Finding A Place Between Haughtiness And Hopelessness

Maoist Center chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s taunts and gibes to the Nepali Congress seem to be troubling quite a few prominent members of our senior ruling party.
The leftist alliance so suddenly sprung upon the nation amid the Dasain festivities has given an opportunity to the Nepali Congress to rejuvenate itself, Dahal began pontificating shortly thereafter. That line has become almost a refrain on that side of the political spectrum.
Granted, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and his allies gave a bit of an opening by their undue alarmism in response to the development. But, really, their agitation was probably triggered more by the unexpectedness of the event than by an earnest appraisal of its potential implications.
Lately, Deuba and his colleagues seem to be exuding a more relaxed attitude. Just the other day, the prime minister left out the M word when he rumbled on about how his party had vanquished the Rana and Panchayat autocracies. Now, was his apparent amnesia relating to the events of April 2006 an accident or a deliberate omission? That’s something the lefties can scratch their heads on.
Meanwhile, Gagan Thapa, the most prominent Nepali Congress republican of his generation, has detailed the ways in which his party could stand to gain from leftist unity. His core contention: the leftward drift of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML) could only widen the potential base for the Nepali Congress. Other Congress leaders are torn between eternal smugness and abiding shock. The latter sentiment seems to be in greater abundance in their private engagements.
Yes, the Nepali Congress is in poor shape. No, it is not sapped of its intrinsic strength. Like any party in power in the world these days, Congress leaders can’t seem to see or think right. Worse, they are busy evaluating the guy or gal standing next to them in the party. Comparisons in terms of time spent in jail or of springs crossed versus current stature in terms of patronage and pelf emerge to ruin the animation and energy of wielding power.
In terms of resilience, however, the Nepali Congress is in a league of its own, bolstered no doubt by its enviable legitimacy. Party leaders may seem odious while in power, but in the end, they are the ones called to clean up the mess. After all, can Dahal and his comrades imagine the April 2006 uprising and its aftermath without Girija Prasad Koirala and his organization?
Sure, the left mobilized themselves on the streets. But what other party could have rewritten history in a way that turned what was a popular uprising against autocratic monarchy into a republican one and gotten away with it?
Still, the Nepali Congress easily manages to mismanage things by veering between alarmism and arrogance. The temptation gripping sections of the party to put off the elections to stop a possible leftist landslide is misplaced.
The UML and Maoists couldn’t do anything separately to turn the Nepali Congress into another Praja Parishad. This may be a case where they won’t be able to do much together, either.  In fact, let the proponents make up their minds whether the realignment heralds a radicalized UML or a much more moderated Maoists.
In the meantime, all you Nepali Congress leaders and supporters, quit telling us how great you and your party are. We the sovereign people don’t like it when you keep rubbing it in like that.

