I argue that Girija Prasad´s pre-arrival happened between 1979 and 1982. These were three eventful years for Nepal and coincided with the last three years of the life of BP Koirala, the more famous Koirala brother.
The National Referendum, 1979-80
Following wide-spread political unrest, King Birendra was forced to announce a national referendum on the future of the Panchayat System on 24 May 1979. The referendum was an opportunity for the citizens of Nepal to choose either a multi-party system or a ´suitably reformed´ Panchayat system.
Once the referendum was announced, Birendra formed an election commission to oversee its execution, and relaxed the controls over freedom of expression and assembly. For the referendum to be seen as legitimate, his regime had to allow public debate about issues that would inform people’s choice. However the regime did not initially specify just how the Panchayat system would be reformed nor did it acknowledge the legality of political parties as they were still banned under the then existing Panchayat constitution of 1962.
Nevertheless, oppositional politicians and private newspapers took advantage of this relaxation. It was in this atmosphere that Girija Prasad returned to Nepal from India. He had spent the previous eight years living in India in self-exile. Along with his brother BP and many other Nepali Congress (NC) leaders, he had been imprisoned by King Mahendra for over seven years following the royal coup of December 1960. After being released from prison, he lobbied for the release of his older brother BP. BP, Ganesh Man Singh and several of their colleagues were released and went into self-exile in India in the late 1960s. Girija Prasad followed them in 1971.
During most of the 1970s, he headquartered in Forbesganj in North India and spent most of his time meeting NC activists. He regularly met with NC activists who remained inside Nepal at several locations just south of the Nepal-India border. As has been recently argued by Pradeep Giri, it was during this period that Girija Prasad masterminded the hijacking of a Nepal Airlines plane with Indian rupees three million in mid-July 1973. He also made decisions for NC to carry out armed attacks in eastern Nepal during the following year.
Girija Prasad subsequently became NC´s general secretary. When BP chose to return to Nepal (along with Ganesh Man Singh) in December 1976 as part of his famous move for ´national reconciliation,´ Girija Prasad was told to remain in India and watch the within-Nepal developments from there.
Once the referendum was announced, oppositional politicians addressed mass gatherings in various parts of the country, exhorting their audience to vote for the multi-party system. Many of them demanded that certain preconditions be met to ensure that the referendum exercise was fair. These preconditions included the disbanding of the Panchayat government and the formation of an independent government that could supervise the referendum. However BP did not agree with this view. For him it was important to use the occasion to reach out to the people after 19 years in the wilderness. He also thought the formation of a neutral government was impossible.
After returning to Nepal in the spring of 1980, Girija Prasad traveled across the country to campaign for the multi-party side. These travels marked his ´pre-arrival´ in the national scene for the first time.
The election commission supervised the holding of the national referendum on 2 May 1980 and took about two weeks to announce the final verdict which went in favor of the Panchayat System by a margin of about 400,000 votes. Many politicians and commentators who were critics of the Panchayat system said that the verdict was doctored. But BP refused to see it that way. He added, "I accept the result of the referendum, however unexpected and inexplicable it may be. The support that the multi-party side has received is massive….The votes cast for the multi-party side are votes committed to democracy. We will have to build our democratic strategy in the coming days on the basis of this committed support" (quoted in Lok Raj Baral, Nepal´s Politics of Referendum, 1983). Nevertheless BP was blamed for the loss. His overconfidence and rejection of pre-conditions before the referendum was held were thought to have helped the Panchayat side.
NC Boycotts Elections, 1981
Within a few days after the Referendum results were announced, Birendra formed a Constitution Reform Recommendation Commission. Leaders of the multi-party fold were asked to submit their suggestions and most did not oblige. BP reiterated that the opinion of two million Nepalis who had voted for a multi-party system must be respected in the constitutional amendment. In late 1980, BP acknowledged that the new constitution was unlikely to be fully democratic but hoped that it would provide enough of a basis to gradually attain further democratic rights.
Birendra announced the third amendment to the Panchayat Constitution in December 1980. The most important amendment included direct elections of the members of the Rastriya Panchayat (RP) through adult franchise, hence opening the process to the public at large. But there was a catch: election candidates still had to be members of one of the class organizations of the Panchayat System. The prime minister was to be appointed on the recommendation of the RP and council of ministers was to be responsible to it.
There were other amendments as well. However the emphasis on the partylessness of the Panchayat System and the King´s powerful role in it were retained. The ban on political parties was continued.
