Pre-emptive Democracy

Now that the Constituent Assembly election results have been formally announced, public attention has focused on the precise moment that august body would convene. Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala and the leaders of the other parties within the ruling alliance and outside have not been able to come up with a specific date or time.
Under the interim constitution, the assembly must convene by May 29. But, then, the document could always be amended. Before the body convenes, the government is expected to nominate 26 members to give it full shape. The sovereign people have a right to know the composition of the full body before the eldest member starts reciting the oath.
The assemblage of directly elected representatives and those who rode on the proportional representation lists is not that inspiring. For one thing, most of the Maoist reps are unknown quantities. Even if they are capable of overseeing the constitution-writing process, what’s to stop them from trying to ram their draft down the throats of the other members? Some Maoist members in the interim legislature actually brandished weapons in the chamber, didn’t they? Members from the other parties don’t quite have a collective reputation for resistance.
More than life and limb are at stake here. By sending distinguished personalities from various walks of life to the assembly, the government can inject a dynamic positively unencumbered by the popular mandate. Since their reputations would be on the line, these members have a vested interest in successful deliberation. (Of course, our experience with the interim constitution has left us little to be sanguine about. The most prominent drafters, after all, were among the first to dissociate themselves from the text the people finally got to see.)
The distinguished-personalities rule has always existed. Yet, in the past, those lucky to be nominated tended to be people who distinguished themselves in morning walks to palace secretaries and party satraps. Still, people who had just lost elections invariably were not picked.
This time, it looks like things are going to be a whole lot different. According to reports doing the rounds, there is a sustained campaign to induct prominent losers from all parties. Sujata Koirala, Shekhar Koirala, Krishna Prasad Sitaula, Khum Bahadur Khadka, Govinda Raj Joshi, Arjun Narsingh K.C., Binay Dhoj Chand and Bal Bahadur K.C are among those tipped to make the Nepali Congress quota.
From the UML, Madhav Kumar Nepal, Khadga Prasad Oli, Bharat Mohan Adhikary, Pradip Nepal, and Iswar Pokharel are said to be the frontrunners. Mahant Thakur of the Terai Madhesh Loktantrik Party is also favored. The surprise contenders are Surya Bahadur Thapa of the Rastriya Janashakti Party and Pashupati Shamsher Rana of the Rastriya Prajatantra Party.
Before you go ballistic over this subversion of the popular mandate, consider this. Keeping these highly motivated and organized people outside the assembly could represent a real threat to Nepal’s democratic future. For one thing, they would be capable of building all kind of alliances. For another, they could be susceptible to all kind of pressures – local and foreign – that are likely to grow in the new political climate.
This is actually what the big parties believe, and the Maoists are said to be the most ardent advocates of this preemptive democracy. How about tossing Jwala Singh and Jai Dev Goit in the lot in the true spirit of consensual politics?

The Maoists’ Russian Roulette?