The Ins And Outs Of It, Here And There

Dr. Baburam Bhattarai and his Naya Shakti barely lasted a week in the new left alliance.
If anything, that record gives some respectability to Pashupati Shamsher Rana’s desire to reunite his faction of the Rastriya Prajantra Party (RPP) with Kamal Thapa’s group, merely two months after breaking away.
As Thapa returned to the cabinet as Deputy Prime Minister, with seven loyalists in tow, Bijaya Kumar Gachchaddar’s formation is returning to the ruling Nepali Congress.
The RPP nominee who became deputy speaker of parliament, Ganga Prasad Yadav, marked the formal expiry of the body by joining the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist. You may be forgiven if, in all of this churning, you missed the news that Keshar Bahadur Bista left the RPP faction led by Prakash Chandra Lohani to join Rana’s group. (Lest you forget, Lohani himself broke away from the RPP shortly after its much heralded unity convention).
Although President Bidya Bhandari was expected to do a Katuwal and block Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s decision to expand his cabinet, she pulled back at the last minute. Not that she could have done much, at least after Chief Election Commissioner Ayodhee Prasad Yadav certified that the expansion did not violate the election code of conduct. All that whining and moaning in the past? Well, don’t ask.
Deuba had little to lose. He has been insisting that the size of the cabinet is the prime minister’s prerogative. And it’s not as if his image of affinity for elephantine ministries created circa 1995-1996 was going to go away just because he suddenly turned lean and mean.
How all this will play out is anyone’s guess. The government is working overtime to tamp down fears that the provincial and federal elections might be put off.
It’s useless to fret over the prospect of  a combined communist juggernaut taking over Nepal. What are they going to do with all that power?  Divided, our comrades couldn’t be expected to stand. In unity, too, they are hobbling.
The alacrity with which the Nepali Congress – or at least the ruling part of the party – has turned rightward has raised new possibilities from that end. But the options being talked about there have not really been off the table since April 2006.
External stakeholders – state and non-state alike – seem equally baffled. And they may not be faking it. The Chinese ambassador in Kathmandu has been telling everyone willing to listen that her country had no hand in the sudden realignment on the left.
Maybe so. But that has not stopped the Indians from mounting their own version of an anti-access/area denial campaign. Could Bhattarai’s hasty exit from the left alliance suggest something here? Perhaps. But what if New Delhi engineered the Dasain surprise?
The right hand is free not to know what the left hand is doing – or not to want to know. There’s no rule saying you have to be inside the country or outside to display such obliviousness.
Our national transition has acquired a momentum of its own, based on exigencies and imperatives that are not entirely our own. Let these dynamics play out as they will as part of an open-ended process. We can all take turns feeling good and bad, regardless of who’s in or out. What could be fairer for those here and there?

But How Real Is Our New Reality?

In retrospect, that Dasain picture spoke a thousand and one words.
Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist Center Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ observed tika festivities after a hiatus of 22 years but left it to son, Prakash, to publicize the affair via social media. Our estimation, before the pictures emerged, was that Dahal, as usual, would have goat slaughtered at home and pretty much stay indoors.
Our collective astonishment focused squarely on this phase of the ‘normalization’ of Dahal, and he played along very shrewdly. That must be why we’re having a hard time making sense of the dramatic realignment that has gripped the left.
Dahal’s one-time deputy, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai, who broke away to form his Naya Shakti, was defiant against ever joining hands again with the Maoist Center chairman, at least in this life. Yet there Bhattarai was, jubilant amid Dahal and another fellow ex-premier he routinely berated, Khadga Prasad Oli, chairman of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist. Wonder of wonders, the erstwhile people’s warriors consented to playing second fiddle to the half of the parliamentary duo they rose up against.
The master hair-splitter he is, Bhattarai may be technically correct in claiming that he has not joined Dahal or become a full-fledged communist again (he is merely contesting the upcoming election on the UML symbol). The other groupings that have gravitated toward the UML-led alliance recognize which side their bread is buttered. More entities and individuals are bound to do the same in the days and weeks ahead.
The Nepali Congress, for its part, is torn between indifference and apprehension. Some leaders see the development as a natural outcome of our choppy politics as it seeks equilibrium. Other Congress leaders fear for the future of Nepali democracy. The divergence of opinion therein merely means that the Nepali Congress still hasn’t been able overcome its decade-long identity crisis. It is being pushed toward forming one faster than party leaders wish to acknowledge.
Lest we worry about the fallout from the latest development, Chief Election Commissioner Ayodhee Prasad Yadav has urged us to remain confident that the elections would be held according to schedule. We have to believe him, at least, for now.
With two successive legislatures hung in the midst of over a dozen political formations, Nepalis might be forgiven for any temptation to put faith in a two-alliance system. Since the putative Nepali Congress-led grouping remains in the realm of possibility, it would be germane to focus on what impelled the realignment on the left.
We have it on the good authority of UML leader Bishnu Poudel that this was the culmination of a decade-long process. If so, the secret confabs the UML’s then general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal held with Maoist leaders on Indian soil and the two royal takeovers they supposedly precipitated start to make greater sense.
True, the imperative of taming the Maoists gained urgency after 11 p.m. on June 1, 2001 after it became clear who didn’t survive the Narayanhity Carnage and who did. Taming, by definition, entailed relegation to second or third place. But the Maoists ended up gaining strength under royal rule, eventually ousting the monarchy, enflaming the southern plains, and emerging the top vote getters in elections certified as free and fair. The job of Messrs. Poudel and Co. just became harder. But they had to persist.
On the geopolitical front, things were in flux. Since Tibet and the Olympics were of paramount concern to the Chinese, their alacrity in abandoning the old and allying with the new was understandable. As our transition got murkier, second, third and fourth thoughts began to emerge up north.
The Indians didn’t want the Chinese veering too deep inside Nepal, but they were more interested in keeping third countries out, a desire shared by Beijing. The UN special political mission came in handy as a temporary fix but was soon coopted by the very third parties and overstayed its welcome. The Chinese, for their part, began sending representatives to conferences of Terai-based parties.
While the Dragon and the Elephant succeeded in evicting the United Nations, they had a harder time figuring each other out. Someone had to take that one bold step, but neither side wanted to be the one. The Chinese had more lucre, level-headedness, and luck while the Indians had more laments. Still, neither side would take the plunge. Then came Doklam, which really hasn’t gone away.
As geopolitical dynamics cut across our two political formations, we can brace for a proxy rivalries that would dirty only our hands. The search for a new equilibrium will have begun in earnest, everyone will have ducked blame, and our hopes will have sputtered into life for another stretch. But, then, all this would depend on how real our new reality is.

