Afghan Parallels and Ironies

Nepali reaction to the collapse of the Afghan state to the Taliban has been quite revealing. Sections of the royalist right jumped immediately to contrast President Ashraf Ghani’s hurried flight into exile with former king Gyanendra’s decision to stay put in Nepal.
It didn’t take long for others, while praising the former monarch’s attachment to his motherland, to point out that the Nepali Congress and Unified Marxist-Leninists who spearheaded the April 2006 popular uprising were no terrorists akin to the Taliban.
The fact that the mainstream parties played second fiddle to the Maoists – still designated a terrorist group when the 12-point agreement was struck  – was an inconvenient fact that could be airbrushed out because of prevailing political equations. Nor was it palatable to point out that the uprising was against ‘absolute’ monarchy, not the institution itself. Ditto the foreign factor in our regime change.
Still, the debate has been no less contentious on the ‘domestic’ factors gripping our two countries. Afghanistan could have continued as a functioning state even after the overthrow of King Zahir Shah in 1973 but for the Cold War-era superpowers’ meddling. By the time the Soviets had struck a semblance of stability between the Khalq and Parcham factions in the Afghan Communist Party, Washington had already assembled a forceful albeit fractious alliance of opposition groups ostensibly united by religion but in fact glued together by dollars and advanced weaponry. The collective ‘Mujahideen’ then had a positive connotation because they were arrayed against the godless Soviets. The pejorative ‘Jihadi’ gained currency once those fighters turned their guns in the other direction.
The mujahideen chased the Soviet invaders out but couldn’t begin to rule, paving the way for the Taliban, which, lest we forget, Washington had initially wooed to facilitate the putative flow of Central Asian oil.
Supporters of our April 2006 regime change, anxious to project the initiative as a purely internal undertaking, caution against drawing false parallels with Afghanistan. But, then, just because the Soviet/Russians and Americans haven’t bombed us back to the stone age doesn’t mean that our state institutions are any better than the Afghans’. If the Indians and Americans want their own security forces to protect their interests – be it airline security or the MCC infrastructure – they just aren’t equating us publicly with the likes of Somalia for fear of conceding the post-2006 adventure a failure.
In the end, Zahir Shah returned to Kabul as a citizen but, more importantly, as a prop for the Hamid Karzai government. If the former king instilled any stability in the initial phases of the post-Taliban government, it ceased with his death as ‘Father of the Nation’ in 2007.
King Gyanendra, who many believe lost his throne for tying China’s entry into SAARC as an observer as the price for Afghanistan’s India-backed membership of the regional organization, probably detected the irony here. If Pakistan has prevented India from reviving SAARC, how would a Taliban-led Afghanistan affect the moribund regional outfit? And China? With Afghanistan on its side, it hardly needed SAARC to arrive firmly in South Asia.

Flashback: Can Nepalis Coexist With Nepal?

A snarky question, even bordering on the seditious? Perhaps. But it’s one that cannot be evaded.
When Ram Kumari Jhankri, a ruling party lawmaker in the dissolved parliament, said Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was emulating King Mahendra, much of the country probably wished she was complimenting him.
However, Jhankri, speaking at a public function in Bardghat as a constituent of the Pushpa Kamal Dahal-Madhav Kumar Nepal faction of the Nepal Communist Party, served to exemplify our collective ambivalence.
The penchant to see King Mahendra as Nepal’s most egregious villain does much more than ignore his matchless contributions to strengthening Nepali nationhood. It encapsulates our inability to identify ourselves as well as our place in the world.
In a perfect world, the elected government of Prime Minister B.P. Koirala might have continued in office with the foreign policy King Mahendra subsequently pursued. Despite their deep differences over domestic politics, both leaders shared broadly identical visions regarding Nepal and the world.
We can argue ad infinitum over whether B.P.’s government – and the polity in general – could have survived the time’s geopolitical pressures or whether the Panchayat system was the sole inevitable outcome. But that is what happened.
Our view of how reality should have unfolded need not define how we view ourselves as Nepalis. Even amid its isolation, Nepal marched to the drum of the times. Our baise-chaubise states were locked in a struggle to come out of feudal societies based on tradition to the modern state system approximating the raison d’état of Cardinal Richelieu. Except, it’s safe to assume, our petty potentates had no clue about the Thirty Years’ War.
Prithvi Narayan Shah and his immediate successors waged a campaign to establish a nation-state defined by common language and culture, much in the way the wars of the French Revolution had. But the Treaty of Westphalia or the Congress of Vienna were not common terms in the bhardari sabha.
The Rana rulers might have been familiar with some of the triggers that eventually disintegrated the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, but they felt the geopolitical ripples from the north and the south far more uncomfortably. And in an irony of ironies, Nepal, never a colony, had to face more than half a decade of Soviet vetoes in its quest for United Nations membership. India, still under the British Raj in 1945, is ranked as a founding member of the world organization.
Continuing to debate how much Nepal is a nation and how much a state may reflect the vibrancy and candor of our democratic discourse. How productive would that be today, when cities, cyberspace and common citizens continue to challenge the nation-state as the principal unit of world order? The post-Cold War world’s contours still remained largely obscure when the international system moved on to the equally abstruse ‘post-post-Cold War’ era.
In that sense, the demand to restore the monarchy to save the country becomes no more backward-looking than the communist/socialist vision still largely drawn from a German’s musings at a British library a century and a half ago.
Today, we are a nation entrapped between one open and pluralistic civilizational state that sees our independence as a threat to its national security; another regimented civilizational state that is committed to a fully and functionally independent Nepal; and a diminished but determined superpower intent on seeing an independent but pliable Nepal between the two rising Asian behemoths.
Our inability to accept who we have been has only been deepening fissures over who we want to be. Nepalis need to reconcile with Nepal.

Originally posted on Wednesday, January 13, 2021.