Divide And Don’t Rule

Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal is firing on all cylinders. With each passing day, he is becoming an equal-opportunity aggressor. The Maoists are a bunch of bloodthirsty ingrates, who now risk the fate of the likes of Pol Pot. And his own party? The Unified Marxist-Leninists are in such disunion precisely because they are trying to out-red the Maoists.
The Nepali Congress should have been the beneficiary of the bloodletting. But it has too many people itching for the premiership. Party president Girija Prasad Koirala asked the premier not to believe everything he read in the papers. Once Nepal left the room, Koirala aides began whispering to favorite reporters how the old man had refused to acknowledge the premier from his sick bed.
The Maoists had actually promised the premier their conditional support, Nepal revealed the other day. He hasn’t lost his spirit of reciprocity, though. Pick any number of ministries, he offered the ex-rebels, barring the top job. Bringing the foremost Marxist-Leninist into the Constituent Assembly, overruling the people, was the greatest mistake of the followers of the Great Helmsman, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai shot back.
When Koirala offered the premiership to Nepal earlier this year, there was even less reason to believe the octogenarian was being magnanimous. The treachery with which Koirala backed out from that consensus-candidate pledge in 2004 will resonate forever. Maybe the man this time only wanted Nepal to help elevate his daughter to the top job. Nepal felt he could sit on that, as long as Koirala refused to come out with a public affirmation of such a quid pro quo.
Of course, UML chairman Jhal Nath Khanal was out to get him from the start. By pitting Khanal and Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli against each other, Nepal staked out his ground. By propping up Oli as a prime ministerial candidate, Nepal knows he can now checkmate both Khanal and Sujata Koirala. As for Khanal, well, the country has space for only one Mao wanna-be anyway, and Pushpa Kamal Dahal has the better swept-back hair to go with the devious eyes.
Given the deep sting Dahal left behind with his northern tilt, the Indians preempted Nepal with the affirmation that he was born in India. At a time when allegations of foreign birth was bedeviling the leader of the world’s most powerful democracy, that was a chance Nepal reckoned he could take. (As additional insurance, he would go on to cite his India visit as the most successful part of his government’s 100 days.)
But how long can the prime minister hope to thrive on the disarray of his opponents? As someone transfixed by halo of his predecessor, Madan Bhandari, surely Nepal must have some thoughts about his own legacy. During his years as opposition leader, especially after the UML decided it had to obstruct Koirala every step of the way, critics used to dare Nepal to offer solutions for a change. Let me get the premiership first, he hardly shied from saying.
But that was when he enjoyed the people’s mandate. When he finally got the long-coveted job, it was only because the parties chose to go against the people. Performance must await times that are more propitious. Don’t count on the ‘doubly defeated’ epithet to go too far. It lost its luster the moment the Maoists and Koirala took turns feigning altruism.
So what lies at the core of Nepal’s confidence that so unnerves his critics? His newfound canon of divide and don’t rule.

