Mounting Northern Discomfort

“There are no communists in Nepal, all are employees of CIA and RAW”. Such sentiments have lost their ability to shock us. But maybe they do gain some traction when attributed to people like Li Zhanshu, chairman of China’s National People’s Congress, or parliament.
Granted, the news was carried by a secondary segment of Nepal’s media. The copyeditor wrote the headline based on something that wasn’t even in the text. Moreover, the lack of sourcing and mere allusion to a special conference of the Chinese Communist Party raised more questions.
Still, the background, temperament and record of the personage purported to have made the comment lent some credence.
Expressing concern over the political situation in Nepal, Li said Western powers were dominating the country’s politics. Despite having a two-thirds majority in parliament, he continued, Nepali communists have been accused of working for foreign powers and not for the country and the people.
Specifically, Li was quoted as saying, the United States and the West were working hard against the communist ideology and were investing billions of dollars in Nepal to tear the communist party to pieces.
The current government was trying to appease foreign powers in order to maintain its power, Li said, and accused India and the United States of manufacturing a border dispute with China with ulterior motives. Nepal, he recalled, could not even call the Indian blockade of 2015 a blockade or resolve its long-running border dispute with India.
Li said the United States had brought the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) project in Nepal to encircle China, in keeping with Washington’s tradition of never providing selfless assistance to anyone. Furthermore, he said, the MCC project is eyeing Nepal's precious minerals and would ultimately make Nepalis bear all the losses.
Considered a rising star, Li was elected to the politburo of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2012, something uncharacteristic for a chief of the party’s General Office. He owes his political clout to proximity to President and CCP general secretary Xi Jinping.
As the director of the General Office of the Communist Party, Li handled Xi's daily activities, a job that  included management of classified documents, correspondence, security and the president’s health care. He also helped the president advance key policies.
On foreign policy, Li played a major role in facilitating the strong relationship between China and Russia. He was believed to be the first General Office chief in post-Mao China to have played such an active role in foreign affairs. For example, in 2015 Li was sent as a ‘special representative’ of Xi to meet with Vladimir Putin in Moscow. He has accompanied Xi on the leader’s key foreign visits.
Since assuming the leadership of the National People’s Congress in March 2018, Li has been active in promoting China’s relations with its neighbors, including those in South Asia.
Much remains unclear as why Li would make such outspoken comments on Nepal’s relations with third countries. Equally obscure remains the agenda of the ‘special conference’ of the CCP that would have prompted such forthrightness from such a senior Chinese official.
Given China’s rhetorically assertive foreign policy pronouncements in recent years and the opportunities apparatchiks in Beijing have been so gleefully detecting around the world, Li’s brashness becomes understandable. What we can or will do about it is, of course, a different matter altogether.

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.

Cut-And-Paste Constitutionalism

Okay, let’s get this straight. The leader of a deeply divided party that barely controls a quarter of the seats in parliament restored by the Supreme Court is ordered appointed prime minister – no less by five honorable justices themselves.
Parties that supported and opposed an elected prime minister’s dissolution order – twice – vote to confirm the court-mandated head of government. But, then, within the former ruling party, elements that had supported the ill-fated dissolution order ended up voting for the new premier. Some of those elements in the former ruling party who had joined the opposition alliance’s court motion demanding this prime minister’s appointment ended up walking out of the house.
Another opposition party, filled with former Maoist and Madhesi antagonists responsible for Nepal’s worst communal killings, supported the new prime minister. There, too, elements that supported and opposed the dissolution order both times endorsed the new prime minister. They included short-lived cabinet members of the government formed after the first resurrection.
Interspersed here, too, are elements who burned copies of the new constriction upon its promulgation six years ago. In their minuscule/individual capacities, members opposing federalism voted for the premier, while the more virulently ‘nationalist’ strand of communists opposed him. And we’re celebrating how the Supreme Court saved the constitution.
The Americans are happy because MCC is back on the front burner. The Indians and Chinese, for their own reasons, are happy that the new government is what it is – a band-aid until the next injury.
Letting Supreme Court justices define every article of the constitution as its flaws emerge is bad policy. How the panchabhaladmis reached their decision this time and last is still in the realm of speculation. But there is a worse aspect. Can Nepalis be sure that the justices just read and interpreted the law?
What if the next challenge and ruling ends up being something the current cheerleaders hate? Or is that the fig leaf they are waiting for? In an highly opaque collective enterprise entailing agents and interests that are as fluid as they are opportunistic, it is hard to apportion blame when the going gets tough. Buck passing becomes convenient.
Look at things this way; we are still blaming a ceremonial head of state for the nation’s ills created by the political class, condemning enduring legislative skulduggery and ultimately making fertile ground for another uprising. If all we want is camouflage, why not cut the text of the 1990 Constitution and paste it into the 2015 version and continuing governing as if nothing had changed? The 1990 text would be far more credible and effective as a living embodiment of a functional democracy? Heck, it might even salve our collective conscience.

