An Interview That Never Happened (But Should Have)

Time: Undisclosed

Place: Undisclosed

Maila Baje: We’re in deep trouble and here you are, vice-minister How’s your parachute diplomacy going?

 

Guo Yezhou: It’s easy to make fun of it, isn’t it? But aren’t you undercutting the seriousness of it all?

 

MB: This is out of seriousness. Nepalis used to blame Indians for this kind of interventionism. At least we know the Indians better.

 

GY: As if Indians were intervening out of familiarity?

 

MB: Point taken. But why this assertiveness now? Has Nepal catapulted to the top of Chinese foreign policy priorities without us knowing?

 

GY: You are half-right there. Nepal has become a top priority for China, and I emphasize the word ‘for’ here. When you’re not able to discharge a normal state’s normal functions, it worries us – for our own sake.

 

MB: That sounds like a wholesale abandonment of your vaunted policy of non-interference.

 

GY: Your inability to maintain your international commitments affects us. Do you expect us not to interfere?

 

MB: Why this interest in the internal affairs of the ruling Nepal Communist Party?

 

GY: Nepali and Indian media have made much of how we facilitated the unity between the Maoists and Marxist Leninists. We have never confirmed our role. But we haven’t denied it either.

 

MB: Okay, did you play a role?

 

GY: Yes, and it wasn’t easy, as you might have guessed. We persuaded both sides of unification’s wisdom and its broader salutary effects on Nepal and the region. And we thought we had convinced them?

 

MB: You hadn’t?

 

GY: You tell me. All of our commitments to securing Nepal’s long-term viability and value as an independent, sovereign and territorially indivisible state were predicated on Nepal’s firm commitment to upholding China’s interests. In other words, it was a mutual undertaking.

 

MB: You’re saying Nepal hasn’t been sincere?

 

GY: I am. You signed all these important agreements with us to use them to seek a better deal from India and the United States. Those papers are gathering dust, but you’re busy making excuses.

 

MB: What excuses?

 

GY: That rival external powers are pressuring you against building closer relations with China.

 

MB: But China isn’t the only foreign power we have to worry about. And while we’re nitpicking, Beijing hasn’t exactly been faithful to its commitments to Kathmandu. Bahadur Shah, Bhimsen Thapa, Birendra, Gyanendra and Dahal are just a few examples.

 

GY: You’re not expecting to keep getting away with this? We didn’t help you against the British in 1814-1816 under the 1792 Betravati Treaty provisions because you manufactured that crisis expressly to draw us in for purely Nepali factional politics.

 

MB: I can’t believe you just said that. We lost a third of our territory.

 

GY: Not because of us. Don’t expect us to take the fall for Gajaraj Mishra, Chandrasekhar Upadhyaya, and your internal machinations and mishandling.

 

MB: What about more modern times?

 

GY: You couldn’t explain to India why you purchased arms from us in 1988-89. Instead, you tried to drag us into the aftermath with least sensitivity to events in Eastern Europe and Tiananmen Square, etc. In 2005-2006, you assured us things would be in control. For all his ‘people’s war’ bluster, Dahal overplayed his hand far worse at a time when our rivals were trying to use the Beijing Olympics and its aftermath to undermine China. Let’s take something more recent, like President Xi’s visit. He flew in directly from that informal summit with Modi, and you reneged on the extradition treaty.

 

MB: But you do appreciate all the pressure we were under. And President Xi did put us in a tight spot with his original ‘wolf warrior’ crushed-skulls-and-bones bit.

 

GY: At least we were sensitive enough to give that story a Beijing dateline and obfuscate the real target.

 

MB: It sure seems like somebody’s fuming.

 

GY: Wouldn’t you be? Yet your show goes on. You couldn’t even stick to your new map after fully and formally incorporating it in the Constitution. Your decision not to distribute the new schoolbooks containing the new map may not have been enough to appease India. It was more than enough to infuriate us. Just imagine how bad it would have been for us if we had openly backed you on the territorial dispute with India? And what did we get for not even defending that bilateral agreement with India on Lipulekh? Your Nepali Congress accuses us of territorial encroachment in Humla.

 

MB: So all this justifies your meddling now?

 

GY: It sure does. You shouldn’t have given us those false promises. Sure, there is not much you can do amid the external pressures. But you’re not even doing the bare minimum you should be, such as keeping your NCP intact.

 

MB: Thank you for your time. A lot to think about.

 

GY: Remember, not just think about – but do.

Sharpness For Crown And Country’s Sake

If Nirmal Niwas seems a bit apathetic over the nationwide spontaneous protests in favor of reinstating the monarchy, you can’t really blame its chief occupant.
Consider the content and color of the discourse. Gyanendra Shah can’t be characterized as ex-king in the absence of an incumbent, we hear. Once a king, always one, just to be sure. Others – and more and more of them – insist that Nepal needs some form of monarchy because of its singular domestic and geopolitical circumstances.
How is the institution to be reinstated? By bringing back the Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal 1990, which most of the parties once hailed as the world’s best. And how’s that to be done? A Supreme Court order on what would be considered until fairly recently a frivolous lawsuit. A military coup in which the generals beseech their supreme commander to begin wearing the uniform again?
Or a United Nations Security Council Resolution steered by permanent member China and incoming temporary member India to revive a new multilateralism as the old drivers are preoccupied within?
Then, there’s the next biggie. What kind of monarchy? If the crown is to be brought back to address our special national circumstances, can we really qualify it in traditional terms? Ceremonial, constructive, constitutional, call it what you may – but we surely aren’t looking at the milk-and-rice-fed variant. The nation’s guardian must be allowed to guard it, one would think.
As for the ‘who’, the debate is misdirected. The people can bring back the monarchy, but can they expect to choose the person? He hasn’t spoken about it, but King Gyanendra pretty much knows the difference between an elected republic and a hereditary monarchy. If there’s anyone who can decide who sits on the throne, it’s King Gyanendra.
Yet advocates are splitting hairs over raja (monarch), rajtantra (monarchism) and rajsantha (monarchy). Sure the king’s person, the institution and the crown/throne can be considered separate entities. To what end?
When you have one individual embodying the institution in its full regalia, how would you expect things to work by debating the finer points on republican premises? Granted, no one wants to be perceived as supporting the monarchy we’ve had. But, then, that means you’re accepting the premise of the monarchy’s critics all the way.
You can argue over the good and bad parts of our royal history. Specifically, King Gyanendra could have done things better, such as retaining head of government’s position. (Do we really know the full story even to say that?) But why should the parties that produced the putridity and pushed the palace to invoke Article 127 get a pass from the monarch’s failure?
King Gyanendra appears more prone to such pondering. The crown was thrust upon the toddler the first time amid great uncertainty for Nepal. The Ranas enthroned him to save their oligarchy. They may have failed, but the king did save the country. Yet in our official royal history, his brief reign is not even a footnote. (No wonder everyone got the math around Baba Gorakhnath’s legendary boon so wrong.)
King Gyanendra’s second ascension came amid great institutional and personal calamity, not to speak of the danger the nation faced. Yet he had to confront sustained calumny along with those serious challenges. He didn’t plan a coronation, but was still blamed for all that went wrong during the Ranas’ century-long and Bhimsen Thapa’s three-decade autocracy.
A third reign would have to clean the second mess the political parties have created in a generation. How can he be sure his campaign doesn’t confront the same political chicanery?
Having dissociated himself from the ongoing protests, King Gyanendra is probably enjoying the spectacle. And not altogether as a belated vindication. This was a debate Nepal needed circa 2005-2006. It’s not too late to sharpen the deliberations for the sake of the crown and the country.