While Panchayat politicians welcomed these amendments, they were viewed as inadequate by most leaders in the multi-party fold. Their main criticism was focused on the fact that the referendum´s verdict had passed an ´improved Panchayat system´ and they interpreted that to mean that its partyless character was no longer its foundational feature. In addition, they also stressed that the third amendment failed to adequately take into consideration the fact that over 45 percent voters had favored a multi-party system in the referendum.
The national elections to the RP were held in May 1981. While initially some sections of the opposition parties showed interest in taking part in these elections, by the time it was held, most of them had decided to boycott the elections. In the public domain, BP put it this way, "Our one temptation was that since it involved the participation of the people it would give us an opportunity to be with the people. We could project our image, explain our stand to the people, define ourselves and our ideology to the people….[But this] constitution is not bold enough to take note of the rising expectations of the people. We are the representatives of the people, and so we thought that would be betraying the trust they had reposed in us if we accepted the constitution and fought the elections. That is why we are not participating in them" (as told to Bhola Chatterji).
However it is thought that the decision for NC to not take part in the 1981 elections was reached after field reports suggested that its candidates would lose in a humiliating fashion. In the 20 plus years since political parties had been banned, NC´s political cadres with local and national influence had shrunk to a small number due to death, retirement, internal migration, state repression and defection to the Panchayat side. In mid-1981, Krishna P. Bhattarai claimed that his party had "5,000 active and 50,000 ordinary members" but most likely these numbers were made up of very new recruits who had joined the party during the year leading up to the referendum.
In the run-up to the elections, NC leaders had to explain to their supporters why the party had decided to boycott it. For this they traveled across the country. While other NC leaders chose easily reachable locations, Girija Prasad traveled to all corners of the land. During these visits, he left behind a more robust set of marks of his national ´pre-arrival.´
BP´s Death, 1982
When BP died in July 1982 after a long battle with cancer, NC did not seem to have a definite program of action. BP´s own position after the May 1981 elections had been one that he described as "no surrender, no confrontation." In other words, he did not want the NC to engage in a struggle to overthrow the Panchayat system, nor did he want his party to surrender to it. BP said he was opposed to "a mass struggle strong enough to force the King to grant democratic freedom" because such a movement would "get out of hand…due to the infiltration of foreign powers" (as told to Chatterji)
On the face of it, in the homestretch of his long oppositional career, BP seemed only capable of an equivocal policy, preferring to raise the specter of foreign intervention instead of a clear policy for his party to oppose the Panchayat system after its third amendment. However after the then recent Soviet intervention in Afghanistan and the merging of independent Sikkim into India in mid-1970s, it could be said that he was just not raising the bogey of foreign intervention. The then two superpowers – Soviet Union and the USA – had brought their cold war to South Asia and Indian interests in Nepal has been an enduring feature of Nepali politics in much of Nepal´s modern history.
In addition, there were other factors that contributed to this position of his. First the deteriorating state of his health must have led him to believe that he could not physically lead such a movement. Second, BP did not think that his deputy leaders in the NC party were immediately capable of taking over the leadership from him on such a matter. Ganesh Man, Bhattarai and Girija Prasad had spent their entire lives working for the NC cause and had suffered, with BP, the repression of the Panchayat system but BP found them variously deficient.
Third, and this probably weighed most heavily in his mind, BP thought that his party then lacked the infrastructure to launch such a movement. This is how he put it to Bhola Chatterji in late 1981, "I have to create a political party in the districts parallel to the panchayat system, every village must have a unit of the party. This is the task I shall now be occupied with, the task of organizing the people, of clarifying the basic political issues before the people. This will take me about 15 to 18 months, and only after this is done will I confront the King."
After the elections, as BP´s health failed, party-building was mainly the responsibility of Girija Prasad in his capacity as the general secretary of NC. As he began to carry out this task, Girija Prasad consolidated his ´pre-arrival´ in the national scene.
After BP´s death in July 1982, Girija Prasad, along with Singh and Bhattarai, became a part of the ´troika´ leadership scheme adopted by NC. During the next eight years, even as there was no conceptual clarity regarding what needed to be done, Girija Prasad continued to travel across the country, meet people, engage with them on political themes, and continuously build the local face of NC. It is during these years that, apart from hardcore political activists, he successfully recruited teachers and other professionals into the NC fold. This continuous work laid the foundation for the success of NC in the 1991 national elections and Girija Prasad´s arrival in the national scene as a colossus.
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