Although officially an adherent of the Great Helmsman, Comrade Prachanda has managed to pour far greater public admiration on Vladimir I. Lenin. The founder of Soviet Russia, to be sure, remains firmly in the pantheon of Reds of all hues. Yet Prachanda’s devotion to Lenin has, at times, seemed, well, revoltingly lopsided.
After the April Uprising, Nepalis didn’t hear the Maoist chairman talk about the siege of Chengdu, the last decisive battle Mao Zedong led against Chiang Kai-shek before establishing the People’s Republic in 1949. Lenin’s October Revolution was the talk of the nation.
Bolstered by his latest popular mandate, Prachanda has now begun describing himself as the local equivalent of Lenin. The other day, he went a step ahead and brought back the memory of Vladimir’s elder brother Aleksandr in the form of Ram Raja Prasad Singh, the pioneer of Nepali republicanism. “I had met Singh several times during the decade-long rebellion…and had the chance to learn a lot from him,” Prachanda declared at the launch of a biography of Singh.
Singh was the first Nepali practitioner of the art of entering the legislature to expose it. Like the Maoist forerunners in the 1991-94 parliament, Singh was in no position to undermine the status quo. That someone elected from the graduates’ constituency, the closest thing you could get to open elections in those days, could muster the courage to demand the abolition of the monarchy was truly ground-breaking.
Singh’s subsequent defiance on how trees would start producing bombs stirred up audiences of all persuasions because of the haste with which hyperbole had turned heretical.
Prachanda must have continued studying the 1985 bomb blasts in Kathmandu long after the gruesomeness had faded away from public memory. So long after Singh claimed responsibility – and was convicted in absentia – for carrying out synchronized blasts, people still believe the palace masterminded them to thwart the civil disobedience campaign launched by the then-banned Nepali Congress.
Singh saw no need to dispel the perception of the top republican’s collusion with the palace against the monarchical mainstream. The future People’s Warriors must have taken copious notes right there.
What Prachanda might have learned from Singh during the insurgency remains in the realm of speculation. It must be substantial, since the Maoist leader indicated that Singh might be asked to oversee the transition to more perfect republic. Singh, after all, was the consensus presidential candidate of all those madhesi groups united by their hatred for the Maoists.
For our purposes, Prachanda’s Aleksandr analogy must be probed a little deeper. In 1883, the elder Lenin graduated from the College of Simbirsk with a gold medal and entered Petersburg University. There he majored in natural sciences, earning another gold medal for his work in zoology.
Aleksandr took part in underground meetings and illegal demonstrations, carrying out propaganda activities among students and workers. In 1886, he became a member of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) party, ultimately affirming terror as a means of struggle. Aleksandr and his allies began plotting an assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III, and were arrested. In court, Aleksandr gave a stirring political speech, and a few weeks later he was hanged.
Surely, Aleksandr’s execution radicalized Vladimir, who was then 17 years old. He became more involved in student protests and revolutionary propaganda. Grief has often been attributed to Lenin’s decision to choose a Marxist approach to popular revolution, instead of anarchist or individualist version.
The Lenin analogy, as Prachanda knows well, is capable of being repeated as tragedy as well as farce. After he suffered his first stroke, Vladimir Lenin dictated to his wife several papers. Among these were Lenin’s Testament, which criticized leading communists, including Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky. Lenin said Stalin, who had been the Communist Party’s general secretary since April 1922, had “unlimited authority concentrated in his hands.” He suggested that “comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post.”
After Lenin’s death in 1924, his wife mailed his testament to the central committee so that it could be read at the 13th Party Congress. The central committee, at the instigation of Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev, kept it from the wider Soviet public. It argued that Lenin had been mentally ill in his final years and, as such, his final judgments could not be trusted.
The following year, Lenin’s testament was published in the United States. Trotsky wrote an essay downplaying its significance. He argued, among other things, that Lenin’s notes should not be regarded as a “will” and had neither been concealed nor violated.
Of course, Trotsky fell out with Stalin a few years later and began using Lenin’s papers to step up attacks against his former ally. The Soviet dictator subsequently had Trotsky assassinated in his home in exile in Mexico City. Amid the rumblings of confusion within the triumphant Maoists, this Leninist legacy casts the longest shadow on Nepal.

From Where To Eternity?

From Sikkim, Bhutan and Fiji we’ve transitioned to Algeria and Gaza. Despite being the largest party in the newly elected assembly, the Maoists are not quite sure they would get to head the government. Subverting the popular mandate could have consequences more devastating than those that erupted in Algeria in 1991. The Islamic Salvation Front wasn’t known for its capacity for mayhem before the election.
As for Gaza, at least Hamas has a sympathetic Egypt. For the Maoists, the most Jimmy Carter could ever do is help withdraw the US terror tag. That won’t keep the supply lines open, especially when you’re under the constant vigilance of both neighbors. No wonder the Nepali Congress, still dazed by its electoral drubbing, is scheming to keep the premiership.
The Maoists, mortified by the mandate for change, have been exhibiting strange symptoms. No sooner had party chairman Prachanda decided to take the premiership from Dr. Baburam Bhattarai than he began speaking of a “graceful exit” for King Gyanendra. Struggling to keep his composure, Dr. Bhattarai tried to do one better by seeming to acquiesce in a cultural monarchy. That was too much for Ram Bahadur Thapa ‘Badal’, who tugged the debate back to the non-residual theory of post-monarchism.
With better half Hisila Yami preoccupied with wooing India, Dr. Bhattarai did the next best thing to register his displeasure. He simply moved out of Prachanda’s residence. (Fears of the “preventive detention” phase preceding the 12-point-agreement in November 2005 must have played some part.)
If Dr. Bhattarai is indeed in some form of disfavor, proletarians vexed by his insistence on wearing the Dr. prefix must be among those most delighted. Yet loyalists can’t afford to squander time on the man either, especially when the party is under multi-pronged assault.
By rejecting the resignation of cousin Sushil as acting party chief, Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala has given us a foretaste of his appetite for incumbency. This time, he can count on a unified party. (Unified Marxist-Leninist [UML] general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal made his own graceful exit because his position was more untenable.)
With our perpetual premier-in-waiting out of the way, the Nepali Congress and the UML want to do away with the two-thirds majority provision in the interim charter vis-à-vis the new government. A vote-of-no-confidence by a simple majority may or may not be able to tame a Maoist government. But such a provision would surely do some good to legacy-driven Koirala’s spirits, considering his own travails with Tanakpur-era supermajorityism.
Nepali Congress vice president Gopal Man Shrestha’s stipulation must have come as more startling to the Maoists. If Nepalis couldn’t tolerate the supreme commander of the Royal Nepal Army as head of government, how would they countenance the People’s Liberation Army’s counterpart? Consigning all those weapons to the beyond-use stage may not be enough. The one-man-one uniform rule must prevail to consummate the novelty of a new Nepal. More so with the Supreme Court just having endorsed the proclamation made by the now-defunct reinstated House of Representatives that stripped King Gyanendra of most of his royal powers, prerogatives and privileges.
If not Algeria or Gaza, then where do we go from here? Things might drift along until the Beijing Olympics. Amendments to the interim constitution as well as to the assorted documents known collectively as the peace accords could remove the roadblocks.
And who knows what might come of that meeting between Prachanda and King Gyanendra? A decision to organize a referendum on the monarchy? How much more egalitarian can the outer edges of the left and right get than that?

