“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?