Not So Foreign Policy

Photo courtesy: onlinekhabar.com

Amid its deepening general disarray, the government injected a dose of sanity over the weekend by unveiling a unified foreign policy document.
The supreme source of succor here is that Foreign Minister Pradeep Kumar Gyawali put to rest swirling speculation that a government confronting extreme competing external pressures was about to release a new foreign policy document.
Having to choose between the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Belt and Road Imitative has been exacting enough. The extrapolation of that into a litmus test of our very existence would have been unbearable. New times do warrant new thinking. Yet old ways, too, have enduring value.
Drawing from Lord Buddha’s teachings and Prithvi Narayan Shah’s Divine Counsels to Nepal’s own policy assertions and experiences over different systems and governments, ‘Nepal’s Foreign Policy, 2077 BS’ is replete with principles that have stood the test of time.
Presenting the document, Gyawali affirmed that Nepal would continue its long-standing non-aligned policy. Phew! The country wished to promote and promote the overall national interest by strengthening external relations based on universal equality, mutual benefit and respect through a network of independent and balanced foreign policy.
Nepal would expand and strengthen bilateral relations with all countries, including neighbors, based on universal equality, mutual benefit and respect. Our foreign policy also included promoting the national interest by enhancing Nepal’s identity and representation in international and regional fora.
Now, it would be easy to dismiss the document as a regurgitation of platitudes. Why assert the obvious with such fanfare, especially when voices on the streets are screaming for sweeping change?
The paramount point here, though, is that we now have a single affirmation of what Nepal values, thinks about, requires and expects in its engagement with the rest of the world. Foreign relations are a two-way street. We now have signposts.
In articulating those views, the government has illuminated vital continuities in our foreign policy. More importantly, it has done so rising above the practice of negation prevailing in the nation, much of it officially sanctioned. Denigrating the successes of the past simply because of their authors has been allowed to paralyze the country for far too long. The state’s severity has only toughened the streets.
Adjusting to a world in constant flux is a challenge in itself. Having to navigate periods of unusual turbulence is tougher. The document’s emphasis on international border security, climate change, economic diplomacy, and the protection of the interests of the Nepali community abroad clearly responds to emerging needs. The commitment to deploying soft power, too, holds promise, especially in view of the richness of Nepal’s heritage, natural splendor and fierce quest for survival amid the regional giants.
This is why the affirmation of underlying constants in Nepal’s pursuit for independence and prosperity becomes even more commendable amid our diminishing political discourse. Expressing them with clarity and candor can only help in pursuing them equal vigor and verve.
Elusive as it may seem at the moment, such broad consensus backed by commensurate conviction is the answer to our dismal internal affairs. But, then, our collective capacity to act remains an imponderable. Should it be so?

Messages Galore But Little Time To Think

So it probably goes something like this.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, after hyping how seductively he had shifted Nepal’s geostrategic locus northward, failed to impress Beijing subsequently by doing anything more substantive.
Dragging its feet on agreements already signed, the Oli government purportedly reneged on a pledge to sign an extradition treaty during President Xi Jinping’s visit last year. The irate Chinese went on to detect the premier’s eagerness to secure legislative endorsement of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with the United States.
Under internal and external pressure, Oli escalated a war of words with New Delhi, rallying Nepalis behind a new political map incorporating land occupied by India and securing an amendment to a constitution the Indians already hate.
And the Chinese? They seemed to blame Nepal for letting India and China get away with their 2015 confidence-building measure on Lipulekh that concerns Nepali territory. After all but taking Beijing’s side on Galwan.
Predictably, Oli decides to go easy on the Indians, who reciprocate by sending, consecutively, their top spy, army chief and foreign secretary.
The Chinese aren’t about to let Oli guilt them into anything. Before India’s top diplomat arrives, Beijing sends a team of military and strategic officials supposedly to express its own growing displeasure with Oli and everybody else. Publicly, China’s ire seems to have fallen on the Nepali Congress, but the mandarins want Nepal as a nation to listen up.
To reinforce China’s sentiment, State Councillor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe virtually invited himself to Kathmandu for a daylong working visit. Although you couldn’t tell from his demeanor and deportment, Gen. Wei seems really worked up. In his exasperation, he tries to do more than what Samant Goel, Manoj Mukund Naravane and Harsha Vardhan Shringla had attempted together.
Some Indians were put off by Nepal’s northern overtures at a time when it was reviving ties with the south. Others were elated by Oli’s supposed demarche to Chinese ambassador Hou Yanqi. By the time Gen. Wei left Kathmandu, New Delhi, too, was trying to make sense of it all.
The bizarre election aftermath in the United States may have given Oli a breather, but January 20 is fast approaching. The Chinese want to prevent a split in the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) at all costs – even if it mean Oli relinquishing the premiership.
Now, that really offends Oli. He believes he should have more street cred with Beijing. After all, he spent more years in Nakhhu than Pushpa Kamal Dahal et al. did at NOIDA. Oli hadn’t done so as a Brezhnevite. Nor had he desecrated the memory of the Great Helmsman.
So Oli decided to send his own message. Flouting the NCP’s prior undertaking to keep the dispute civil, he ensured his response to Dahal’s charge-sheet was heard far and wide, including through a full audio version on YouTube.
While we were alternately tickled and disgusted by the tawdriness of it all, Oli slipped in a reference to Lin Biao, Mao Zedong’s one-time designated successor who died in a plane crash en route to the Soviet Union after a failed coup against the leader in 1971. India, like many of us, must be left wondering whether Chinese or American ears perked up first and what each heard.

Can We Just Be Civil?

If you were expecting fireworks at the upcoming secretariat meeting of the ruling Nepal Communist Party, Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe has dashed your hopes.
The NCP has decided to make the November 30 meeting ‘non-controversial’, citing the Chinese dignitary’s visit scheduled for the previous day.
The secretariat is slated to receive a written proposal from Prime Minister and NCP chair Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli the day before Wei’s arrival and hold discussions on it the day after his departure. The timing of the visit is probably forcing us to search for connections that may not exist. But, then, who really knows what’s going on here?
Oli’s proposal comes in response to the document submitted by co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ last week. Although forwarded as a political proposal, Dahal’s text is so laced with accusations of corruption, nepotism and dictatorship by Oli that it reads more like a manifesto for his removal from the premiership.
An explicably irate Oli demanded that Dahal withdraw the proposal, which the latter rebuffed with the support of other key members of the secretariat. Oli is expected to lay bare his own set of serious allegations and accusations against Dahal.
The NCP secretariat, however, says it would withhold details of Oli’s proposal to avoid marring Wei’s visit, already the subject of much speculation.
Although officials are tight-lipped over the visit, Wei would be the high-ranking Chinese official to visit Nepal since President Xi Jinping in October last year. Wei is believed to be visiting in connection with the 65th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Nepal and China. During his daylong stay in the capital on November 29, he will meet with President Bidhya Bhandari, Prime Minister Oli and Foreign Minister Pradeep Gyawali, among others.
Amid growing public protests against China’s interference in Nepal and official Chinese media taking aim at the Nepali Congress for fanning anti-Beijing sentiments, the NCP is understandably loath to rock the boat any further. Especially not when Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi’s activism vis-à-vis the ruling party’s internal rifts continues unabated.
While we can expect Wei to reciprocate the NCP’s proclivity for civility, he will have pointed questions on Nepal’s approach to and intention towards the evolving regional dynamics.
The string of visits to Nepal by India’s spy and military chiefs and the imminent arrival of the foreign secretary coincides with India’s pronounced entry into the US-led Indo-Pacific alliance to contain China. Beijing, for its part, has initiated its own version of the Quad in South Asia.
Clearly, the Chinese have not abandoned their support for a trilateral framework with India on Nepal, Beijing appears to have felt the more pressing need to pursue comprehensive Nepal-China engagement. The creation of the NCP and its preponderance in power appeared to have instilled some confidence in Beijing, which had been searching long for a reliable post-monarchy partner in Nepal.
Yet China’s efforts to build institutional and ideological coherence into party-to-party relations have coincided with serious rifts within the NCP. Much of the rupture, from Kathmandu’s vantage point, may be attributable to personality clashes and competing ambitions of leaders. Beijing, however, increasingly views the NCP’s inner rivalries as part of the larger geopolitical churning process under way.
The early word was that Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi was to arrive in Kathmandu. Yet in a late evening meeting with Oli, Chinese ambassador Hou finalized Wei’s trip. Indeed, Wei must have found it easier to accommodate Nepal on his regional itinerary. But that couldn’t have been the only reason.
Foreign Minister Wang’s arrival in close succession may not contain the glitz of the two-plus-two confabulations between the American and Indian foreign and defense ministers. The urgency for Nepal and China may be no less, especially when a party so deep in civil war so fervently feels the need for civility.

Stuck Between The Carrot And The Stick

TOP SECRET/SENSITIVE

EXCLUSIVELY EYES ONLY

MEMORANDUM OF CONVERSATION

PARTICIPANTS:
•    PRIME MINISTER KHADGA PRASAD SHARMA OLI
•    SAMANT GOEL, DIRECTOR, RESEARCH AND ANALYSIS WING, INDIA

PRIME MINISTER’S RESIDENCE, BALUWATAR, KATHMANDU 

DATE: WEDNESDAY, 21 OCTOBER 2020, 8:30 - 11:20 PM

[BEGIN TEXT]

GOEL: It’s straight to the point, I guess.

OLI: There’s never a better way.

