Baburam Bhattarai’s group’s unification with Upendra Yadav’s outfit and their revival of the 11-province-cum-presidential-system demand follows the visit of Shyam Saran. Admittedly, on the Nepali Congress side, Krishna Prasad Sitaula looks like a has-been. Yet you have to recognize the similarity of his voice to those of other leaders like Ram Chandra Poudel and Bimalendra Nidhi to grasp the revolutionary camp in that party fully. As they fight tooth and nail in defense of their baby, the Bhattarai-Sitaula duo can be expected to draw more extensive support.
How will things pan out when Nepal’s politically discredited albeit established history collides with the precariousness of its geography underscored by C.K. Raut? The fact that many Nepalis are praying rather than prognosticating provides a telling portrait of our plight.

Saturday, May 04, 2019

Two Words That Don’t Go Together Well

My, my, what wrath hath two words wrought?
In fairness, we must accept President Bidya Devi Bhandari’s repeated use of ‘mero sarkar’ while presenting the government’s annual policies and programmes for the next fiscal year to parliament as a matter of course, rather than a sinister assertion of neo-royal privilege.
Ordinarily, many of us wouldn’t have even bothered how many times the head of state use those two words together. In a strict sense, by our collective reckoning, this is the first government each Nepali can truly claim ownership of. As a member of this empowered citizenry, the president, too, can make an individual assertion.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli thus didn’t have to exert himself over external precedents to expose the purported prejudices of his internal critics. The simple fact remains that President Bhandari isn’t operating in ordinary times. Nor are the people.
The incumbent government, which enjoys a massive legislative mandate, is not exactly perceived as a living embodiment of the popular will these days. Instead, it is increasingly being seen as the personal fiefdom of a handful of leaders of the ruling party, where, for example, state property can be bought and sold with impunity.
Moreover, when the ruling party obstinately asserts its democratic credentials while clutching on to its communist appellation with greater defiance, popular misgivings can only deepen. And when the president is seen as an adjunct of one faction of the ruling party, the people are bound to speak out. In this instance, a populace cloyed by Oli’s castles-in-the-air approach to governance had little choice but to count the number of times Bhandari invoked those grating words.
Minister for Communications and Information Technology Gokul Banskota keeps complaining that the media portrays the incumbent government as anti-democratic just because it is led by a communist party. That perception must be corrected because the Nepal Communist Party is also an organization that has taken part in movements for democracy, Banskota said while addressing a function to mark World Press Freedom Day.
Just because Nepali communists took part in popular movements led by a democratic party doesn’t quite make them democratic. The Nepali Congress and communists both hated the partyless Panchayat and royal regimes but couldn’t do anything alone. They joined hands to restore democracy.
The corruption and maladministration that thrived under successive Nepali Congress governments have done little to undermine that party’s democratic credentials. The populist programmes of the communist governments haven’t help to burnish their democratic credentials. Maybe calling yourselves communists is a big part of the problem.
The NCP top brass and rank and file don’t seem that eager to defend the government, either. Deepening factionalism and ever shifting internal alliances should prompt greater introspection, not a desire to go after your critics.
Moaning and whining at the bad rap the communists are getting won’t help. The fact that the people are supreme in today’s Nepal also means they are great at name-calling. And crybabies inspire them to be more creative.