Neighbors’ Frenzy, Owners’ Hayride

To: Girija Prasad Koirala and
Pushpa Kamal Dahal

From: Tang Jiaxuan and
Karan Singh

As the principal interlocutors for the governments of the People’s Republic of China and the Republic of India, respectively, during the April 2006 uprising, we are jointly writing to convey our profound concern and regret at the manner in which Nepal’s transition to greater representativeness and inclusiveness is progressing. While cognizant of Nepalis’ sovereign and inalienable right to chart their own destiny, we remain deeply troubled by the wider geopolitical ramifications of the volatility of your peace process.
It was with an earnest desire to bolster the strategic engagement between our two ancient civilizations that we had agreed to contribute to a peaceful resolution of the crisis resulting from the breakdown of the constitutional process in Nepal. Although, at the time, our missions seemed separate and unrelated, it was a product of close consultation based on the mutuality of our interests and basic complementarities. As you surely recall, the understanding we had reached during our separate consultations with the Seven Party Alliance (SPA) in Kathmandu in March and April 2006 was premised on your express commitment to bridge the dangerous breach between the monarchy and the anti-government rebels in an effort to allow Nepal to continue on its own course and consolidate regional stability. But things went against our expectations. Today, China and India are locked in one of their worst crises ever, partly resulting from distrust of each other’s motives and intentions in Nepal. There is a dangerous escalation in the rhetoric on each side by the day, which threatens to result in untold catastrophe.
We recognize that things began to worsen in Nepal almost from the outset. The Indian government, in close consultation with Beijing, welcomed King Gyanendra’s decision to restore parliament and invite the Seven Party Alliance (SPA) to form a new government. Our expectation was that the palace and the parties would bring the anti-government rebels to a mutually acceptable settlement in keep with Nepali aspirations as well as the imperatives of regional security. The rebels, who then dominated the streets, took a harder line than the SPA. To prevent further instability, the Indian government appeared to revise its stand. China, in keeping with its traditional foreign policy precepts of non-interference, refused to comment publicly.
Both Beijing and New Delhi understood that the rebels had to conciliate their cadres. This was, after all, no surrender on the part of anyone. The House of Representatives moved to strip the monarchy of the controversial powers it had been exercising since 2002. However, the secularization of the Nepali state was not on the agenda. Yet it became part of the House Proclamation. The Indian ambassador, as you may recall, immediately conveyed his government’s concern at this incongruity to the king and the parties. Beijing, too, used every opportunity to remind the major actors of the urgency of adhering to the agreed framework.
When China and India acquiesced in a United Nations role in the peace process, it served to underscore our commitment to establishing lasting peace and stability in Nepal. Given our own international situations, few in the West expected either of us to set an “unwarranted precedent”. But the Nepali anti-government rebels had made U.N. involvement a precondition to their return to the negotiating table. We recognized that a tightly focused and outcome-specific U.N. mandate would be the best guarantor of a settlement conforming to the desires of the Nepali people and the aspirations of its two friendly neighbors. China’s permanent membership of the U.N. Security Council and India’s influential role in the world organization permitted the creation of such an international mission.
Almost immediately, a few other members began using the mission to pursue their narrow objectives unrelated to the basic mandate. Since many of these activities directly impinged on Sino-Indian interest in a strong, stable and prosperous Nepal, we always voiced our firm and unequivocal opposition to such nefarious activities at the appropriate forums. Despite our genuine endeavors, everything represented a serious deviation from the Sino-Indian understanding. But the Nepali leadership, from across the political spectrum, constantly advised us that all this was merely aimed at preserving the peace process.
When the Chinese ambassador became the first foreign representative to present his credentials to Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, it represented a powerful symbol from Beijing for reasons widely known. Maintaining stability and tranquility in the region was uppermost in our minds, so the peace process was encouraged to take its course. But western powers fomented the so-called “Free Tibet” protest in advance of the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Certain elements in India, particularly in the security services, saw an opportunity to strike hard against the Chinese for perceived and real grievances the two nations were thought to have risen over. In the midst of the coalition configuration in New Delhi, they gained the upper hand. Saner minds in India instantly began warning against the damage accruing from needlessly raising Chinese apprehensions.
It was only after the Chinese government lodged a strong protest to the Koirala government that the “Free Tibet” protesters suspended their activities. This allowed the much-delayed constituent assembly polls to be held, marking a major milestone in Nepal. The monarch willingly vacated the palace in keeping with the popular aspirations for peace. But the elected assembly instantly degenerated into the same venue for political horse-trading as it had been between 1991 and 2002. Only this time, the United Communist Party of Nepal became participants.
Under Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, China saw an important opportunity to modernize its ties with Nepal. Yet many hardliners in China, especially those with longstanding ties to the Communist Party’s Ministry of Foreign Liaison, were waiting for a moment to hit back at the Indians for having abetted the “Free Tibet” protests in Kathmandu. The new friendship treaty we had proposed to Kathmandu was a genuine attempt to update ties in keeping with the new realities. It became a subject of needless politicization, wherein one section of the Nepali prime minister’s office leaked it to the Nepali media.
Unfortunately, a Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson in Beijing gave the impression that China somehow backed the Dahal government’s decision to sack the Nepali army chief. We noted with regret how elements within the Nepali prime minister’s party sought to convey that impression. The ill will this created in India, which has honored the Nepali army chief as an honorary general of the Indian Army, was understandable to the Chinese.
With the monarchy out of the way, Nepal, in our view, is farther removed from a popularly drafted constitution. For Nepal’s two neighbors, this has been a wider moment for introspection. Under the monarchy, the “Free Tibet” movement never acquired the rowdiness sufficient to imperil Sino-Nepali ties. From the perspective of India, terrorist activities linked one way or the other with Nepal were virtually non-existent during palace rule. The Chinese and Indian people are justified in revisiting these realities. Today Nepali legislators openly meet with the Dalai Lama, the political head of the “government in exile”, in contravention of Kathmandu’s official One-China policy. The Indian government has had no handle on the situation, which has been largely instigated by western-funded non-governmental organizations albeit abetted by recalcitrant elements of Indian officialdom. The newly appointed priests of Pashupatinath Temple are beaten up and paraded ignominiously, with the government relegated to a mute bystander. Hardliners in India suddenly see a Chinese hand in the attack. The total absence of leadership in Nepal is unacceptable. Any false move will play into the hands of Chinese and Indian hardliners, which, needless to say, would be ultimately detrimental to all concerned.
Ordinary Nepalis are today apprehensive of an impending “political accident” when they should have been preparing to welcome a new constitution and witness the rebirth of the nation. At the same time, ethnic and regional fragmentation, growing criminalization and lawlessness, political polarization and the other unhealthy manifestations of change have exacerbated the national-security concerns of both China and India.
In the spring of 2006, we volunteered our time and effort to resolve the constitutional deadlock as men of peace. Today, in the same capacity, we issue this urgent appeal to your wisdom and judgment. The Nepali parties must honor and uphold the commitments you had made during our talks in Kathmandu. In the absence of that, we would have no recourse other than to offer our personal admission of failure in what we considered a solemn endeavor. But that shortcoming would pale into insignificance compared to the consequences for Nepal, an admonition we feel compelled to offer as true friends and well-wishers.

