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.