Fight to finish

PRESIDENT VS. THE MAOISTS

It is too naïve of Prime Minister Babauram Bhattarai not to look at the political steel with which president Ram Baran Yadav has rejected election ordinances, after calculating what could possibly come back to hit him. The president would have certainly had a flashback from three years ago when he had taken swathes of Maoist ranting and wrath for a year when he rejected Maoist chairman and then Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s recommendation to sack the then Nepal army chief.

We now know what followed. Despite Yadav being vehemently slandered, it was actually the period of Dahal’s fall from grace. His true colours were exposed and his much talked about charisma proved to be nothing but a combination of tricks. The ruling Maoist party seems to have been haunted by that trepidation as it repudiates that Dahal’s resignation in 2009 was a wrong move. Prime Minister Bhattarai’s inspiration not to step down appears to have stemmed from that apparent humiliation.

With the Constituent Assembly gone and the president and prime minister coming from opposite political schools of thought—the former from the democratic Gandhian and the latter from authoritarian Maoism—the trajectory of Nepal’s constitutional project is certain to pass through this turf of conflict between the two. The Maoist leadership bent on first having power by all means and then plotting for its permanence at any cost, is determined to set off newer conflicts. Ruthlessness underlines their strategy. The opposition parties cannot outrace the Maoists in conspiracies, clothed in the jargon of ‘identity’.

But what the opposition parties can still do is support the president by going to the people with a clear vision and roadmap, an area where they so far have been a huge let down. The president is our democracy’s last hedge and he needs organized backing instead of verbal ones.

Having wasted the last two months simply reacting to the Maoists in Kathmandu, opposition parties—Nepali Congress in particular—have made a mockery of their political acumen. For a politician, it is unwise not to exploit the opportunity time brings before him, and Sushil Koirala’s inadequacies prove so. He has never been a rousing speaker, but he has been so uncharacteristically ineffective lately, that any hope from him has evaporated. UML leaders are, at least, going to the districts despite their limitations, and have largely staved off what could possibly have been a terrible division in the party. NC, on the other hand, is busy holding directionless gatherings of its leaders, which produce no concrete guidelines for the party’s political agenda.

Detailed discussions on issues cannot take place during large conclaves. It is the central working committee or selected top leaders of a party who construct a clear picture of what the party is going to do. Larger meetings endorse them as party policies, with changes if needed. If one asks what the roadmap of Nepali Congress for the new constitution is, its seventy-five central committee leaders come up with as many different ideas. Its meeting of district presidents was a failure too. The party hesitates to agree to fresh elections, while the CPN- UML and Upendra Yadav have unequivocally given a go ahead to the proposal.

The president alone cannot correct all wrongs. His hands are tied but he is trying to work within whatever breathing space he has. It is the responsibility of NC and UML to broaden their fort first, spelling out their roadmap to have a new, democratic and federal constitution.

Synchronizing the people’s daily concerns with the parties’ political moves requires strategy, as does destroying the Maoist propaganda and making people see its corrupt side. The fact that the opposition parties are devoid of strategy only puts additional pressure on the president, who is deliberately pulled into conflict by a caretaker government willing to go to any length to satiate its partisan interests. All steps hitherto attributed as the source of conflict between Shital Niwas and Singha Durbar emanated from the Singha Durbar first. The president is censured for not kowtowing. Maoist propaganda, unless firmly opposed, aims at furthering and milking this situation.

The opposition can support the president by going to people with clear vision. President is democracy’s last hedge; he needs organized backing to tackle Maoists.

People endowed the Constituent Assembly with actual power, and with its demise, the claim of executive power by the government is hollow, more so when it’s only a caretaker one. Besides, it is now part of the most unprincipled political coalition under the Federal Democratic Republican Alliance.

This writer has been maintaining for some time that the support of the ‘key-holder’—our southern neighbour—to the Baburam-Prachanda regime is only transitory; it does not allow a single force in Nepal to prevail, if our historical experience is anything to go by. From the time of BP Koirala to Surya Bahadur Thapa, GP Koirala and Baburam Bhattarai, competing powers are groomed in parallel, and even persuaded into proxy power struggles. Today, it latches on to the president equally cautiously, while allowing Prime Minister Bhattarai to plan the sinister. The ‘key-holder’ is neutralized at the moment on the flimsy pretext that Nepal’s internal matters should be ‘left alone’.

But frantic signs of suspicion towards the Maoists now seem visible in Delhi. In one of my conversations only three weeks ago with a ‘go-to-person’ on Nepal in Delhi, I was told that India’s Nepal policy at the moment was similar to a rescue mission in which the rescuer (India) has brought the rescued (Nepal) to the middle of the sea. Leaving Nepal ‘alone’ at this juncture would mean aborting the mission unaccomplished, condemning it to sink in the middle, clearly implying that the ‘leave alone’ policy was wrong without peace and constitution drafting having been achieved.

If Prime Minister Bhattarai assumes that he has now turned that tide of history, his ordinance regime will turn his thinking upside down. Rejection of election ordinances must open his eyes, before he ends up ruining his scintillating political career as Prachanda’s credible alternative both in the party and in national politics.

Shital Niwas will have to prepare better for the time being. Living in an illusion, a determined Baburam-Prachanda duo plans to hit hard. Approaching festivals will serve only as an interlude in the melodrama. But in the whole game, it is the president who will certainly have the last laugh.

Tika_dhakal@att.net