How Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli won over Bam Dev Gautam is pretty clear. What led Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ to relent is less obvious. His spokesmen have been clarifying that the Nepal Communist Party (NCP) co-chair joined the rest of the party leadership to avert a ‘political accident’.Still, Oli’s proposal to elevate Madhav Kumar Nepal as the third president of the party must have sensitized Dahal to the prospect of further dilution of his influence, if not power. For someone whose mind turns so interminably, Dahal wasn’t going to be impressed by Madhav Nepal’s alacrity in rejecting the bone Oli’s threw. The gears began to crank up.
Home Minister Ram Bahadur Badal quietly intimated that his backing for Oli was tied to something called ministerial loyalty. It fell on the otherwise middle-of-the-road general secretary Bishnu Poudel to go all the way in the prime minister’s defense before the resumption of the much-hyped NCP Secretariat meeting on Oli’s fate.
The seating arrangements gave an early indication that the mood had actually shifted. Former prime minister Jhal Nath Khanal emerged from the talks far more sanguine about the party than the proceedings might have warranted. The other member of ‘Bhainsepati alliance’ – Narayan Kaji Shrestha – has made a career of progressing with the flow. That posture went well after the meeting with his status as party spokesman.
While we widely assumed that Oli was running out of options this time, we were also mindful of his sharp survival instincts. The prime minister was thought to have four clear choices: a) acknowledge his shortcomings and promise to work together; b) incorporate dissidents into the government; c) implement the ‘one person, one position’ demand growing in the NCP; and d) provide firm assurances of his resignation from the premiership. There was little doubt that the last two were a no-no on Oli's list. He did do the first in a very oblique way and affirmed the second with no less circuitousness.
We may never know what role Chinese Ambassador Hou Yanqui might have played in all this. A Beijing Compromise of sorts might not be exactly in the offing to replace the fiasco the 12-point foray in New Delhi has increasingly proven itself to have become. If the Chinese were so anxious to prevent a damaging split in the NCP, it’s because they have invested so much in the united party. Foisting a formula on ideological cousins, needless to say, is not the same as imposing a system on a country.
Still, the Chinese seem to relish their open abandonment of the officially vaunted policy of ‘non-interference’. President Xi Jinping’s phone call to President Bidya Bhandari, Ambassador Hou’s hectic parleys with the NCP leadership and the publication of the party panel’s majority opinion declaring the US Millennium Challenge Corporation grant as part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific Strategy may be entirely unrelated. But it has become harder to argue that they are not.
In the end, it looked like Oli critics were looking for an excuse to relent – for now. No matter how you slice and dice it, what transpired Saturday was a mere truce. Each critic still has a reason to be mad at Oli – and now more so at each other. Be careful with that cup, now.
