In stark contrast to Baidya’s coolheaded composure, Chandra Prakash Gajurel ‘Gaurav’ displays aggressive combativeness of an insecure Brahmin priest that would brook no interference in prescribed rituals of sacred ceremonies. Gajurel goes ballistic at whoever dares to suggest that Maoism need not be a dogmatic doctrine. Dynamism is anathema to priests of all faiths and tenets of the creed are sacrosanct.
Netra Bikram Chand ‘Biplav’ is an adroit player of realpolitik and would not let norms of behavior interfere with high-stakes games of statecraft. That could be the reason Chand is believed to have maintained his contacts with monarchists all along. Unlike zero-sum games of battlefields and boardrooms, peace processes do not produce clear winners. Warriors instinctively find confusion of negotiations and compromises frustrating.
Ram Bahadur Thapa ‘Badal’ and Dev Gurung are technocratic personalities. Technocrats are trained to prefer hierarchy and order. “Politics is for the present, but an equation is for eternity,” observed Albert Einstein. In rigid creeds of authoritarian regimes, it is possible to reduce politics into mathematical equations where fixed value of a constant keeps all outcomes under control. In the formulation of ‘peasants plus workers equals revolution’, the decisive component is the leadership of the vanguard and not the value of expendable variables.
Baidya and his coterie in UCPN (Maoist) are battle-hardened survivors. They have been participants of bloodiest insurgency in Nepal’s history. They know the situation in the countryside as much, if not more, as any other apparatchik in their parent party. It is possible that the guru is merely expressing his displeasure. The priest may just be miffed that rites being performed are not according to the Red Book. It is also likely that the warrior is waving his khukuri more for effect than to go for the kill. Technocrats can smell a deal from a mile. So why are these sensible middle-aged men bent upon sabotaging the middle ground in politics?
Whatever else it may be, aggressive posturing of Baidya, Chand and Company is not born out of rancour alone. All of them are too calculative to act impulsively. They seem to have assessed carefully that the relevance of violent politics is not yet over and decided to keep this constituency safe for Maoists. The society and polity of Nepal is structured in such a way that political system in the country has to perforce oscillate between fascism and communism with only brief interregnums at the centre. In whichever way politics sways next, Baidya’s Boys would be clinging and swinging with the pendulum.
Rhetorical flourish
In Marxist formulation, empiricism is merely a tool of giving continuity to status quo. Shorn of background and context, facts become putty in the hands of the powerful. Even in description of circumstances, influential interests come into play. Neutral narratives could thus be merely manipulative ways of controlling reality. When human rights activists, to take a contemporary example, claim that impunity cannot be tolerated, they have a very clear idea about what kind of prosecution is possible within the parameters of collated and reported ‘facts’.
Violators of human rights have already been reported on the basis of political bias. Military was mobilised to fight insurgency with the declaration of state of emergency in 2002 and every government functionary since then until the success of Spring Uprising in 2006 is liable to be hauled into courts for war crimes. Be it in the carnage of Dang or the massacre in Gaur, complicity of a section of the permanent establishment could not be ruled out. The suppression of Madhesh Uprising remains unsurpassed in its brutality. However, the campaign for justice focuses upon a few Maoist leaders and even fewer military officers. Fixation with facts is thus an ideology—a power-seeking and control-perpetuating intellectual device. Marxism, on the other hand, is posited as truth-seeking science of society.
There is a problem with the science of Marxism though. In all sciences, progress is made when one hypothesis is displaced by another until a point is reached where the established theory becomes common sense. Few people posses the intellectual or material wherewithal of testing the validity of globe, gravitation or relativity. Everyone accepts them to be true because nobody in the know questions authenticity of these theories anymore. They are taken as self-evident. That is not so about the ‘science of Marxism’ where apostates outnumber believers by far and sceptics have always been in the majority even in the heydays of Stalin, Mao, Fidel and Kim.
Marxists face the challenge of their critics with what can best be termed as theory of inevitability. Bourgeois political economy contains the seed of its own destruction. A dawn will come when dictatorship of the proletariat will do away with private property and states that have come into being to protect class interests will wither away. Meanwhile, the best believers can do is organise themselves along class lines. This is a gross simplification of a very complex philosophy, but it is adequate to make sense of the way apparatchiks of UCPN (Maoists) or CPN-UML explain the world to the adherents of their faith. A very powerful weapon in their arsenal is a list of anecdotes that they fling with devastating effect.
A small list of communist demagoguery will suffice to illustrate the point. Nepal was ‘duped’ into Sugauli Treaty. Whatever may be the interpretation of that allegation, it is emotive enough to shake a country still ashamed of a debacle it faced almost two hundred years ago. The Peace and Friendship Treaty of 1950 between Nepal and India is unequal. Of course, that is so: Howsoever politically correct the wording; amity between an elephant and a mountain goat is unlikely to be based on absolute equality. Koshi, Gandak and Mahakali was sold away cheap. There may be more than a grain of truth in that accusation, but that is the way monopsony—a market situation in which there is only one buyer—works and it is not possible for a country surrounded from three sides by a single neighbour to be a self-contained island existing in splendid isolation.
What the leftist rhetoric leaves out—perhaps on purpose, as most of its leadership is believed to be hand-in-glove with the propertied class—is the rapaciousness of the ruling elite. However, the most powerful appeal of leftist beliefs lies in the breakdown of bourgeois political economy of the country: It has failed so spectacularly that even fascism, communism and fatalism continues to appear attractive to a large section of the dispossessed population.
The plundering elite
Legitimacy of bourgeois political economy rests upon what Max Weber called “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. It is a belief system that stresses the virtue of hard work, thrift, and self-discipline. Racial overtones of such a formula have since come into disrepute, especially with the rise of Confucian capitalism in Japan and then in much of East Asia including People’s Republic of China.
However, prudent investment of economic surplus in productive enterprises, creativity in identifying areas of competitive advantage, adequate compensation to workers who create surplus value, sincerity in paying taxes that sustain harmony in society, and philanthropic engagements to ameliorate sufferings of the less fortunate are some of the saving graces of capitalism. These features make cycles of boom and bust in economy bearable for the majority. The political economy of Nepal has failed to perform satisfactorily on all counts. Capital flight is a fancy phrase, but economic surpluses have always been stashed away since the time of Ranas.
Perhaps it is merely a coincidence that Baidya and his comrades are strongest in mid and far western part of the country. These are areas with extreme inequality and are slated to get huge investments hydroelectricity and primary industries. Baidya apparently knows his constituency well. In proportionate elections, fragmentation need not hinder prospects of parties that adhere to similar ideology. Nepal would probably remain a cradle of authoritarian ideologies until and unless social democrats come up with a credible alternative.
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