GOEL: This is a decisive moment for both sides. New Delhi didn’t expect this from the 12-point understanding. Granted, there’s enough blame to go around everywhere. Still, Nepali political players must bear the brunt.

OLI: Hold on, you were the ones who foisted an impossible task on us. In fact, you couldn’t even get your act together. Your stick pulled away from the carrot before the palace could begin to make up its mind.

GOEL: Yeah, the Saran end of the show kind of messed things up. But we could keep Karan quiet only after you guys promised everything was under control.

OLI: We did the best we could.

GOEL: No, you didn’t. You immediately opened the door wide open to the Chinese just to snub us.

OLI: Well, the SPA needed an insurance policy. You took over the state army. Now we had to contend with the Maoists you spawned and sustained.

GOEL: Well, if you’re thinking of pinning all this on us …

OLI: Of course, I am. How could you trust the Maoist leadership to rein in cadres basically fired up by anti-Indianism? That, too, after weakening the palace – institutionally and instinctively, the greatest friend India could ever have?

GOEL: That’s the same thing my government and ruling party leaders keep asking me.

OLI: That means it’s a valid question.

GOEL: Okay. But what are we going to do about it?

OLI: Go back to where it all began, like everyone else seems to want.

GOEL: It’s not that easy. RAW spent much of its time alive pushing for a republic here. The ex-king is far more influential among the people in his topi than he ever was with the crown on. So you have to help us out here.

OLI: You think it’s easy for us? We’ve spent the past decade and a half demonizing the man, his predecessors and successors, not to talk about the institution.

GOEL: That’s the crux of it all. We’re not going to take the fall here. You guys promised you could handle things. You didn’t even try.

OLI: Don’t blame me. Don’t you remember the parable of the oxcart and America? Everyone hates me for opposing federalism, even those who now hate it themselves. I haven’t missed a single Dasain ever since, or at least have tried not to. And, pray, show me where there is anything approximating ‘republic’, ‘secularism’ or ‘federalism’ in the 12 points you drafted.

GOEL: Don’t you get it? You’re the right man in the right place. Get everyone on board and admit that the 12-point journey turned out to be misguided. Take a joint petition to Nirmal Niwas affirming the same. Then start blaming us for egging you on to abolish the monarchy. We’ll take it. Heck, it’s gonna be nothing after the heat we’ve already been taking at home.

OLI: Okay, what’s in it for me?

GOEL: Not just you, for everyone. You’ll get to keep everything, your politics, money, self-respect.

OLI: How long have I got?

GOEL: Until Gen. Naravane’s visit. He’s not going to be as accommodating. Remember, the Indian Army was the most bitter critic of our agenda in 2005. They’re the ones breathing the hardest down our necks today.

OLI: Have you spoken with the other blokes here?

GOEL: Yeah. Everyone is waiting for you to take the initiative.

OLI: What? They’ve demanded my resignation again, already?

GOEL: Don’t quote me on that.

[END TEXT]

Who’s Playing Whom, Pray?

After a series of fumbles, the government explains that Samanta Goel, chief of India’s notorious Research and Analysis Wing (RAW), met Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli late at night as a special envoy of his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. That’s probably true, but not in the way we’re being led to believe.
Clearly, Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have studiously refused to take ownership of the regime change New Delhi effected here in the spring of 2006. This is not entirely so because of their lingering affinity for Nepal’s monarchy and Hindu statehood. At the core is the wider BJP fraternity’s general abhorrence of RAW, which they see as Congress-created abomination.
Now, let’s be clear here. The BJP values covert/clandestine research, analysis and – yes – operations deemed so vital to advancing India’s national interest. Still, today’s establishment in New Delhi also views RAW as an instrument of subversion against the BJP.
Modi spent his first term reining in this ‘rogue’ agency, at least the parts he deemed such. How closely the restructuring of the institutional set-up of India’s defense and security apparatus has brought India’s premier external spy agency under that umbrella remains to be seen. Nepal is the litmus test, it would be fair to say.
By mid-2006, even a cursory reading of the 12-point understanding was enough to underscore its loss of relevance. Each subsequent compromise was merely a part of RAW’s sustained effort to maintain the basic applicability of Delhi Compromise II. Things could have changed in 2014, with the sweeping change of guard in New Delhi. But RAW persuaded Modi et al. that extending the gestation period was that was needed.
After the fiasco of India’s earthquake relief in 2015, the BJP’s patience was bound to wear thin. Then Foreign Secretary S. Jaishankar, who wanted Nepal to delay promulgating the new Constitution to address the demands of Madhesi groups, instead got an earful from the leaders of the Nepali Congress, Unified Marxist-Leninists and Maoists.
Now, Jaishankar, as the son of K. Subrahmanyam, the doyen of Indian strategic affairs, easily detected several messages lurking behind that message. Just how many games was RAW playing in Nepal? Before Modi et al. could figure that out, the unofficial blockade became a worse mess. Even the Indian Congress party, which had mounted an official trade and transit embargo in 1989-1990, began accusing the BJP of bullying Nepal.
Ultimately, it took the militaries of the two countries to work out a compromise. It wasn’t much of a one for the Indians, who engineered Oli’s ouster. And yet the public face of Nepali resistance went on to lead communists into a landslide electoral victory. He returned to the premiership to take his crusade into new cartographic and figurative heights.
Were Nepali leaders now listening more to the Chinese, Americans and Europeans? They didn’t need to find out. What Modi et al. knew was that if the Nepali political establishment listened to any Indians, they would have to be from RAW.
So Goel arrives in Kathmandu with Modi’s ultimatum. He wasn’t too bothered about the public glare and met everyone who he thought mattered. After all, his organization was on the line, too. Modi’s henchmen leaked information so selectively that we are now wondering whether Oli has been a RAW asset all along.
Goel’s other known Nepali interlocutor, Dr Baburam Bhattarai, had no problem. In fact, he has been elevated to the role of Oli’s putative successor. Modi et al. weren’t too focused on the other Nepali leaders Goel met. They are still denying having met India spook-in-chief.
RAW may have forced the Chinese, Americans and Europeans to reassess the respective values they have assigned to individual Nepali protagonists. The Chinese and Americans ambassadors spent part of the Dasain interregnum singing and cooking, respectively. It’s RAW that’s facing the greatest pressure – and from India’s generals, no less.
As the bilateral territorial dispute was escalating earlier this year, Indian Army chief Gen. Manoj Mukund Naravane said Nepal might have been acting at the behest of others. Because of the India-China border tensions, everyone thought he meant China.
Gen. Naravane subsequently sought to clarify his comment, which failed to gain traction here or there. He wasn’t terribly bothered, either. Otherness in Nepal, after all, has ever-broadening connotations.
The conventional wisdom is that India is itching for a fight with China. But what if the Indian top brass are merely interested in replenishing defense coffers, and not in a full-fledged conflict? Might this help explain why Gen. Naravane is all set to fly in with a straight face to accept Nepal Army’s honorary generalship?

Living Life As It Comes

Having hit the end of the road, the political class appears to have devised a devious turnaround plan.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s government demonstrated significant alacrity in defending China from accusations that it had encroached on Nepali territory in Humla district. The Nepali Congress, with no less ardor, continues to insist that the Chinese gobbled our land there.
To prevent the ‘China factor’ from splaying the ruling Nepal Communist Party’s already gaping fissures, top comrades have found a convenient ruse in the crisis in Karnali. If provinces need central intervention in such purely local issues as distrust in leadership, what good is federalism?
The stripping of the defense portfolio from Deputy Prime Minister Ishwar Pokharel has extended the diversion. Was Pokharel’s transfer to the Office of the Prime Minister and Council of Ministers aimed at appeasing the army, the Indians or Bishnu Poudel? Your guess is as good as mine. Pokharel, however, sees himself as having been entrusted with more expansive responsibilities. The logical next question is: Are Oli rivals Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Madhav Kumar Nepal really peeved or just pretending?
Externally, the equation is tightening. The Americans want our legislature to approve the MCC compact forthwith so that no future government would be able to wiggle out. Although publicly indifferent, the Chinese opposition is becoming more adamant in private. The Indians, unsure of the wisdom of enlisting Washington in their Himalayan conflict with China, want the two major global protagonists to duke it out in Nepal alone. But, then, New Delhi barely disguises where its preferences lay.
That’s enough to impel the Chinese to dig in their heels. There is a moral equivalence between a sliver of land in Humla and wider swathes along the Sino-Indian Himalayas. Since states big and small are equally sovereign, territory, too, cannot be differentiated based on size.
There has been no encroachment, Beijing has been insisting from the outset. Now it has produced satellite images seeking to prove the assertion. The Nepali Congress is not giving up. While training its guns on the ruling communists, the main opposition party knows the real target knows what’s being talked about. Concluding that the Humla dispute is New Delhi’s contrivance, the Chinese have candidly asserted that the Nepali Congress is a pro-Indian force. New Delhi may worry all it wants about how far Nepal’s premier democratic party’s loyalties have strayed from the land of its origins, Beijing won’t be guilted into doing anything it doesn’t want.
All this certainly cheers up our leaders. If the system collapses, Nepal’s post-2006 leadership can blame it on all the external contradictions that have accumulated since. Any secret letters that might have been exchanged with the 12-point understanding are not likely to see the light of day any time soon. Still, the Nepali signatories to Delhi Compromise II must have made a cluster of commitments before our regime changed. If the ambiguity of the enterprise is enough to bite India today, you can easily imagine the added disappointment of third parties resting on New Delhi’s guarantees.
In fairness, our leaders did try during the past decade and a half. Every step of the way, they negotiated a new compromise to save the preceding one just to uphold the sanctity of a flawed agenda. How long could the internal jugglery go on when the external patrons kept departing from the script? There must be a statute of limitations somewhere when it comes to violations of commitments long altered.
What will happen next? Nepalis have learned to live life as it comes. Who says politicians can’t do the same?

