Grossed Out By That Net Gain

If all official India can do these days on matters concerning Nepal is to ‘take note’, it has good reason. There seems to be no meeting point between the three broad strains of opinion. Restoration of the Hindu monarchy and statehood, the establishment of a Hindu republic and maintenance of the existing dispensation with enough tinkering to suit New Delhi are not ideas that can easily be reconciled into coherent policy.
So Nepalis are left scratching their heads over what the parade of former Indian ambassadors are saying about developments here. When the dean of that fraternity writes, we read. But Shyam Saran seems propelled by a higher urge. As foreign secretary during that tumultuous April 15 years ago, his sleight of hand led directly to the mess Nepal is in today. If the ‘Shyam Saran Doctrine’ has any connotation on this side of the border, it is hardly complimentary.
That awareness impels Saran to defend himself. “The abolition of the [Nepali] monarchy is a net gain for India and the government must firmly and unambiguously declare that it does not support the revival of the monarchy, which has already been rejected by its people,” he wrote the other day. Tempting as it is to contest that sentence at multiple levels, let’s desist and focus on the ‘net gain’.
Those two words let on more than what Saran might have intended. Just as King Gyanendra – in Maila Baje’s humble opinion – had no roadmap for Nepal when he took over full executive control on February 1, 2005, Saran’s prescription lacked focus. Intending to break a tightening deadlock, the monarch dared India to do the unthinkable: cobble together a coalition of the mainstream parties and the Maoist rebels. Saran took on that challenge firmly and faithfully.
Here’s a hypothetical. Saran arrived as ambassador in late 2002, after King Gyanendra had sacked the Deuba government the first time to begin the first phase of his direct rule. Nepal was unlike Indonesia, where Saran was serving as ambassador. Nor could his tenures in Mauritius and Myanmar be of much help. What did help him was an uncanny ability to sniff out information and act on it. During the second ceasefire and peace talks with the Maoists, Saran found himself quite busy tracking down sources and anything of substance. King Gyanendra, irked by Saran’s snooping around, was said to be quite straightforward with Saran about a newly reassertive palace’s intentions. Maila Baje guesses that the monarch – in his polished yet pointed style – put India’s ‘unofficial’ Nepal policy on the top of the agenda.
So, on the morning of February 1, 2005, when Saran had become foreign secretary, he was prepared to take on the monarch’s challenge. “[T]he monarchy in Nepal, at least since King Mahendra’s accession in 1955, has always tried to distance Nepal from India and promoted a nationalism which takes hostility to India as its main driver,” Saran wrote the other day. It is not unnatural for a smaller nation’s assertion of independence to be perceived as hostility by the bigger neighbor zealously intent on asserting its influence. Saran sought to perfect that sentiment into strategy and feels duty-bound to defend it.
Granted, Saran could be speaking about the Indo-US civil nuclear deal. A bitterly divided New Delhi could have gone along with Saran’s ploy of subcontracting Nepal policy to Sitaram Yechury et al. in exchange for their silence on the United States. How far Saran was committed to anything beyond a republican Nepal became immaterial because Prime Minister Manmohan Singh got parliamentary endorsement of the nuclear deal through legislative legerdemain. Since Yechury and Co. could still claim to have opposed the deal, they didn’t badger Saran or the Indian National Congress for duplicity. For us, the 12-Point Understanding was terrible enough. The departure from that document – which Saran precipitated – opened the Pandora’s Box even Girija Prasad Koirala had been warning us about.
So, was the abolition of the Nepali monarchy a net gain in terms of India’s new quasi-alliance with the United States? Under Bush Jr., Obama, Trump and now Biden, the optics seem good. But deeper down?
A ‘net gain’ for India in Nepal? If so, why is Saran so grossed out in the remainder of his article?

