Chancing With The Stars

A tempest in a teapot it may not be, but our Unified Marxist-Leninists (UML) wallahs sure seem to be trying to make a little extra out of business as usual.
The UML’s Madhav Kumar Nepal and Jhal Nath Khanal faction has decided to intensify its campaign to expand parallel committees in the party. All this is being done in the name of unity. The Vietnam War-era credo ‘you have to burn the village in order to save it’, seems to have acquired particular relevance from the other end of the ideological spectrum here.
An informal two-day meeting of lawmakers and central committee members of the UML’s Nepal-Khanal faction decided to implement the 17-point resolution adopted earlier by a meeting of national cadres.
Accordingly, the faction will continue its struggle inside the party by forming parallel committees to reorganize the party, strive for unification among communist forces, and not surrender to the incumbent leadership.
After the Supreme Court ordered the revival of UML and the Maoist Center, the Nepal-Khanal faction has been lobbying to legitimize party committees that existed on May 16, 2018, before the two parties merged to form the doubly dolorous Nepal Communist Party (NCP).
UML chairman Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, on the other hand, has consolidated power. The party’s central committee endorsed the parliamentary party statute to give him, as the PP leader, sweeping authority to recall any lawmaker elected to the House of Representatives under the proportional representation system and choose the deputy parliamentary party leader, a position Subas Nembang currently occupies.
The central committee meeting also decided to hold the party’s 10th national convention from November 18 to 22 and annulled all office-bearers’ positions except those of the chairman and the general secretary.
The duo is entrusted with selecting the new office bearers and the standing committee – in a thinly veiled attempt to emaciate the Nepal-Khanal faction. The party central committee decided to ask Nepal and three other parliamentarians to clarify their activities. Oli also inducted 23 Maoist leaders into the UML central committee, giving the prime minister a clear majority.
The Nepal-Khanal faction continues to demand that Oli revoke his decisions, which the party chair has rebuffed with equal vigor. The prime minister also said that the clarifications submitted by Madhav Nepal and Bhim Rawal were unacceptable and suggested the party could initiate further action against them.
Oli surrogates like Surya Thapa, the prime minister’s press adviser, have suggested that Nepal and Rawal be suspended from the party central committee for six months as part of a cleansing campaign.
With the party hanging perilously between unity and split, a countervailing dynamic is at play. Despite taking an increasingly harder line since the Supreme Court’s restoration of the House of Representative and the NCP’s nullification, he is reluctant to hound out his rivals at the cost of being responsible for a formal split. The Nepal-Khanal don’t want to be blamed for any split, either. So the UML essentially finds itself in a position it has been in for much of its existence.
With the Nepali Congress, Maoist Centre and Janata Samajwadi Party no less flustered on the eve of Nepali new year, however, perhaps our astrologers can serve up more exciting insights into what the stars might have in store for us. It’s not as if Nepalis, who hardly hold elected officials accountable, would serve summons to deficient stargazers.