Flashback: Hardiness And Foolhardiness Amid A Contagion

Well before the onset of coronavirus pandemic, Nepalis were searching for ways of doing things differently. Socio-cultural stoicism may have played a part, but pollution, curfews, shutdowns, blockades and shortages had prepared us for a transition other parts of the world are finding hard to cope with.
How the Nepali state is functioning today depends on your outlook that was well entrenched before the onset of the global emergency. The international system may have proven to be a house of cards; we knew ours was one from the moment it was manufactured. That’s why we may be more resilient now.
The leadership rift in the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) in the midst of an international emergency becomes explicable, if not entirely palatable. Outrageous as the continuation of state-sanctioned corruption is, it is nevertheless understandable. Leaders who built a career in police lockups are more inured to lockdowns. Those who emerged from subterranean existence might not relish the return to distancing, but they are certainly capable of enduring it.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli has thrown the gauntlet. Unspoken but evident is his warning. This government will have to become more highhanded or simply hand over power to an institution that is innately so. NCP co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal must have a lot on his mind. A sweeping Oli clampdown could encompass a postponement of the NCP general convention scheduled for April next year – a major roadblock to Dahal’s quest to attain sole leadership of the party.
Dahal might have relied on the main opposition Nepali Congress to thwart Oli’s authoritarian instincts, but party president Sher Bahadur Deuba has been looking for his own excuse to put off that organization’s convention. The smaller parties are still too busy searching for relevance to make a difference. Individual leaders like Baburam Bhattarai and Kamal Thapa are speaking from all sides of their mouths to see if anything sticks in the public imagination. Critics contend the former monarch is playing politics with his till and tweets. They should cut him some slack: he is, after all, the most aggrieved party in our hopey-changey reverie.
Geopolitically, things should have been clearer, especially with the Chinese having come out on the top for the moment. The mandarins, however, seem to be in a dilemma of their own. While they recognize that ideological affinity hasn’t exactly bolstered trust and confidence between the two communist parties, they also realize that the monarchy has tended to take Chinese support for granted.
Ultimately, the Chinese must decide, preferably with the Indians. Even then, the immediate task for Beijing and New Delhi would be to assuage the diminished Americans and Europeans who have barely recouped their investments in Nepal.
Much of the country is left rooting for the military – out of choice or compulsion. Yet we forget – or are forced to overlook – the fact that the institution couldn’t handle things when they were far simpler circa 2005-2006. (If anything, the generals were consistent then. In their confidence, they egged on the king to take full executive power. When things got out of hand, they nudged him to step down.) Is the transfer of the supreme commandership to a president from a king supposed to make such a big difference?

Originally posted on Saturday, April 18, 2020

Chinese Chequered

When you’re busy keeping a lot of balls in the air and trying to figure out what to do with the new ones coming your way, you look for help.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s government has found eager assistants in a section of the Indian media. These outlets, mostly close to India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, want Nepalis to get all riled up over China’s purported land grab in Humla.
Both the pro-Indian and pro-American wings of the Nepali Congress continue to rake up the issue. Still, protests outside the Chinese Embassy haven’t gained much traction. The imperative of keeping Kalapani et al off the table and the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact on the national agenda is enough to drive the narrative.
The Chinese have brought some of this upon themselves. For long, they have operated in a low-cost enterprise here that owes its success to Nepalis’ relative unfamiliarity with their northern neighbor. What used to be a single litmus test over Tibet continues to swell over several issues. Today China wants firm commitments from Nepal on the Belt and Road Initiative, whose expanse is alarmingly imprecise.
Oli stuck his neck out really far over Kalapani et al. to prove Nepal’s commitment to exercising its sovereign choices. And all the Chinese can say is they sympathize with us but not enough to abrogate their 2015 Lipulekh agreement with India. We’re supposed to settle bilaterally with India what the Indians have already settled with the Chinese.
A neighbor that has paid so much lip service about safeguarding Nepal’s sovereignty mouthing platitudes is bad enough. When China is accused of having fiddled with border pillars, Nepalis go into shock. In that stupor, they tend to believe anything regardless of the source.
Since life is a trade-off, countries have no opt-out. The Chinese are itching to get into Eastern South Asia through Nepal. Or are they just waving the ‘Nepal card’ to increasingly smug Indians? Tibet and Taiwan are no doubt two blunt instruments New Delhi can wield against Beijing. What chance do they have in a three-front war?
Former Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal took great pains to promote his trilateral cooperation concept but got no support in New Delhi. Exasperated, Beijing came up with the ‘2+1 mechanism’ that it hoped to fine-tune with New Delhi for Nepal. Lots of Nepalis now joined the Indians rebuffing the idea. The hawks at the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations and the Global Times are still at it.
With the Indians and Chinese failing to agree or disagree on Nepal, the Oli government felt it needed to act. So it ordered the Ministry of Education to halt distribution to high school students of the 110-page ‘Self Study Material on Nepal's Territory and Border’, a Nepali-language book that includes a chapter on the campaign to reclaim disputed territory.
How much of a sop to New Delhi might this be when India wants us to withdraw our new map? Alone, probably not much. Hey, things might change if we could help amplify the logic of why – besides how – Indian troops came to be stationed in Kalapani. Chinese encroachments seem to provide good copy down south these days. If we’re good enough to the Indians, we might even get to keep our constitution along with the map.

Aww Sorry, If It Helps

Here we go again.
A newly unified (sort of) ruling party says it’s going to work toward parliamentary endorsement of the US Millennium Challenge Corporation compact. With clockwork precision, reports emerge of China having encroached Nepali territory in Humla. And just in time, a B-grade freelance journalist in India is arrested for spying for China, and the handler happens to have a Nepali associate.
All this comes amid vibrant discussions among academics and analysts (mostly the YouTube kind) predicting the polity is on the verge of collapse. You might not think so from how well Constitution Day just went. Yet, we are told, some major realignments are occurring. COVID-19 infections and isolations have provided the cover for extensive political consultations.
China, which worked so hard to unite the Communist Party of Nepal and toiled even harder to keep it so, now wonders whether it was all worth it. The Indians and Americans are intent on destroying the current polity, we hear. The Indians, yeah, since they can get rid of Nepal’s new map. But the Americans? They might want the MCC endorsed really bad, but to the point of regime change?
Or maybe it’s the wily Indians there, too. They dragged the Americans kicking and screaming to the 12-Point Agreement in 2005. We know that the Modi government has, for all practical purposes, renounced that course. But what about the External Affairs Ministry and Research and Analysis Wing blokes who wrote the script? Maybe they want Uncle Sam to take the fall with them.
Some suggest Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli’s inner-party composure comes from the satisfaction that he is on the verge of handing the keys of Narayanhity Palace to the ex-monarch. (Now let’s be honest here. From the status the ex-monarch has been enjoying under republicanism within the country and among our immediate neighbors, can we really say that he’s not still the de facto head of state?)
The way Oli seems to be cozying up to the Indians these days may give credence to such suggestions. But the Chinese probably feel a sense of betrayal, too. The last time they could blame Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Sher Bahadur Deuba for not following through on the agreements Oli the anti-embargo crusader had signed up north. But Oli not following through on his own commitments?
Now, don’t for a minute believe that the Chinese aren’t still seething from Nepal’s last-minute refusal to sign the extradition treaty during President Xi Jinping’s visit last year (prompting that Beijing-datelined ‘bones and bodies’ rhetoric when the guest was still here.)
Flashing the ‘India card’ to Beijing after the rancor with New Delhi over the past year may be good tactics. But it’s certainly not good optics, especially when all you’ve got are nine new structures in a remote part of the country. How do we know they’re not structures China built as part of its security arrangements with Nepal when we were fast-tracking our constitution five years ago?
Yet the Indian media are running with the story faster than they did with the last – and subsequently discredited – one. Worse, they are citing those same disgraced stories to back up their current claims.
You’ve got to ask. Is our internal disarray giving the three principal external powers the space to fight? Or is our political establishment letting them brawl to avoid blame for the collapse of Delhi Compromise II?
If it’s all about taking the blame, how about we, the Nepali people, do that? We did let them con our senses out of us, didn’t we?

