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.