By Dipak Gyawali
I spent all of last
week in Delhi as honorary Mekong citizen helping
bring together for the first time ever colleagues of the Mekong and the Ganga to discuss experiences in water management and
regional cooperation. It also became a good opportunity for me to meet old
friends and India’s leading
cognoscenti – academics, former diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists and
politicians – on the side to discuss Nepal and its current travails. I
conclude that, barring a few arrogant exceptions, there still remains
tremendous goodwill in India
for Nepal.
However, most are quite ignorant of what is really happening in Nepal, those
who do know something are confused, while those who follow events here really
closely are quite disappointed that Loktantra has come to such a sorry pass and
its politicians have turned out to be such a vile lot. Strangely, most Indians,
even the modernists, privately say (much more than Nepalis generally) that Nepal should
not have been declared secular and should have preserved its identity as the
world’s only Hindu country. They get quite upset when reminded that it was
their own “Yechuri Path” imposed on Nepal that has brought about the
current instability and more to come in the days ahead.
Their composite questions and my equally
composite answers were as follows.
Q: Everything is fine in Nepal now, no?
DG: Quite the contrary, politically everything is
in a total mess. Previously it might have been called a “royal mess”; now it
should be called a “loktantrick mess”.
Q: We never knew this. Why have Indian
papers and the media not reported this?
DG: Because, for a democracy, Indian media’s due
diligence on the neighbourhood is extraordinarily self-centered, lazy and lies
in practicing what we call “handout journalism”, i.e. reproducing press
briefings instead of attempting to go behind the stories to inform the Indian
public as well as politicians. Also with its corporatization since the 1990s,
its owners know on which side their bread is buttered and hence toe the
official line much better than even bureaucrats. In contrast to their silence
on literally burning issues today that would eventually impact India
too, when the king was being demonized in 2005, stories of even obscure ‘royal
relatives’ not paying their electricity bills were emblazoned across their
pages.
Q: But has not Baburam recently formed a
consensus government?
DG: That myth is the media’s cruel joke. The UML
has stayed out as have several Madhisey factions. The powerful Vaidya faction
of the Maoists is out on a warpath against Baburam and the Deuba and KB Gurung
faction of the Kangress too are seething against the Sushil Koirala
establishment for giving up the BP Koirala line and kow-towing to disreputable
foreign agency implants. This government is not even complete, is full of
discredited faces, and if times were normal would lose a vote of confidence in
the parliament.
Q: Will they produce a constitution by May
28?
DG: Not a snowball’s chance in hell. They may
produce a sheaf of papers that may facetiously be called a ‘constitution’
(which five law students can produce in a week); but that will be done by
violating the procedures and provisions of the interim constitution regarding
public consultations and without coming to an agreement on its basic framework.
It won’t be a “peoples’ constitution” or even a workable one. Since it will be
burned immediately in the streets and within the house as well, there is talk
of imposing an emergency to promulgate it. Some democracy that will be!
Q: Why? We hear Nepali leaders coming to Delhi saying it will be
produced and promulgated at all costs (“jaise bhi”) by the deadline.
DG: Nothing should or can be done “jaise bhi”: it
should be done right, that is ”theek se”. The big parties in the CA cannot
agree on the basics of the political framework of tomorrow’s Nepal because
they hold very divergent political philosophies. Because the regime change of
2006 was externally inspired, talks of ethnic federalism, secularism,
republicanism, forms of governance and the electoral system etc. have all
turned out to be poorly thought through adventurism with little connection to
Nepali needs or ground realities.
Q: But did not the Nepali people vote
these parties to power in April 2008?
DG: Yes, in a manner of speaking, but how? The
Maoists still had the guns; they and the Kangress-UML combine did not even
allow former prime minister Surya Bahadur Thapa to go to his constituency, to
say nothing of other politicians holding different views; those elections were
instead fought for “sadak, bijuli and pani”; the party manifestos never spoke
of republicanism, secularism or federalism; the motion to declare Nepal a
federal, secular republic was tabled by a home minister who was not even a
member of the house; and no debate was allowed in parliament on this motion
before the voting! The Supreme Soviet was probably as democratic a rubber stamp
as this Constituent Assembly! And to top it all, their elected mandate of two
years ran out in April 2010. The current of MPs are but mere illegitimate
squatters.
Q: Is all this because China is very active in Nepal these
days?
DG: Hardly! The Chinese ambassador has been
absent from his post and on holidays in China for the last month: the Indian
ambassador is sitting in the prime minister’s residence and summoning other
party leaders for discussions with Baburam, reminding Nepalis of the terrible
years of the 1950s under Matrika Koirala. In reality, the Indians are
over-active while the Chinese are merely reactive: it is Indian political and
diplomatic blunders that seem to be assuring the Chinese their lottery wins in Nepal.
Q: How can you say that? Look, Chinese
projects such as West Seti are pushed forward
while Indian ones are languishing in limbo. Is it not due to anti-Indianism in Nepal?
DG: You conveniently forget a fundamental
difference. The previous version of West Seti as well as those such as Karnali
and Arun-3 acquired by Indian companies following the Mughlani-inspired regime
change in Nepal (and
counter-inspiring continuing protests and litigation here) was meant for export
to India even as Nepal reels
under eighteen hours of power cuts a day. In Nepal we call that a “neo-colonial
mode of development”, a continuation of the Mughlani British Raj policies. In
contrast, the new version of West Seti to be developed by China’s Three Gorges is meant for ameliorating Nepal’s power
shortage. If you were a Nepali electricity consumer reeling under severe power
cuts, seeing all of this, would you be pro-Indian or pro-Chinese?
Q: Still, we sense anti-Indian sentiments
being quite rife in Nepal.
Why?
DG: The very expression “anti-Indianism” is a bit
of an intellectual cop-out. If being pro-Nepal or pro-Bangladesh makes one
automatically anti-Indian, it really behooves my dear Indian friends to
introspect and reflect over what “Indianism” really means that seems to make
the neighbourhood so “anti”. None of India’s
neighbours I know really have any bad feelings about Bollywood, Gandhi the
Mahatma, Tagore or even India’s
double-digit growth. This means that the time has come for Mughlani Babudom as
well as Indian well-wishers of Nepal
to reflect on why sentiments against India
are so high now after Loktantra and never quite that bad when there was
monarchy in Nepal.
Q: Will the king come back?
DG: If you were Gyanendra, would you want to come
back and handle the mess which is many times worse now than when he left? When
he tried, OK in his own ham-handed way, to get a parliament elected after it
had been prematurely dissolved by party infighting and to bring the Maoist
insurgency (sheltering in Noida, let us not forget!) to heel, you chose to
strangle the Nepal army and support the Maoists with the feckless party leaders
in tow. They are still feckless, corrupt, incompetent, without a democratic
atom in all their bodies, and have made a mess of Nepal’s administration; but they
rule roost now. I am one who believes that Nepal’s head-of-state has to be
above partisan politics and should not be brought under competitive electoral
politics. Hence the need for a constitutional monarchy symbolizing the
tradition of Prithvi Narayan Shah’s “flower garden nationalism” versus the
ethno-Stalinist model unleashed by the Maoists today. However, if I were
assigned the task of convincing Gyanendra to come back and take over, I don’t
think I would succeed.
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