Between Self-Congratulation And Smugness

The Dashain-Tihar interregnum will no doubt produce sustained streams of self-congratulation over the positivity powering the national psyche in the aftermath of the staggered local elections.
The three-phase polling for village and municipal entities, conducted by two governments representing the same ruling coalition, was a significant achievement. Cabinet expansions, administrative transfers and other knotty interventions in between – regardless of whether they actually violated the Election Commission code of conduct – have not tarnished public faith in the democratic exercise and its aftermath.
The principal protagonists have largely accepted the popular verdict, vowing to learn the right lessons, and are preparing themselves for crucial provincial and national elections. As established tangible preconditions for the full implementation of the new Constitution, the country – the leaders and the led alike – will need to proceed with utmost judiciousness and solemnity.
Once that milestone has been crossed, however, the concept of ‘implementation of the constitution’ will have acquired a new sense and significance. From a destination, that juncture will have become a point of departure in a persistent process of alertness and application.
Ensuring concord and coherence in structural and operational spheres among the local, provincial and central governments will be something new to us. So would the imperative of sensibly allocating power and resources, simultaneously managing the purse and expectations. Forgoing the naming of provinces and determining their capitals in the interest of holding elections made sense as an act of political maturity. Those very imperatives have the potential to assume far less pacified dimensions. In all this, Nepalis will have to learn by doing.
More portentously, mismanagement, corruption, favoritism and the other banes blighting our modern polity – and systems around the world – will acquire renewed focus. Perceptions of foreign meddling – pronounced at the most sanguine of times – would exacerbate the challenges of those governing as well as the governed.
Should the going get inordinately rough, it won’t matter whether foreign powers are really conspiring to perpetuate conflict among our diverse ethnicities, cultures, languages, religions – and yes, political ideologies. Nepal’s precarious geo-strategic position and more than a century and a half of a hemmed-in mentality provide enough combustion.
No one will uncover incontrovertible evidence of plots to tear apart the country because no one will demand it. When perceptions flow along a reality-like narrative, prophecy can easily become self-fulfilling.
Fortunately, the flaws naysayers like yours truly have identified in the Constitution ever since its promulgation have not been able to stop our political momentum. Yet our own experience has taught us how ambiguities and uncertainties can emerge when we least expect them. Worse, they can be contrived with little exertion, given the right political circumstances. The amalgamation of the personal and political is a double-edged sword. If it can be a sign of abiding commitment, it can also be a catalyst for convulsion.
In the prevailing celebratory mood, it is tempting to dismiss such warnings as irrelevant or, worse, revolting. But the complexities defining life in general today are bound to deepen intricacies on both sides of the political contract.
Today’s constitutional clarity can revert to elusiveness so easily because of the abstraction national stability, prosperity, unity and similar concepts have become.  Amid all-round fluidity, the road from self-congratulation to smugness can only be a slippery one.