For the Maoists, keeping the internal edge may prove far tougher than seeking international acceptability
By Sanjay Upadhya
For someone assiduously evading an international arrest warrant as recently as two years ago, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has mounted a captivating performance on the global stage. Traveling to China to attend the closing ceremonies of the Olympic Games days after taking office in mid-August, Dahal held extensive bilateral talks with President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao in what had become an official visit in all but name.
How the Republic of Nepal had broken with tradition by sending its new head of government to the northern neighbor on his first trip abroad fortified the nationalist constituency – and enervated influential sections across the southern border. Barely had Dahal landed home than he went on full damage-control mode. Nepal’s neighborhood policy was not a zero-sum game, the Maoist leader suggested. Exhibiting his insurgency-era capacity for linguistic legerdemain, Dahal said he would make his first political visit to India.
In an ironic reversal of roles, the premier was warned by his predecessor, Girija Prasad Koirala, not to sign any agreement. Actually, when premier Koirala prepared to visit India after the restoration of democracy in 2006, Dahal had used stronger language indicting both sides. By the time Dahal landed in Delhi, goodwill had replaced political as the operating adjective of his visit.
The Koshi flood and its destructive aftermath coupled with the Maoists’ own history of fierce anti-Indianism, not to mention Nepalis’ traditional skepticism of their giant southern neighbor, provided a sober backdrop for Dahal’s visit. That did not stop him from mounting a charm offensive on the Indian political leadership across the ideological spectrum. Emerging from talks with his counterpart, Dr. Manmohan Singh, and other senior leaders, Dahal spoke of a new beginning in relations. Curiously, he did so by circuitously reviving the term “special relations” that had marred them in the past. By winning New Delhi’s firm commitment on a thorough review of the 1950 Treaty of Peace and Friendship and other agreements, Dahal gained a major symbolic victory. By the time the joint statement was released, its tricky text imposed stern responsibilities on the man once known as the Fierce One.
The Indian media became ever more euphoric as they discovered new facets of the once shadowy leader who some believed never really existed. Entrenched adversaries like leaders of the Bharatiya Janata Party, which resented Dahal for his ideology, were charmed by his invocation of Pashupatinath. The premier disowned all but ideological ties with the Indian Maoists, who according to Singh, pose the greatest internal security challenge for India since independence. Dahal used his interactions with India Inc. to demolish Maoist shibboleths, a turnaround that must have astounded even the Great Helmsman reformist successors.
Skeptics, of course, saw Dahal in a chameleon-like avatar, ready to assume colors appropriate to his audience. Overall, though, he succeeded in focusing enough attention on himself to leave India firmly glued on his government’s next move. That was fast in coming, with China granting $1.3 million in military aid during Defense Minister Ram Bahadur Thapa Badal’s visit to Beijing. By then, Dahal had embarked on a global performance.
In terms of sheer symbolism, the prime minister’s visit to the United States capped it all. Although technically a trip to address the United Nations General Assembly, Washington seemed quite anxious to make a close appraisal of the watch-and-wait policy it had adopted since the Maoists emerged as the largest party in the April elections. The fact that President George W. Bush invited the leader of an organization still listed on one of Washington’s terrorist lists to his traditional reception for visiting heads of state and government was telling enough. That Bush and Dahal managed to exchange words essentially confirming continued cooperation marked a victory for the Maoists. When junior State Department officials met the premier, they were clearly seeking to set the parameters for an eventual full rapprochement.
In his address to the U.N. assembly, Dahal attempted to cast his party’s decade-long bloody insurgency as a national liberation movement, using other public forums on the sidelines to unveil his vision for the future. Clearly, within a month of his rise to power, the three principal external stakeholders had established Dahal’s acceptability. Eager for more, the premier reached out to Russia for military assistance, almost seeking to entice a resurgent Moscow back to a Cold War-era role in Nepal.
The Home Front
Success in the international arena does not necessarily solidify a leader’s internal flank.
In resource-starved Nepal, the flamboyance of the premier abroad, not the prospect of enhanced global goodwill, became the news. The possible political ramifications for the ruling coalition, a fractious amalgamation at best, began consuming the punditocracy and people alike.
Nepal badly needed a post-monarchy government for it was becoming too embarrassing for the purveyors of novelty. Despite their mutual distrust lingering from the abortive alliance on the presidential election, the Maoists, Unified Marxist Leninists (UML) and Madhesi Janadhikar Forum (MJF) made the best deal possible within the internal and geopolitical dynamics.