Protean Proxy War In The UML

If the proxy war between our two fretful neighbors is evident in one single arena, it surely within the Unified Marxist-Leninists (UML). Party chairman Jhal Nath Khanal and senior leader Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli have been embroiled in a fiery exchange of words that threatens to outlast the widely expected split in the organization.
Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal must be beaming at the secure middle ground he has staked in the short term. But, then, he must be mortified by what has become of a party he believes he has nurtured far more than did the late Madan Bhandari.
Ideology was never quite the adhesive it was made out to be in the UML. When Bhandari came out with his program of People’s Multiparty Democracy (PMD) at the 1993 convention, there was no shortage of critics who dubbed it a repackaging of glasnost and perestroika. This effort to establish relevance in a changing world did not help Mikhail Gorbachev and the Soviet communists. Their one-time ideological soulmates in the Eastern European satellites succeeded because they had formally reinvented themselves as social democrats.
As a policy, the makeover did help the UML, which became largest check on the Nepali Congress. This distribution of the popular mandate helped Nepal’s second democratic experience last as long as it did. Khanal was never reconciled to PMD line, Bhandari’s widow, Bidya – our current defense minister – told us in a recent forthright interview. She implied that Khanal has been scheming against Madhav Nepal’s government since the moment he was denied the premiership he felt entitled to as the leader of the senior coalition partner.
Even if personal, his sentiments against Bhandari and his legacy must run deeper. Impositions in the garb of ideology by upstarts was not something Khanal, who built the forerunner of the UML during the partyless years, was going to tolerate. Khanal, moreover, was the top-most comrade in the interim government (in terms of influence if not rank) that brought about the transition from the partyless regime to the multiparty system. He personally considered himself the only thing that stood between the country and that constitution drafted by the palace.
The response from the other side was swift. J.N. Comrade found himself in the company of Balaram Upadhyaya and Siddhi Lal Singh in that he was dropped from the post-convention standing committee.
If anything, Bhandari’s tragic death thrust the party further away from Khanal. The man did not find a place in the nine-month UML minority government. Nepal and Oli, the leading party beneficiaries in the post-Bhandari era, gradually pushed their own competing lines of sorts. When the country jeered how Khanal had brought in internal decorations from Europe for his new home, the UML establishment joined in the derision. In March 1997, Khanal flexed his muscles by forcing a rearrangement of the order of precedence after he discovered that he was ranked ninth in the Lokendra Bahadur Chand-led cabinet – after the Rastriya Prajatantra Party’s Prakash Chandra Lohani – instead of fifth in line with the party’s decision.
As Nepal and Oli vied with one another to tilt the deepest to the south, Khanal seemed like a has-been. It looked like he was enjoying his ride to the sunset. The man to watch was Bam Dev Gautam. He was impetuous enough to believe that his nationalism card would see him through the UML split, losing sight of the countless hands his rivals had to trump him. Once Madhav Nepal began slipping among the wider populace because of his unpredictable contortions, Oli and Gautam stepped up their moves. Khanal was biding his time. The Oli versus Khanal round became a must-see show only when it became part of the north-south rivalry, leading up to the party convention.
Oli’s illness allows him to visit India often. That frequency gives him an aura of power that he uses. The Indians know they can use him to the hilt. The Chinese, in their quest to project their soft power, recognized that their policy of building ties with all political parties had to go a step further. They began competing patronage in all the parties, including the Terai-based ones.
That Khanal was forced to cut short a visit to China to attend to the growing row over the dismissal of then army chief Rookmangad Katuwal perhaps reflected the setback the north received in its Maoist misadventure. But it was a metaphor for the geopolitical lines drawn in our national polity.
And Gautam? Well he sure sees an opportunity where it presents itself. His bold appeal to China to mediate the Kalapani row with India did not amuse Beijing. Yet he brought the issue to the table. Between Khanal and Oli, Gautam has grasped an incongruity. The Maoists own the agenda of a constitution drafted by the constitutent assembly. Yet they are no part of it today.
Madhav Nepal, a member of the panel that drafted the ill-fated 1990 basic law, and Nilambar Acharya, the law minister who supervised the process, are leading the charge. Gautam has added his voice to the Maoists’ call for a people’s revolt to ensure popular supremacy. Is the man once disciplined by the UML for being a royalist now itching to join the Maoists? Perhaps he wants to stay in the UML as its edifice of equidistance.