Everything Is Fair In Hate And Peace

Almost all of our democratically elected prime ministers have asserted their right to dissolve parliament as a matter of executive privilege. (And who knows what the prominent exception B.P. Koirala might have done by 1964 amid the deepening cracks in the Nepali Congress had King Mahendra not preempted him?)
It’s just that the incumbent has proved to be doubly zealous. So it is perhaps natural to expect the opposition to be equally faithful in their Newtonian fervor.
The escalating Covid-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli’s invocation of the elections in the United States and the razor-thin patience of Nepalis have made the political firmament bleaker. (Not to exempt all those pesky astrologers on YouTube.)
The presidency is in the worst shape. According to the dominant narrative, the institution was created because the palace was becoming too creative with Article 12. Yet we can’t stop heap scorn on a ceremonial head of state for rubber-stamping the premier’s fancies. Not to put too fine a point on it, everything in Nepal seems fair in hate and peace.
With weighty matters like citizenship being decided through ordinance, the presidency is bound to sink deeper into the morass along with the premiership. But, hey, maybe we can finally circle the square by completing the triangle: endorsement of the Millennium Challenge Corporation compact with the United States and enactment of the extradition treaty with China by decree.
At another level, it’s become fashionable to affirm that the 12-point process has come full circle. Yet that is being unfair. This is a case where one must defend that maligned accord/agreement/understanding or whatever else it was. The three pillars of our polity – republicanism, secularism and federalism – in no shape, manner or form resemble what the Seven Party Alliance and the Maoist rebels had undertaken to construct in November 2005. The fact that real architect couldn’t welcome the culmination of that process – the current Constitution – says enough.
Sure, politicos as distinct as Narayan Man Bijukchhe and Rajendra Mahato support President Bidya Bhandari’s decision, but they are few and far between. Anyway, they have their own reasons for doing so.
From outside the tent, King Gyanendra aimed some of his most blistering words yet against the political fraternity (assuming, again, if the tweet really is his).
On the far left, Netra Bikram Chand ‘Biplav’ party wants a referendum on abolishing the parliamentary system and the institution of a ‘progressive political system’ through national consensus (without elaborating on what such a system might be).
The right – far, near, and in between – sees in this sordid saga a justification for the restoration of the monarchy.
Still others blame the monarchy for mishandling things so bad over two and a half centuries that the people were forced to bring in a president to make things worse. For a change, we seem to have cut foreign powers some slack this time, given our urgent need for vaccines.
The moral of the story? Heck, who knows if there is any? Still, proffering one becomes incumbent in places like this one. So here it is: stick to the plan all the way through, no matter how nebulous. It may not work but still prove less fickle than public opinion and geopolitical equations.

Flashback: When History And Geography Collide

With Nepal on the cusp of the traditionally portentous month of Jestha, political battle lines of sorts have been drawn at the individual, institutional and international levels.
Fresh from an enthusiastic reception up north rejuvenation, President Bidya Devi Bhandari landed in a storm over her purported imperious ownership of the government while unveiling its annual program and policies. Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, unable to comprehend what the hullaballoo was all about, left us scratching our heads.
He departed on a visit to Vietnam and Cambodia, countries that have little political, commercial or cultural relations with Nepal. To many of us, the trip makes sense only as part of Nepali leaders’ traditional political pilgrimages to our southern and northern power centers on the territories of their respective Southeast Asian confederates.
Oli’s Nepal Communist Party (NCP) has been able to put a lid on dissent. The latest step in the organization's inexorable unity drive has only served to widen internal fissures. Party co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ speaks or maintains silence based on personal calculations.
The main opposition Nepali Congress, for its part, is able to show signs of life only because of the listlessness of the ruling party. Its ‘awareness campaign’ may turn out to be an opportunity for the people to give the leaders an earful.  The smaller parties are united by little else than their antipathy for the Oli government.
Institutionally, too, the fluidity is becoming intense. The sour taste federalism has left in Nepali mouths has been aggravated by the tightening pinch in their pockets. Official state secularism has proved to be the best sponsor of Hindu revivalism. Cursorily, republicanism remains the strongest pivot of the tripod of Nepali newness. That, too, is wobbling under popular fascination with the comings and goings of the ex-monarch and the animation in broader royalist right. If the government feels compelled to think out loud about criminalizing demands for monarchism and Hindu statehood as anti-constitutional, it should give us a fair idea of the stakes involved.   
The broader international lineup is ominous, too. While much of the ‘democratic’ West is rooting for Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party’s defeat in the elections, traditional foe China joins long-time Indian ally Russia in longing for the reelection of the incumbent government.
There has been feverish speculation over the impact of Modi II on Nepal, ranging from restoration to Hindu statehood to a full-fledged return of constitutional monarchy. On the eve of the Nepali new year, soothsayers became so sonorous about the future of sanatana dharma that Prime Minister Oli felt compelled to denounce their participation in a vast right-wing conspiracy.
Nepal’s predicament is,  however, deepened by growing evidence that the Indian National Congress, too, is troubled by the way things have turned out here. In retrospect, the party astutely hedged its bets through the Karan Singh-Shyam Saran shtick in 2006 so as to revisit things with enough credibility over a dozen years later should Indian electoral realities and national interests warrant.
Our die-hard domestic votaries of the 12-Point Agreement aren’t giving up. It is significant that Baburam Bhattarai’s group’s unification with Upendra Yadav’s outfit and their revival of the 11-province-cum-presidential-system demand follows the visit of Shyam Saran. Admittedly, on the Nepali Congress side, Krishna Prasad Sitaula looks like a has-been. Yet you have to recognize the similarity of his voice to those of other leaders like Ram Chandra Poudel and Bimalendra Nidhi to grasp the revolutionary camp in that party fully. As they fight tooth and nail in defense of their baby, the Bhattarai-Sitaula duo can be expected to draw more extensive support.
How will things pan out when Nepal’s politically discredited albeit established history collides with the precariousness of its geography underscored by C.K. Raut? The fact that many Nepalis are praying rather than prognosticating provides a telling portrait of our plight.