What You Get When You Rope In India and the West

‘Indo-West’ as a geostrategic construct vis-à-vis Nepal continues to provide interesting conjunctions and contrasts. Broadly credited with engineering Nepal’s regime change in 2006, the constituents have carefully played down their divergences. Empowerment, inclusiveness and openness have been malleable enough to provide a façade of a common progressive quest.
Republicanism, secularism and federalism – Nepal’s delicate tripod – has veered sharply away from the much-maligned 12 Point Agreement signed by the erstwhile Seven Party Alliance and Maoist rebels on Indian soil. New Delhi, which actively promoted the anti-palace alliance amid clear domestic cleavages, became inextricably linked with the enterprise. As such, India continues to embody the baleful phenomenon of external influence in Nepal, prompting criticism lately from even from onetime Nepali supporters of this search for a nebulous national newness.
The United States and the European Union drove much of the peace process on India’s back. If New Delhi seethed at this infringement of its version of the Monroe Doctrine, larger geostrategic calculations checked too malignant an articulation of its resentment. You just have to play along to get along.
Of course, each power center displayed varying levels of commitment to the emblems of a new Nepal. Steadfast support to left-of-center preponderance against the royalist right had to confront the Chinese juggernaut. If Beijing could go along with this instance of color-coded revolutions, much was because of its enduring Maoist ability to detect and deploy principal and secondary contradictions. The uncovering of the extent of the Indo-West’s hallucinations vis-à-vis the Middle Kingdom had to await the Covid-19 pandemic.
The culmination of our glorified peace process – the 2015 Constitution – was to the liking of neither of Nepal’s two immediate neighbors. New Delhi still cannot wholeheartedly welcome the basic law. While Beijing displayed unusual enthusiasm in hailing it, its subsequent comments and involvement have underscored the depth of its disenchantment. In substance, both Asian giants reflected their reservations in different ways and have been impelled toward some course correction in keeping with their respective national interests. The other side, so to speak, is intent on making sure that doesn’t happen.
With geostrategic considerations regaining traction in the American approach to Nepal, the EU ran the risk of being left behind. Inclusion and equity continued to be core European concerns, which are still reflected in EU documents and that grouping’s joint statements with the Indians and other bilateral partners.
Yet the European version of an otherwise noble endeavor lost much resonance among more and more Nepalis who saw something akin to the arsonist pleading everybody else to put out the fire. By the time the latest Newar-Dalit ruckus erupted, the EU felt compelled to issue a statement denying it had sponsored the individual who was refused a room on account of her caste.
As if Brexit were not enough, the Europeans had to be reminded in Nepal that inclusion was not something that could be imposed. But setback? What setback? The journey to remake Nepal must continue, be it under the aegis of the Indo-West, Indo-Pacific or whatever else is catchy and convenient.