A Hoax In Time

The signs were apparent in their conceptual and explicit manifestations alike. Here were the two dominant factions of Nepal’s awfully fractious communist movement – coming from vastly dissimilar schools, no less – in a headlong rush toward amalgamation.
Deftly deflecting us from the whys and hows, Unified Marxist-Leninist leader Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli and Unified Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ insisted on what they touted as a historical inevitability.
The commentariat uniformly considered it too good to be true. A few others didn’t shy away from declaring that it would be bad if it were true. Yet Oli and Dahal persisted over countless one-on-one sessions but let on precious little. Photographs showed them sipping tea and swapping tales. Nepalis were persuaded that this was a done deal. The only thing left was to figure out how to do it.
The bad blood between the two factions existed in its darkest hue. Yet key members of each faction – many as clueless as the rest of us – pushed for unification. It was thrust down our throats with a surfeit of zero-calorie sweeteners.
According to the prevailing narrative, the Chinese masterminded the unification for their political and strategic ends. If Nepalis could not produce our version of the Kim dynasty, we could put in power a communist government in perpetual majority. North Korea and Nepal needn’t be alike. Democracy promotion with Chinese characteristics had enogh local camouflage to contrast it favorably with western-inspired color-coded revolutions.
But, then, maybe the Indians were behind it all. Their 12-point agenda had gone through so many contortions that a majority government was the only saving grace. At least the 1990 Constitution had produced a majority government (even if it didn’t turn out to be a good omen).
Or was it the Americans? A two-thirds-majority endorsement of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact was within reach, despite the ruling party's perfunctory noises.
To stretch the story a bit, maybe a united communist party was the best way of containing China. Let’s not forget how the Indians and Americans portrayed the Chinese as driving the Nepali Maoists, only to see Beijing reap low-investment post-monarchy rewards in a way neither New Delhi nor Washington had anticipated.
When Messrs. Oli and Dahal finally came up with an extended unification plan to be formalized through a party convention, they couldn’t even get the new organization’s name right. They added the abbreviation to the party’s official name. Common parlance christened the new party ‘Double NeKaPa’.
That oversight became the butt of many jokes. In retrospect, it has become far more tempting to wonder whether our comrades had deliberated placed that as an escape clause. Power, pelf and patronage were too enticing prospects not to foist a hoax upon the country, especially when the Constitution specifically forbad a no-confidence vote for two years.
Politicians are what they are. How could the country go along with such a transparent sham? The question may have come too late for any redeeming value. Still, it’s becoming harder not to ask.

The Anticipation Behind Our Exasperation

With the Supreme Court’s resurrection of the House of Representatives last month, you’d think Nepalis should be well past viewing politics in the tragedy-farce-and-beyond sequence.
Let’s admit it; our collective exasperation also carries a dose of shared anticipation. It’s as if quirky Nepali politics has acquired a sensibleness of its own that does not cease to astonish our leaders and the led alike.
The narrative that the Supreme Court order represented a decisive – and even irretrievable – blow to Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli could barely last a week. Today’s prevailing line appears to be that, while not handing our premier an outright victory, the justices ended up cementing his position, as far as where he stood just before issuing the dissolution order.
The conventional wisdom, in a nutshell, appears to be that everything now depends on a formal split in the ruling Nepal Communist Party.
Ordinarily, such an unabashed declarative could have been easily cast aside as the fulmination of a conspiracy theorist or agent provocateur. But, as Nepali Netbook readers are often reminded here, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean someone isn’t out to get you.
The political equivalent of that adage is that leaders have come to rely on the crystallization of any of the competing theories that may be in fashion at any given time. They still have to play the part of the primary drivers of our irremediable era of hope and change. Privately, they, too, want those alien forces who instigated them to break ‘old Nepal’ to own it.
Once you’ve figured that out, a lot more becomes clear. You can stop wondering how Oli rivals who today insist they always knew how nasty the prime minister is could once partner with him. The Nepali Congress’ nauseating eagerness/indifference on leading/joining a new government becomes more comprehensible. (As does party president Sher Bahadur Deuba’s affirmation that – as leader of the opposition – he is the prime minister in waiting, but isn’t actually lining up for the job.)
Heck, it even starts to make sense when a prime minister accused of taking a lurch to the extreme right suddenly pallies up with the most radical leftist force on our spectrum. (And rival Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ taking credit for an agreement signed by a government he castigates.)
Maybe our leaders are waiting for specific guidance from their respective external patrons, you might insist. Maybe. But let’s not forget the power of Nepali politics to confound foreigners. A prime ministerial aspirant to promises to lead a government India would feel ‘comfortable’ doesn’t exactly burnish credentials in New Delhi. The foreign powers that matter don’t seem to be able to think together or alone, much less act.
The proverbial snake, frog and scorpion abroad have to come out of this trance before our leaders can even sense a smidgen of succor.
Doing the same thing repeatedly to expect a different result may be a sign of insanity among our leaders, Baburam Bhattarai recently advised us, advancing that well-worn adage. For all the toil and turmoil of the last decade and a half, the people at least can try thinking up all possible equations ahead.
After all, who says you can’t apply logical reasoning to even the most ostensibly twisted logic?