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.

Colder Calculations On Covid-19?

Earlier this year, when the Indians were no longer able to bear Nepali accusations of New Delhi having imposed its version of the Pressler Amendment, they let us know that Nepali middlemen were the real culprits.
The amendment mentioned above, under which the United States continued withholding delivery of F-16s Pakistan had already paid for as punishment for Islamabad’s nuclear weapons program, dogged bilateral relations for much of the 1990s. The 9/11 attacks cleared that barrier. India’s refusal to deliver vaccines in Nepal carried worse optics.
China’s glee at the dent in India’s image was subsumed in Beijing’s more considerable glory against the vaccine it continues to be accused of having unleashed for nefarious geostrategic purposes.
With the tables turned on them, it’s the mandarins up north who are irked. Apparently, they didn’t like how our government officials hyped up reports that they were about to purchase four million doses of China’s Sinopharm vaccines. Beijing’s specific grievance was that we publicized the price – $10 per jab – despite our apparent undertaking to say nothing.
A supposedly do-nothing government finally sputtering to life went beyond damage-control mode. It issued a statement denying that any deal had been finalized at all.
While our southern neighbors are understandably giddy – judging from the media coverage – far from subdued chuckles must be emanating from the Americans. Not that Washington sees its vaccine generosity as a tool to break the MCC deadlock. It’s just that Nepalis can’t see how the Americans can’t see that it is.
This development has been described as an ‘awkward snag’ in Nepal-China diplomatic relations – in the words of one Indian newspaper. Still, the Indians – and the Americans – have learned the hard way how perilous it is to issue sweeping generalizations on the Nepal-China relationship.
More broadly, when humanitarian relief matters are caught in prevailing geopolitical cross-currents elsewhere, it is easy to lament over the despoilation of the human spirit. But when it is felt so close to home, all we can expect is for others to sympathize – if they have time to rise above their own problems, that is.
Sure, self-reliance as a virtue is bound to be extolled eternally. As Nepal has been unable to instill that attribute, it hardly comes as any comfort. We may rail all we want against ‘vaccine apartheid’ or create more catchy terminology, but the fact is that human nature hasn’t broadened enough to accommodate our aspirations as world citizens. The gap between the haves and have nots must be bridged as an ideal. In emergencies, idealism becomes little more than idle talk.
What Nepal can resort to is old-fashioned cold calculation. Our two neighbors can’t let us go down without figuring out how to divvy up the debris. Worse, they can’t figure out whether the debris would be an asset or a liability. In that situation, those farther afield can’t afford to turn up the geopolitical heat unless they are pretty sure places like Tibet and Kashmir do not become their problem. Mutual assured destruction may sound a bit crude as a strategy for survival for a nation that has tried almost everything else. But it also sums up our options.
The United Nations Security Council would hardly be expected to issue a presidential or press statement – much less adopt a resolution – affirming how vaccinating every Nepali would help maintain international peace and security. But as Nepalis, we have the freedom to believe so, regardless of who is incensed or amused.