The bad blood between Deputy Prime Minister Bam Dev Gautam and Finance Minister Baburam Bhattarai over ministerial protocol spilled out in the open during Dahal’s absence. The protests sparked by the new budget’s slashing of funds for traditional religious observances did much more than pit Gautam and Bhattarai on opposite sides. How rituals and festivals defining the Nepali character would be sustained by an officially secular state under a government led by an ideologically atheist party began boggling more and more minds on the eve of Dasain.
Structurally, the government has enough ingredients to implode. The UML and the MJF have exhorted their youth cadres to go after the Maoists’ Young Communist League (YCL). By opposing the merger of the People’s Liberation Army with the Nepal Army, the MJF has raised the stakes several notches. The move may have cheered the army, intent on preserving its professionalism, but it also casts a shadow on a key component underpinning the peace process.
The Terai Madhes Loktantrik Party, for its part, has demanded that the government hold full consultations with its constituents before proceeding with any revision of the 1950 treaty. Considering how closely the treaty influences everyday life in the region bordering India, the demand is undoubtedly valid. Operationally, achieving national consensus on the precise changes Nepal is seeking and calibrating them with New Delhi’s obvious preference for comprehensiveness would be daunting enough. Fusing the Terai’s aspirations and expectations into the national agenda could leave Nepal scribbling several drafts, especially now that over a dozen armed groups active in the region are veering toward some form of unity.
For Dahal, the real siege lays within. Land Reforms Minister Matrika Yadav’s antics and his subsequent resignation only exemplified the rifts within the Maoists. The controversy sparked by the Maoists’ bearing arms in public places, including the constituent assembly premises, drew clear battle lines. A strong constituency among the former rebels is resentful of Dahal’s seeming readiness to dilute the ideological wholesomeness of the struggle in the name of political expediency. Clashes between rival factions, while still sporadic, could increase amid deepening polarization. While the fractured nature of the popular mandate has certainly stymied the Maoists, Dahal’s eagerness to gain legitimacy from the foreign powers he spent years denouncing is more liable to be perceived as capitulation than as conciliation.
Energized Opposition
All this has redounded to the benefit of the Nepali Congress. Having abandoned its long-standing support for the monarchy, exposing itself to a communist juggernaut, the party was desperate for a revival strategy. Despite the official reunification of the party, members of both factions have candidly acknowledged the lack of emotional unity. The Nepali Congress immediately pounced on Dahal’s and other Maoist leaders’ reiteration that they did not support traditional parliamentary democracy for Nepal. For an organization that had raised arms against both the monarchy and parliamentary democracy, the Maoists’ desire to radically restructure the polity evidently reflects the aspirations of a strong segment of the rank and file. Many Nepalis disenchanted by the 1990-2002 democratic era, too, are understandably anxious for something new. Yet Dahal’s explicit assertion that he did not envisage a one-party state replacing the monarchy has been undercut by his failure to articulate the precise nature of a middle path.
UML general secretary Jhal Nath Khanal, as a major critic of the People’s Multiparty Democracy doctrine that mainstreamed the once-radical communist faction, is understandably inclined to inject revolutionary fervor among cadres. Clearly, his qualified endorsement of a non-traditional democracy under the new constitution is partly aimed for internal consumption. The public convergence of the two communist parties’ disavowal of conventional democracy has given the Nepali Congress the cover to deflect public attention from its internal woes to the purported threat democracy once again confronted.
Significantly, the first salvo was fired by a Maoist-friendly leader Shekhar Koirala, who warned that his party could pull out of the assembly en masse to protest any Maoist tilt toward totalitarianism. NC vice-president Ram Chandra Poudel went on to equate Dahal’s stance with that of king Mahendra while dismissing Nepal’s first elected government and abolishing parliamentary democracy in 1960.
NC president G.P Koirala, insisting that the contradictions within the coalition would be enough to bring it down, promises his party would discharge the role of a responsible opposition and focus on drafting the new constitution on time. Judging by the party’s – and Koirala’s – past, it is hard to see it desisting from any effort that would hasten that collapse.
Having kept the party largely intact during its massive battlefield and political setbacks during the insurgency, Dahal needs to prove he can steer the ship in today’s turbulent waters. Although more militant members have formed another group, vowing to continue the People’s War, the split has not been that grievous. Dahal, however, can no longer expect to play the hardliners and moderates off against each other. Whether in power or out, he will come under greater pressure to either bridge the two or pick a side. Either way, he is unlikely to emerge unscathed.
(This article appeared in the October/November 2008 issue of Global Nepali)