People’s Peacemaker, ‘Garden Variety’

For years, Comrade Ram Bahadur Thapa ‘Badal’ had a favorite anecdote. As a student in the former Soviet Union, ‘Badal’ met peers from other developing countries of Asia, Africa and Latin America. He would listen fervently to fellow students describe the true beauty of their home countries.
If only these thriving tribes of autocrats, who invariably doubled as kleptocrats, could be swept away, the brilliance beneath the dirt everywhere could bedazzle everyone. ‘Badal’ rediscovered Nepal as a garden festering under a pile of cow dung. Ever since, he has been struggling to remove the manure and unveil the magnificence.
Hailed as the military strategist of the Maoists’ “people’s war”, ‘Badal’ ceded ground to junior commanders quite early. The Maoist strategy never got past the equilibrium phase on the battlefield, but ‘Badal’ remained the center of attention.
When he emerged as a member of the rebel negotiating team during the 2003 peace process, ‘Badal’ presented himself as a self-effacing advocate of the people. The garden parable wasn’t the only one he borrowed from King Prithvi Narayan Shah to rewrite. In a television interview, ‘Badal’ had described Nepal as a dynamite between two boulders.
Lacking the garrulity of Prachanda and Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, ‘Badal’ nevertheless projected confidence over his convictions. Unable to rein in restive foot soldiers, he was credited with the Maoist pullout from the peace process. (The collapse of the first peace process in November 2001, too, was attributed by many to ‘Badal’.)
After the nation plunged into a bloodier conflict, ‘Badal’ wasn’t quite conspicuous as a political strategist. Still, his presence loomed over deliberations. At one point, he was said to have been behind an oust-Prachanda campaign over the Fierce One’s creeping mellowness.
During the Prachanda-Baburam split, ‘Badal’ maintained the equilibrium. When the duo patched up, joined an anti-palace alliance with the mainstream parties, and acquiesced in the reinstatement of the legislature, the silence of ‘Badal’ became menacing to many. Was he going to join Rabindra Shrestha and Mani Thapa in rebellion against this wholesale sellout of the cause? Or was ‘Badal’ negotiating a better place in the hallowed hierarchy. Soon he denounced the antics of Messrs Shrestha and Thapa, standing firmly behind the top honchos.
The constituent assembly elections, in the view of ‘Badal’, merely affirmed the agenda of the “people’s war.” This was no radical departure from the party line. In an interview with the Maoist daily, Janadisha, ‘Badal’ sought to project himself as a pragmatist. In the process, he couldn’t eschew the platitudes associated with political triumph.
Nor could he avoid contradicting himself. Hailing the poll results as a defeat for “status quoists”, ‘Badal’ sounded quite miffed by the Unified Marxist-Leninists’ decision to quit the government. Magnanimous in victory, he wants the Seven Party Alliance to continue in power to lead an economic revolution.
Actually, ‘Badal’ wants much more than that. He is in favor of an alliance of nationalists, capitalists and every other constituency you’d normally consider anathema to communists. But, then, you wouldn’t expect the Maoists to clean all that manure alone, would you?