Bouquets Of Boondoggle

The purveyors of perfidy are prospering. Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala declared the other day in a television interview that the controversy sparked by her decision to pull out of Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal’s official entourage to New Delhi was actually a boon to her Nepali Congress.
Without the media linking the abrupt move to her apparent dissatisfaction with the prime minister’s failure to promote her to deputy premier, told the interviewer, the Nepali Congress wouldn’t have recognized how incommensurate its place in the cabinet was with its numerical presence in the constituent assembly. If anything, the country’s second-largest party could now claim the deputy premiership with greater credibility and conviction.
Sujata, of course, carefully stuck to her official line that ill health prevented her from joining her boss in his most important diplomatic foray. And a significant section of her own party isn’t buying that story. The foreign minister is infuriated by the persistence with which she is being asked to explain the obvious.
The B-word was not far off Sujata’s immediate predecessor’s mind, either. Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (MJF) leader Upendra Yadav told supporters that the split the party recently suffered was actually a boon. The Madhesi movement, Yadav asserted, was now cleansed of opportunists. But his ebullience didn’t end there. Yadav likened the situation to the blessing World War II turned out to be for Japan. (How fortunate for us that Yadav was no longer foreign minister when he drew that parallel, especially during the solemn month of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki carnage commemorations!)
United Maoist leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal hasn’t described his resignation from the premiership as a godsend to the party in such graphic terms. But his bravado certainly points to such belief. It was impossible for Dahal to unleash the raucous rank and file onto the streets in the form of the Young Communist League while he was trying to govern, for a change. It was becoming harder still to keep them quiet any longer, especially with his failure to sack the army chief.
Having resorted to the easy way out, the perpetual agitator in Dahal has flourish to the point where he has widened his sights. The upholding-civilian-supremacy crusade may have failed to impress many in the country. But he sees in it the Maoists’ international salvation, after having braved the opprobrium of key allies of those crucial subterranean years.
If Dahal has really made a bid for the leadership of the international revolutionary movement, then his experience in power must be a central part of his campaign. “We joined the peace process in earnestness to emancipate the people, but were being forced to abandon our core ideals every step of the way once we won the largest number of seats,” he must have told the faithful during the secret conclave he supposedly attended during his recent European trip. “Let this be a cautionary tale to revolutionaries the world over and an impetus for permanent revolution.” Peace is, after all, war by other means.
In reality, Sujata’s antics may be part of a grand design to destabilize Prime Minister Nepal’s government and precipitate its fall. Yadav, for his part, wants to undermine the Unified Marxist-Leninists – the prime instigators of the MJF, in his view – without letting the rival faction led by Deputy Prime Minister Bijay Kumar Gachchadar reap the most benefits. Oddly enough, Dahal’s motives are the clearest: a keen desire to obfuscate his true purpose of the moment.
The national boondoggle can be expected to continue because Nepalis aren’t terribly interested in counting their blessings right now. They are too busy trying to evade new blights.