Waving That Worn Tibet Card, Again?

You’ve got to feel for the Dalai Lama. He’s sitting somewhere minding his own business when his Indian hosts start howling they might now support a Free Tibet.
Yeah, he’s otherworldly. But much can the guy take? He fled Tibet once in his late teens to see if that might help his homeland. Nope. He returned. The blokes in Beijing (or, Peking then) strung him along until 1959. The Americans egged him on to leave once more. They wanted Sri Lanka to take him in. In the end, the Indians did and had to fight a war for that (okay, at least partly).
Over the decades, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, hung out with Hollywood and counterculture celebrities before joining the fraternity himself. His homeland? Barely recognizable. So he sent his older brother in Kalingpong over to talk to the Chinese communists. Just as things seem to go well, it turns out they don’t. China’s rise ushers in a love-hate relationship with the world. His Holiness adjusts his itinerary accordingly. Things go wrong with Beijing, and the Dalai Lama enters the White House through the front door. And when things sour, well, the kitchen door is splashed across television screens.
The recent clashes in eastern Ladakh have weirdly weaponized the Tibet issue. A leaked report to the media revealed the secretive Special Frontier Force, recruited mainly from the Tibetan community in India, was used in the operations in southern Pangong Tso. One soldier Tenzin Nyima died in a mine blast, and independent Tibet’s flags were flown at the funeral. A top Bharatiya Janata Party leader attended the funeral and tweeted about it, before taking it down.
The hyper-realists couldn’t contain themselves. The ‘Tibet card’ was alive. Not sure how the leak affected Indian External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s meeting with his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in Moscow. The influential Global Times wasn’t impressed. ‘Playing Tibet card will incur damage to New Delhi’, was the headline of Li Qingqing’s commentary. Too cliched? Wait for the money quote: “If India openly supports ‘Tibet secessionism’ on border issues, does it mean that China can also support the insurgencies in Northeast India?”
Granted, Li didn’t say that. He quoted Qian Feng, director of the research department of the National Strategy Institute at Tsinghua University. But you get the drift.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been gutsier than his recent predecessors. In 2014, he invited Lobsang Sangay, the ‘prime minister’ of the Tibetan government in exile to his swearing-in ceremony. The Modi government has allowed interfaith conferences other events before and after President Xi Jinping’s visit to India. Furthermore, references to Tibet being a part of China ceased being a regular part of  Sino-Indian bilateral statements, ostensibly to force China to be more explicit about India’s sovereignty over Arunachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.
But then, two years ago, the Modi government forced the Dalai Lama to cancel events marking the 60th anniversary of his exile in India. And now, this?
His Holiness is too good a host not to play the part. But he’s probably not too bothered. He’s about to exit the scene. He’s done the most he can: insist that his successor may be a female born outside Tibet. Yet the Dalai Lama probably knows that Chinese intelligence operatives must have already gotten to all would-be parents.
Moreover, he has a pretty good idea that Taiwan might be independent before Tibet. The world can instigate India all it wants, but who else is going to join India on the high Himalayas. The same blokes who missed Bin Laden in Torah Borah?

For Dahal, Too, Enough Is Enough

We’ve been hounding Nepal Communist Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ so hard that he has started looking for a new home.

Contractor Sarada Adhikari, whose home in Khumaltar Dahal currently rents, has long been accused of using Dahal’s influence to advance his business. The other day someone even claimed that Dahal was the real owner of the home.

The former Maoist leader’s name has been linked to billions inside the country and abroad. A trip to Dubai, and the predictable headlines come pouring in. The word ‘cantonment’ has become synonymous with you know what. Still, Dahal has rarely responded to such allegations. Enough is enough.

In a candid and wide-ranging interview with Janata Television, Dahal said he had no clue what the house owner did or did not do. “Any contracts he might be working on were signed before I moved in,” Dahal explained. “I have no relationship with him even as remote as that of a cattle seller. Now, I have started looking for another house.” It’s that bad, eh?

Far from being complicit in nefarious acts, Dahal said he actually has been busy exposing them. On the irregularities surrounding fertilizers, the former Maoist chief insisted, he had actually pressed the Minister of Agriculture to identify the offenders and take prompt punitive action.

Dahal appeared particularly stung by what he characterized as below-the-belt allegations of nepotism incessantly heaped on him over the years. Invoking what you could call the Koirala defense, Dahal explained that his entire family had involved themselves in the ‘People’s War’. Why should the sky fall when some happen to get minor responsibilities, he asked?

“Prakash didn’t just take pictures. He carried a gun,” Dahal said of his late son.“Renu formed women’s organizations all over Rolpa and Rukum. How is it nepotism when she contests an election and wins?”

“Bina was active in politics before coming into our family,” he said of his daughter in law, who serves as Prime Minister K.P. Oli’s Water Supply Minister.

Turning to allegations that he has always betrayed someone or the other during his political life, Dahal asked why, if that were so, people like Khadga Prasad Oli, Madhav Kumar Nepal and Narayan Kaji Shrestha would unite with him. I guess we’d have to ask them.

Describing himself a conciliator, Dahal claimed he possessed the natural traits of someone who could bring everyone together. “I used to play the role of mediator in the village, even when I was a child.” So it was because of the state’s callousness that he had to take up arms.

On the party’s ideological orientation, Dahal said that it would be against the spirit of party unity to speak in favor of either multiparty democracy or ‘Prachanda Path’. The party would have to move forward synthesizing both. Perpetual motion, if not permanent revolution, huh comrade?

Addressing charges of ideological deviancy by former Maoist allies such as Mohan Vaidya and Baburam Bhattarai, Dahal said history would be the judge of whether he left them or they had left him. Whatever the truth, we do know who’s better off, don’t we?

Can This Circle Be Squared?

Despite projecting an outward image of consideration and composure, the Indian government must be wondering how things turned out the way they did in Nepal.
Around this time a decade and a half ago, Indian intelligence agents were ‘chaperoning’ – to borrow one of the more colorful descriptives of the time – Nepali Maoist rebel leaders around New Delhi in preparation for the 12-Point Agreement they were expected to sign with the Seven Party Alliance arrayed against Narayanhity Royal Palace.
Although signed separately in November 2005 by the two Nepali parties, the deal would be set in motion the following month, after the South Asian summit in Dhaka brought China more firmly within the region.
It looked like the Indians believed they could really cut the pesky palace down to size and reverse Nepal’s ostensible northern tilt.
Today, as sections of the Indian media are reduced to portraying Nepal as an appendage of China, Prime Minister Narendra Modi can perhaps afford to shrug his shoulders a bit more than others. After all, the myopia of the then-ruling Indian National Congress myopia created the mess. He was a meager provincial executive.
Shyam Saran, India’s ambassador in Kathmandu who was subsequently promoted to foreign secretary, is in an unenviable spot. His reputation in the international diplomatic fraternity is too remarkable to expose his fiasco in Nepal. Yet somewhere, sometimes his conscience does perhaps bother him. After all, India’s post-2006 doctrine in Nepal still bears his name, even if unofficially.
Between the two royal proclamations in April 2006 in response to mounting street protests, Saran, accompanying Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy Karan Singh to the palace, succeeded in pulling India back from its support to the twin pillars of constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy.
Galling as the transience of that triumph must be to its architect today, it must pale in comparison to the what Saran sees the Chinese doing in Nepal. Seminal to our story is that Saran went to Beijing as part of their bilateral strategic dialogue and felt he had persuaded the Chinese that a post-monarchy Nepal would still have room for its northern neighbor. Beijing may have pulled the rug from under the palace just a bit, but the wily mandarins had something else up their sleeves.
No one knows what really transpired during those tumultuous days. Karan Singh later conceded that he thought India would continue with its post-1990 policy of a constitutional monarchy and democratic parties. He appeared to suggest that there might have been another Indian conduit with greater sway over Nepal that was responsible for the monarchy’s removal.
Today, as the so-called ‘Shyam Saran Doctrine’ – the purported ‘democratization’ of Nepal’s political space to restore its geostrategic core firmly within India’s sphere of influence – lays exposed, the man still feels he can square the circle.
“While India should reject the Nepali state’s ill-conceived territorial claims, it should do everything to nurture the invaluable asset it has in the goodwill of the people of Nepal,” wrote Sharan, concluding a recent commentary.
Through a mixture of rough banter and convenient historical digressions that only an evocative ex-journalist could pull off, Saran nevertheless mounts a valiant effort. If he succeeds in nurturing the goodwill of Nepalis while negating our territorial claims as ‘ill-conceived’, let’s hope success proves less fleeting.