Home (A Few Miles) Away From Home

So “Asia’s most humiliated man” has been asked to vacate Narayanhity Palace gracefully – or else. Now, we aren’t really sure whether King Gyanendra is going to oblige top vote-getter Dr. Baburam Bhattarai. But we’ve heard enough in recent days suggesting that the monarch might be planning to settle down in ex-royals-packed Rajasthan state down south.
Sikar, being the seat of Crown Princess Himani’s family, sounds plausible as domicile in exile. But not when you start figuring out how long ago the crown princess stopped calling the city home.
The names of other Indian cities have popped up in between. The northern pilgrimage of Benares, for instance, where kings Rana Bahadur and Rajendra Bikram had spent some time in exile. Their fate after returning to Nepal would probably be enough to dissuade King Gyanendra from making that choice.
Gurgaon, on the outskirts of Delhi where president-in-waiting Prachanda once resided, is touted as another destination. But wouldn’t it be so disgustingly conspicuous to trade residences at the highest national level so soon?
No one is suggesting Beijing, where Norodom Sihanouk – that other monarch another generation of Maoists flirted with – called home away from home. (Sihanouk’s third abode, Pyongyang, could have been considered a destination, considering North Korea’s long-established embassy in Nepal. But, then, the Chinese seem to have started turning off the oil pipelines periodically.)
Dubai, London, New York City and all the other places King Gyanendra is said to have business interests could be lucrative destinations. But India is somehow the national fixation. From Dev Shamsher to Mohan Shamsher, fall from grace has invariably entailed a southward hurtle. We seemed to be caught in that rut.
Still, it’s hard to see King Gyanendra settling abroad, if he were to vacate Narayanhity at all. (An audacious qualification, perhaps, considering the redness all around us, but certainly not an improbable one.) New Nepal simply has too many promises for an ex-monarch. And one who intends to mix business with politics for pleasure and much more.
In comments to relatives and confidantes, the monarch has insisted he would stay in the country come what may. Moreover, exile in India makes little sense. An ex-monarch leaves his country only if he is chased out or to avoid persecution. King Gyanendra stood firm when the multitudes on the streets two years ago forced then-US ambassador James F. Moriarty to fear a messy abdication. His Excellency ended up shifting much of the embassy to New Delhi, but couldn’t see the king anywhere near a whirring helicopter.
As for persecution, the threat will always exist. And exile in India wouldn’t offer any cushion. The Indians wouldn’t miss a heartbeat to make an ex-monarch the first subject of that tightened extradition treaty. Considering their record, they could choose to use him as a prod against the Maoists. That would be another reason for an ex-king to stay in Nepal.
A monarchy abolished contains an element of finality, unless you’re a Sihanouk or a Juan Carlos. It would take a leap of faith of worldwide Hindus to pull that off here. Ordinarily, having ascended to the throne twice is a good enough record. Why not burnish it by becoming the first monarch to have been democratically discharged?
King Gyanendra’s New Year’s message forced Maila Baje to ponder a bit deeper. The satisfaction he derived from Nepalis’ emphatic reiteration of their “firm resolve not to compromise the nation’s existence, independence and integrity under any circumstance” could not have gone down well down south. Chastisement in exile is doubly demeaning, a sentiment only Dr. Shashank Koirala, among the newly elected lawmakers, could really share.
Then something else struck Maila Baje. In addition to his royal stock, King Gyanendra shares the blood of a Maithili Brahmin (Rana Bahadur’s consort Kantavati) as well as a lower caste forebear. (Historians can’t seem to agree on the antecedents of Johar Kumari, one of Dhir Shamsher’s wives. But they do know that family elders elevated her status in a formal rice-eating ceremony, thereby ensuring their son Juddha Shamsher’s place on the roll of succession). If unity in diversity still has any meaning, then it runs in King Gyanendra bloodline.
By far, the strongest case for King Gyanendra’s continued presence in the country is provided by the Maoists themselves. He would be welcome to stay as a commoner, Prachanda and Dr. Bhattarai have reiterated since their electoral triumph. Translation: “If we could benefit from all those people around the palace, we certainly wouldn’t mind befriending the man who once lived inside.”