Originally posted on Sunday, May 12, 2019

Compulsion Versus Choice

Deepak Manange (aka Rajiv Gurung) is too much of a human being not to have anticipated the public reaction his appointment as a provincial minister prompted. He must have prepared his response to us with some deliberation.
‘Politics is my compulsion, not choice’ may not be exactly what the Nepali people wanted to hear now. Such in-your-face demeanor has been Manange’s stock in trade. Bearing that sting, the important thing here is that Manange, with seeming effortlessness, deflected blame to our political culture, if not quite to the system itself.
To be fair, every Nepali regime has had its share of ruffians and louts who managed to leverage their brawn and brutality into political capital. The difference is that the Ranas and panchas did not flaunt much sense of impunity.
The regime leaders then protected their kith and kin fairly well – at times too well for our liking. As a general rule, though, the political class believed it was bound by the same rules that governed the rest of the people.
Now, having ‘emancipated’ the people from ‘tyranny’, our current crop of leaders can be expected to regard themselves as a class unto themselves. Incarceration and exile must stand for something. But expecting such treatment is not quite the same as asserting it as a matter of right.
Deep down, Nepalis understand that corruption is what lubricates the political machinery, especially amid the bedlam legitimized as democracy. A society deliberately splintered by those claiming to save it cannot expect its politics to remain untouched. It’s the end-of-history mindset gripping the ruling class that’s problematic.
If the price of nebulous newness is factionalism, then factions must reign over politics. With so many external state and non-state factors at play domestically, politicians must pretend to be for and against things at the same time. But even a professional contortionist has limits.
Popular allegiance – the ficklest of commodities during the best of times – oscillates with public attitudes toward personalities. And we are notoriously capricious when it comes to our likes and dislikes. Still, the people can’t be blamed for, say, failing to figure out who is justified in calling whom ‘lampasarbadi’ when that’s the default posture of the political class.
So when the going gets tough, it’s the toughies like Manange who get going. But, then, you’re forced to wonder: If every cabinet needs a don to survive, why isn’t the portfolio allocated commensurate with the urgency of the moment? Put differently, how is the youth and sports minister supposed to save Prithvi Subba Gurung’s government in Gandaki province except in ways we can’t fathom?
If Manange took the oath out of compulsion, maybe it’s incumbent upon the chief minister should explain why. Or perhaps Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Oli himself should clarify why his Unified Marxist-Leninist party backed Manange’s independent candidacy in the provincial elections. But, then, we crossed that bridge long ago, didn’t we?