Why The Messages Keep Getting Murkier

As the task force the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) created to resolve the dispute in the ruling party prepared to submit its report to co-chairs K.P. Sharma Oli and Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, the other key disputant, Madhav Kumar Nepal, used an uncanny forum to explain what the ruckus always has been about.
“The recent controversy within the ruling party is not for the post, but an effort to make the government change its working style,” the senior CPN leader and former prime minister said during Zoom seminar convened on combatting the coronavirus.
Predictably, the NCP task force suggested a division of labor with Oli continuing to head the government and Dahal exercising all executive powers. The issue of Oli’s resignation would be removed from the agenda of the party’s standing committee meeting.
Similarly, critical political appointments would be made only after discussions within the party, the federal and state cabinets would be reshuffled as required to enhance government efficiency.
These platitudes do little to conceal the reality that this is basically a power-sharing deal that would be sealed more tightly. Recognizing that, Madhav Nepal perhaps felt an urgency to preempt the headlines. Citing his own record of having resigned both the premiership and the party when the situation demanded, Nepal has sought to define the dispute in more palatable terms.
That’s a hard sell. Madhav Nepal, to be sure, possesses a temperament and personality that Nepal’s politics could benefit from in these volatile times. His record, however, is less reassuring. The former general secretary of the erstwhile CPN (Unified Marxist-Leninist) would like us to forget his performance between 1990 and 2006. Those memories are too embedded in our consciousness to exorcise.
From the outset, Nepal had the disadvantage of being perceived as the prime political beneficiary of the mysterious death of UML general secretary Madan Kumar Bhandary. Yet Nepal did lead the party to power in the mid-term polls, even if in a minority capacity. He all but ran the government as deputy prime minister.
His role in the ratification of the Mahakali Treaty, readiness to hold parliamentary democracy hostage to further partisan aims during Girija Prasad Koirala’s second-but-last premiership, and propensity to use the Maoist card against non-communist forces more than blemished his credentials.
Having suggested then-Prince Gyanendra to form an inquiry commission following the Narayanhity Massacre in June 2001, Nepal inexplicably refused to serve on it. In retrospect, that move did much to exacerbate the political rancor the findings unleashed. Without that flip-flop, could the obsequiousness he projected after King Gyanendra’s enthronement at Hanuman Dhoka have seized our imagination?
Madhav Nepal’s eagerness to see Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba postpone the elections in 2002 despite senior Nepali Congress ministers’ assertions that the Maoists were in no position to subvert the vote stood out so vividly.
When King Gyanendra dismissed Deuba and took executive control later that year, the UML made half-hearted protests. Yet instead of mobilizing the party against what he would subsequently term ‘regression’, Nepal diverted the UML to a hastily scheduled party convention.
Whatever instigated the alacrity with Nepal applied for the premiership at King Gyanendra’s call, the move smacked of intense political ambition. When that quest fizzled, he seized the opportunity for the UML to return to power as a ‘partial correction’ of royal regression.
Such irresolution went on to define his republican politics. A doubly defeated candidate becoming prime minister couldn’t have burnished popular faith in the new order. Yet Madhav Nepal expected mitigation of that transgression amid our political transition.
His post-Madan Bhandary alliance with Oli couldn’t have lasted long, especially given the latter’s own conversions. Still, something far more serious must have gone wrong between them. Why would Oli so publicly repudiate Nepal’s offer of good wishes as he prepared to fly to Singapore for medical treatment?
Madhav Nepal’s sustained criticism of the two NCP co-chairs settling vital matters couldn’t gain traction because that’s how they decided to arrange things until the unity convention. Nepal did little to question or explain how the two men could unite such unnatural partners as a duopoly. Did Nepal think coopting Dahal and his cohorts would be as easy as overwhelming Manmohan Adhikary and his Marxist supporters? Madhav Nepal, Jhal Nath Khanal, Bam Dev Gautam and Narayan Kaji Shrestha are as responsible as Oli and Dahal for the state of the NCP.
Implicit in Nepal’s latest observation is displeasure with our disinclination to take him at face value. How can we when he continues to baffle us with enigmatic assertions? For instance, he is alone among top leaders today demanding that the Republic Monument be shifted out of the former royal palace premises. Why? So that it gets a more prominent place in the city landscape commensurate with the momentousness of what it commemorates?
Or are we to give free rein to our imagination? After all, we are told, he singlehandedly drafted the second royal proclamation restoring a legislature whose natural five-year life had expired, hurtling Nepal into nebulous newness. If Comrade Madhav could so conveniently renounce the Constitution of 1990 he was so central in drafting, what’s there to stop him anywhere?

The Burning Question Of Our Incendiary Times

With the political climate so vitiated by individual values, attitudes, needs and expectations, it is perhaps understandable that key drivers of Nepal’s post-2006 journey today are resorting to puerile Twitter brawls.
Far from illustrating the erosion of great minds, the latest ‘Dollar Mani-Bharu Ram’ exchange serves to enhance understanding of our malady.
Even before the country could appraise whether or why the old order needed to be abolished, the moderate mainstream recognized it could not complete that job alone. It resolved to join hands with unabashed votaries of left-wing totalitarianism and succeeded.
Yet the mainstream simply couldn’t let go of the fiction that it was the senior partner all along. (Seven mainstream parties allied with a single Maoist party on foreign soil. Do the math.)
While each claims most – if not sole – credit, both groups continue to hail the abolition of the monarchy and the centralized state system as a glorious and enduring achievement. They just don’t understand why the people don’t see things that way.
They did once. Now they have their own questions, since the very forces that claim to have empowered the people’s voices have also secured their right not to hear them. Cruel and crude events of a decade and a half have helped to morph the underlying question into what it has become today.
What is so unnatural about this ostensibly pro-people alliance between the totalitarian left and moderate mainstream that they cannot maintain it without external props? Of course, we search in vain for the obvious.
Excuses abound. Maybe the leadership is not up to the task. Perhaps the people are too impatient. It must be those pesky external powers’ fixation with Nepal’s geostrategic importance but conflicting approaches. After all, when returns on investment are calculated in American and Indian currency, much can go wrong on the aspirations-achievements equation.
Yet neither the left nor the mainstream is ready to concede that their ‘success’ may have in fact been doomed from the start.
We can split hairs eternally over who is a nationalist and who a patriot, the virtues of an executive president over a titular one, and whether structural federalism is really better than genuine decentralization. The pros and cons of secularism versus Hindu statehood and ceremonial monarchy over a constitutional one still provide us an escape from the stark imperatives of daily life.
The fact remains that Nepal’s own peculiar circumstances – call them historical, geographic, cultural, social or any combination of the like – will always require a polity capable of addressing and advancing them carefully balancing domestic and external dynamics.
This does not mean a restoration of the monarchy would solve most of our problems. In fact, it may even exacerbate them, if carried out haphazardly. Nor does this preclude honest and meaningful deliberations on alternatives.
Still, we must start by asking ourselves why the successors to the monarchy have failed so miserably on almost all of the areas in which the palace can justifiably claim a ringing record of success.