Right Message, Wrong Messenger

As the Indian Embassy was in the midst of Independence Day fervor over the weekend, a group of Nepalis demonstrated right outside demanding their own country’s freedom from its southern neighbor. All this came against the background of the incessant pleas by the ruling Unified Marxist-Leninists and the opposition United Maoists to Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal not to sign any agreements prejudicial to Nepal during his upcoming visit down south.
With the southern sojourns of his defense and foreign ministers – both, like Nepal, lacking popular mandate – having precipitated all manner of conjecture and innuendo, the premier was explicit about his intentions. His mandate for the most audacious diplomatic venture of his political life, we are led to believe, has been defined by his surname.
So when Deputy Prime Minister Bijay Kumar Gachchadar took a different tack on wider subject of India, it was rather refreshing. “Don’t blame India for our own failures,” the strongman of the new Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (Loktantrik) said. Chastising Nepalese leaders for their inability to defend the 1990 constitution, thereby precipitating our deepening crisis, Gachchadar said neither Girija Prasad Koirala nor Pushpa Kamal Dahal had been able to provide the steady hand the country needed on its path to newness.
The expansiveness of the Constituent Assembly may have facilitated the election by appeasing disparate groups, the DPM suggested, but now that very size has become an obstacle to the constitution drafting process.
The cynic in Maila Baje immediately sprung up on multiple levels. Isn’t this akin to the pot calling the kettle black? If Koirala has been so odious, how could Gachchadar as a principal collaborator be immune from his own criticism? Once his relations with Koirala soured, Gachchadar helped Sher Bahadur Deuba split the Nepali Congress and create the Democratic parallel. All for what?
He may have tried to patch things up with Koirala after the collapse of the monarchy, but the grand old man didn’t need him that much. That alone couldn’t explain Gachchadar’s decision to break away from the reunited Nepali Congress to join the new MJF, merely days after he denied having any such plans.
Moreover, wasn’t the emergence of the MJF one of the reasons why the assembly had to become so bloated? Granted, the man gave an eye to the commies in defense of democracy during his student days. But what kind of vision allows him to believe that he can wipe the slate clean merely by forming a new party?
The Maoists’ upset electoral win redefined the political parameters. Who can forget Koirala’s tap on Gachchadar’s shoulder in the assembly chamber following his resignation speech, which set off the post-monarchy bedlam that delayed Dahal’s immaculation for weeks? The Maoists’ overreach galvanized Gachchadar once more. But the prospect of getting the deputy premiership in a post-Maoist government alone is unlikely to have goaded him to split the party.
The venue of Gachchadar’s latest pontificating – the Nepal-India Friendship Association celebrations of India’s Independence Day – raises questions as well. As the leader of the fourth largest party and a heartbeat away from the premiership, Gachchadar must have his own ambitions for the top job. (Fueled in no small measure by filling in for his boss during Nepal’s trip to the non-aligned summit in Egypt.) In the current scenario, that entails carefully calibrating his move amid Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala ostensible offensive and Premier Nepal’s widely anticipated stumble.
All this posturing does not detract from the validity of Gachchadar’s core claim. Blaming India for everything under the sun erodes our ability to hold it accountable for things it has been plotting in the dark all these years. But, then, the dissonance between the message and the messenger rings too deep into the soul of our nation.