Maybe The Almighty Has Spoken To Oli

He’s not letting this one go.
Weeks after insisting that Lord Ram was born in Nepal, and not India, Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli has now directed the elected leaders of Madi municipality to build a Ram temple there.
During a meeting with those leaders, Oli said the government would change the name of Madi municipality to Ayodhyapuri. He also instructed them to prepare a grand fair on Ram Navami, the deity’s birthday.
The obvious question here is as clichéd as it is relevant. What has prompted our officially atheist premier to espouse such a profoundly religious cause and at such political risk? Oli’s July 13 accusation of Indian cultural encroachment vis-à-vis the birthplace of Lord Ram came close on the heels of his effort to remedy India’s cartographic aggression through a constitutional amendment enshrining Nepal’s new territorial map.
No amount of rage or ridicule from India and within Nepal seems to have deterred Oli. One reason may be the resoluteness with which Nepali scholars have been making the same assertion for so long. The prime minister’s comments during Bhanu Jayanti observances last month unleashed a torrent of analyses, interviews and commentaries that provided even the most diehard skeptics room to pause.
But, then, Oli could easily have left the issue to play out in public. In ramping up the rhetoric, is he somehow demonstrating an intention to extract the most from the prevailing momentum? After all, only days ago Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi laid the foundation for the Ram temple in Ayodhya in a culmination of a decades-long battle.
Could Oli be thinking of a tradeoff of sorts between Ram’s precise birthplace and Nepali territories India currently controls? You’d think any prime minister willing to barter God in such a way was out of his mind. But, then, Oli heads a party that has officially renounced religion. Who says he sees no use of God? If religion could help him bring back lost territories, wouldn’t he risk deploying it politically?
Admittedly, there is that imperative of tying India down tightly enough to prevent it from flashing the Tibet card as an aging Dalai Lama portends a bitter succession struggle. Oli knows he needs to camouflage any such maneuver with a national narrative.
Could Oli be playing a shrewd game here? An India exhausted by Nepali antics on multiple fronts might be amenable to returning those lands and redefining the bilateral relationship on a more equal footing. Even if there is the slightest chance of that happening, Oli does have the temptation and temperament to pursue it.
If, on the other hand, Oli is resigned to a full display of Indian displeasure at its erosion of influence in South Asia and Nepal’s particular vulnerabilities therein, why not make the most of the situation? By drawing in the Chinese closer to save his government, Oli might even be hastening a Sino-Indian condominium for the next stage of our political evolution.
Should a political ‘accident’ occur here, Oli could evade blame for the entire post-2006 political establishment. Has God spoken to him?

Haughty And Hollow ‘Homecoming’

When Sunil Thapa broke away from the recently (re)unified Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) with dozens of supporters and joined the Nepali Congress, the ensuing sense of relief seemed more palpable on the side of the royalist party.
Thapa himself hasn’t given a compelling reason for switching parties. His contention that the RPP, committed to the restoration of constitutional monarchy and Hindu statehood, was working against the popular mandate may be theoretically sound enough. Yet it is an insufficient explanation, given how politics is playing out. Even if we concede that republicanism and secularism (and its third cousin, federalism) were ever set in stone as a precondition to a new Nepal, public opinion has shifted sufficiently lately to undercut Thapa’s argument.
Thapa has also said he decided to join the Nepali Congress to confront the communist juggernaut. The entry of another republican into the party at a time when more and more Nepali Congress loyalists are counting the cost of their decision to dissociate from constitutional monarchy makes little sense.
Such realities, however, have not stopped both sides from bouncy back-slapping. Thapa said he felt a sense of homecoming in that his late father, former prime minister Surya Bahadur Thapa and founder of the RPP, was once a Nepali Congress functionary.
NC general secretary Shashank Koirala, too, was effusive in his praise. His late father, B.P. Koirala, Nepal’s first elected prime minister, would have wholeheartedly welcomed Surya Bahadur Thapa had he renounced the Panchayat system and joined the Nepali Congress, Shashank gushed.
Really? Discerning students of Nepali politics would be required to suspend disbelief here. When King Mahendra freed B.P. from prison in 1968, eight years after dismissing Nepal’s first elected government and abolishing multiparty democracy, a reconciliation process was under way between the two titans.
Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa, in collaboration with Indian Ambassador Raj Bahadur, moved swiftly to scuttle things. How well the elder Thapa succeeded has been put on the public record by B.P. and his intermediary and younger brother, Girija Prasad Koirala. Thapa contrived the fiction that King Mahendra actually intended to harm B.P. and relentlessly peddled it to the point where the Nepali Congress leader was spooked enough to exile himself in India and raise arms against the royal regime.
After that, Thapa’s political fortunes, too, plummeted. Shortly after King Birendra ascended to the throne in 1972, Thapa began campaigning against what he denounced as the ‘dyarchy’ of Narayanhity Palace and Singha Durbar. When the royal government threw him behind bars, Thapa went on a hunger strike that failed to intimidate the new king.
Finding himself in the political wilderness, Thapa once again turned to B.P., who had returned home from exile on a platform of national reconciliation. During the monarch’s extended tour of the eastern region, Thapa issued a statement demanding the death penalty for B.P. for treason. Instead, the palace permitted B.P. to travel to the United States for medical treatment.
Back as prime minister to oversee the 1980 referendum, in which a ‘reformed’ Panchayat won by a comfortable majority, Thapa continued to head the government. King Birendra had made a public pledge to respect the views of the minority, i.e., the multiparty camp.
B.P., the lone voice in the opposition who accepted what he called an ‘inexplicable’ but democratic verdict, sought a basic concession that would allow the Nepali Congress to contest the elections. Could the Panchayat bosses strike down the requirement that candidates should belong to one of the six class organizations? Thapa, mindful of the challenge this would pose to his politics, led the anti-B.P. charge here, too.
Even after all this, maybe B.P. would have exhibited his characteristic magnanimity and welcomed Surya Bahadur Thapa into the Nepali Congress. Still, it would be a stretch – if not outright slanderous – for Sunil Thapa to claim that his joining the party was akin to a homecoming.

All Together Now

Narayan Kaji Shrestha, the spokesperson of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP), wonders why state institutions are making decisions that seem to undermine our political system?
That’s a fair question. The Supreme Court frees a former deputy inspector general of police sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his wife. The President invites a group of journalists, opens up and bids them goodbye telling them everything she said was off the record.
The prime minister’s loquacious legerdemain has been exacerbating our inability to focus on the issue of the moment. Legislative sessions have ceased to evoke public interest beyond who’s snoozing, yawning and gaping there.
The ruling party doesn’t know how long it can maintain the fiction of unity and is worried about running out of excuses. The main opposition party expels longstanding leaders on the flimsiest of allegations but is eager to welcome people breaking away from all kinds of other parties.
Having exhausted every political experiment, the people are understandably downhearted. It’s not that we have run out of alternatives to the status quo. No single one commands enough support to bring people onto the streets. For the first time since Matrika Prasad Koirala held that official title in 1950-1951, ‘dictator’ is beginning to acquire some positive connotation in the popular imagination.
The post-2006 political leadership, to be sure, has benefited from this apathy and could continue doing so. But it seems to have lost patience. The inevitability of collapse makes the wait more excruciating.
From the outset, the notion of a ‘new’ Nepal was too nebulous to work. Since it was a collective enterprise pushed by dominant internal political players carefully anointed by geopolitically attuned external stakeholders, the quest could carry particular momentum.
The script, moreover, could change with such great convenience because arbitrariness was camouflaged as compromise. A decade down the line, the new constitution stood on the three pillars that were not part of the agenda of ‘People’s Movement II’.
If anything, 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.
In retrospect, the political class made a shrewd bet. Since the Nepali people went along with each compromise made to uphold the main – albeit tenuous – 12-point compact, they, too, became stakeholders. Ordinarily, corruption may be a bad word, but in context, its institutionalization is what lubricates the state machinery in a resource-strapped economy. Nepotism, too, is part of the manifestation of newness with Nepali characteristics. After all, preserving hard-won gains requires us to make hard choices.
But, alas, the world around us has a logic of its own. When they made investments, each external stakeholder was benign in its intention. When the time has come to claim their return, they have turned bold in their expectations.
The political class is anxious to hasten what is considers an inescapable breakdown. Since no one is prepared to take the fall individually, they seem intent on collective responsibility.

Every Which Way, Comrades (Up) In Arms

Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s inducement of an early unity convention seems to have appeased his Nepal Communist Party (NCP) Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ enough to start talking.
Although the NCP Secretariat, abruptly convened amid the technically ongoing but repeatedly delayed Standing Committee, failed to break the ice, the principal disputants seem to be working on a compromise that would ‘prepone’ the NCP convention from 2021 to later this year.
Reports of a fresh pact – clearly witnessed, if not actually brokered, by President Bidya Bhandari – have naturally alarmed the other members of the Dahal-led alliance, including former prime ministers Madhav Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal. But those two men have already subordinated themselves to Dahal sufficiently for the ex-Maoist supremo to comfortably grasp a deal that is good enough for him.
As we all know by heart, the ruling NCP was formally set up in February 2018 with the merger of the major Unified Marxist-Leninist and Maoist factions after their alliance won overwhelming popular support in elections the previous year. Real consolidation of the two groups has not even begun. For whatever reason, the two co-chairs left crucial decisions to the convention, allowing them to drive the agenda interim.
Dahal has vacillated on the validity and relevance of the arrangement in which the two men would take turns as prime minister during the party’s five-year term in power. It has since emerged that Dahal knew all along that nothing he asked for – good, bad or ugly – could be achieved without Oli signing off. So no more prizes for uncovering the origins of Oli’s obstinacy.
Still, nothing is set in stone, much less when it’s the NCP we are talking about. While Oli’s health remains a major imponderable, Dahal’s potential legal problems are no less formidable. Oli opponents could still go through the motions and seek newer avenues to demand that he step down from the premiership and/or the NCP leadership, depending on the mood of the moment. Oli could continue dangling the sword of a party split, mid-term elections and even systemic collapse to stay in power. Disregard the surface currents and dive deeper.
Long rumored to have been behind the Oli-Dahal unification, the Chinese are doing their best to establish the veracity of such reports. They have been holding regular training sessions for NCP members with the ardor of a principal stakeholder. Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi has stepped up consultations with rival NCP leaders amid growing criticism and calumny, mindful perhaps that it is more so in India than in Nepal. Still, Beijing remains undaunted in publicly abandoning its much-vaunted policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
The intriguing question of why China would want to save the premiership of the most pro-Millennium Challenge Corporation (albeit not the most pro-American) leader in the ruling party has ceased to confound too many of us. A CPN split between pro-Indian and pro-Chinese factions may not give Beijing too much room for maneuver. Yet Beijing understands that a formally – even if only theoretically – united ruling party would help to lower the risk of mischief by other external forces.
The contradictions inherent in any common India-US approach to China globally are too stark to make a significant impact in Nepal immediately. Perhaps the shenanigans in the NCP, the loose cannon called Oli, Dahal’s atypical bashfulness, and the hourly fluctuations in the focus of our political discourse carry more considerable significance than we choose to confer.

Cooking Up A More Credible Casus Belli?

Nature’s fury seems to have coerced the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) into putting off its rambunctious standing committee meeting for a week.
Has a party on the verge of a damaging split somehow stepped back from the brink? More likely, it has been shamed into postponing the inevitable.
Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli and his NCP rival and co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ had dug in their heels so deep that their one-on-one meetings had started becoming a curious affair. Since the two men had nothing new to say, they began shouting at each other what they’ve always been saying.
The rival NCP camps were getting apprehensive as Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqi resumed her consultations to keep the party intact. The Indians, already miffed by Her Excellency’s earlier success in rescuing Oli, began taking cheap shots in all directions.
For months now, Indian analysts and experts have been trying hard to make a distinction between the Nepali people and their incumbent prime minister. Sleazy and sloppy Indian media reports have subverted that ploy. Even the loudest domestic critics of Oli hated the way the Indians were trying to undermine our elected prime minister. Oli supporters kept rallying in public, rain and/or Covid-19.
Things got so disgraceful on the China-versus-India front that one Indian reporter eventually revealed that the chiefs of India’s domestic and external intelligence agencies were camped in Kathmandu for political parleys far broader than Chinese ambassador’s. Two detectives versus one diplomat might sound unfair. But, then, who knows what the other ‘external stakeholders’ are up to.
It took an act of God to afford the officially atheist NCP some relief. Oli went on television to say that the crisis in the NCP was too internal to affect his government’s performance. Dahal, back at his home constituency in Chitwan, wondered what he might have wrought had he become a bit too rash in Kathmandu.
So, what’s the hiatus really about? Oli and Dahal (and the rest) have been shamed into pulling back, apparently by second-generation NCP leaders. A compromise formula is said to be in the works that would allow Oli to keep the top government and party posts. In exchange, Oli is being persuaded to hand over greater day-to-day control of the NCP to Dahal.
If things go according to plan, the prime minister may start awarding key chief ministerships to Madhav Nepal loyalists and run the government in closer consultation with other leaders. A cabinet reshuffle incorporating more rival faction members, and greater representation of the Dahal and Nepal camps in diplomatic and political appointments could be part of the new compromise.
But, then, what’s new here? Such commitments were made many times in the past. Oli rivals took little time in accusing the prime minister of reneging on them. Can the prospect of ignominy alone separate the belligerents? Not likely.
Even though we may have dodged the bullet, for now, it’s pretty clear the principal protagonists are already regrouping for another day. Bereft of ideological coherence from inception, the NCP is too consumed by factions and personal ambitions to continue as a single organization. The principal satraps want a decisive battle so bad that they may just be looking for a casus belli that is credible enough.

Go Your Own Ways For The Good Of All

We are permitted to anticipate enough good sense from the rival factions of the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) to step back from the brink. But we are also prudent enough to face the inevitable.
The unification of the predominant Marxist-Leninist and Maoist factions of Nepal’s heavily splintered communist movement was artificial enough from the outset to expose its underlying unviability. If anything has been a surprise, it is that the NCP could maintain the subterfuge this long.
So, in that sense, another patch-up would only presage greater subsequent calamity. The NCP is top-heavy with bruised egos, burning ambitions and broad-spectrum bitterness to maintain the fiction of unity any longer. Allowing the party to split and politics to take its logical course may be the more judicious course.
There are apprehensions that a full-blown political crisis could sweep away the system. Such fears are not misplaced. In fact, they may be prescient enough. The ground has shifted significantly since the 12-Point Agreement was signed in India in late 2005, laying the foundations of the existing order.
The context should be more instructive for our purposes today. The Seven Party Alliance against the palace and the Maoist rebels reached the agreement on Indian soil at a time when a beleaguered royalist government’s assiduousness in breaking free from what it considered Indian duplicity morphed into a direct challenge to Indian and American regional interests in the so-called global war on terror.
Moreover, the reality that Washington and New Delhi were busy redefining their strategic relationship through a civil nuclear agreement under an Indian coalition government comprising a feisty communist partner served to facilitate a tacit and imprecise arrangement on Nepal.
China, exasperated by the royal government’s inability to stabilize the situation, recognized the perils of prolonged instability in Nepal to Tibet amid the Olympic Games it was organizing. Irrespective of how significant Chinese support for the royal regime was in the beginning, Beijing began making not-so-quiet noises about how the palace was exaggerating the extent of the backing.
That was music to Indian and American ears. New Delhi, Washington and Beijing came to a quiet understanding in early 2006 that would facilitate the implementation of the 12 Point Agreement. Still, they somehow seemed to let events on the ground define the specifics.
The outsized benefits China managed to reap in Nepal early on – without any investment, in New Delhi and Washington’s view – might not have been such a source of extreme consternation if geopolitics could stand still. As the three principal external stakeholders sought to stabilize their triangle amid newer entanglements, Nepali leaders enjoyed a wide berth to redefine the peace process by manufacturing more grievances than the people could sustain.
Today, each of the three external protagonists has recognized the futility of that accord in the changed circumstances. Our political class, meanwhile, has played the part so long that it has started to believe it has been in full control from the start.
Beijing has become a political intermediary in the ruling party’s affairs at a time when Washington and New Delhi are wariest of the mandarins in recent memory. The Nepali Congress is anxious for legislative endorsement of the US Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact as if those paltry billions stood between the nation’s life and death.
The government chose a time and manner to step up its claim to Indian-held territories and build massive national consensus wherein New Delhi has shed all qualms to dismiss an acknowledged bilateral dispute as a Chinese-instigated ploy. We have affirmed those territories in our coat of arms listed in an annex of a Constitution which, by most accounts, is gasping for breath.
Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli need not have squandered words on something so patently obvious as a concerted Indian campaign against his government in the aftermath of constitutional endorsement of Nepal’s new political map. His principal NCP rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal was even less warranted in having engaged in a such a discreditable attempt to shield New Delhi from growing demands for the prime minister’s resignation.
The unfortunate and even counterintuitive chain of events and analyses the two men have precipitated has tainted the political process amid a palpable but imprecise realignment of geopolitical equations.
Unfortunate as this confluence of internal and international dynamics is, we should not miss the bright spot. No new slogan, agenda or campaign can entice us into another nebulous promise of newness that fizzles into detriment and disappointment.
All forces across our political spectrum have been tried and tested for their purported decency and depravity. Now that Nepalis have recognized the expanse between those two extremes, we must learn to make do with what we have. Friends can be better friends – but they will never be one of us. As for enemies, we better start looking harder within and without.