Nepal's Constituent Assembly elections, held on April 10, 2008, are yet to produce a final result, with counting for the Proportional Representation seats still to be completed, but there is little doubt, in a world of winners and losers, that the Maoists have emerged as unambiguous victors. Parties that have traditionally been wedded to democratic and constitutional politics in Nepal--and their vacillating international backers, including India--are unquestionable losers, as are those who had thrown in their lot with the monarchy.
Of the 240 seats determined by the First Past the Post (FPTP) system the Maoists had secured 120, just shy of a simple majority, with one result yet to be declared at the time of thisassessment. The Nepali Congress (NC), with 37 seats, the Communist Party of Nepal--Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), with 33, and the MadhesiPeople's Rights Forum of Nepal (MPRFN), with a surprise 29, lagged far behind. The once-powerful royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) was unable to secure even a single seat.
The Maoist 'lead', however, will shrink dramatically with the results of the Proportional Representation (PR) vote are finally tallied--something of an irony, since it was the Maoists who were most strongly insistent on the PR system, believing that they would fare better here, rather than under a purely FPTP vote. 335 seats in the 601 seat Constituent Assembly, which is to re-writeNepal's constitution over the coming 30 months, are defined by the PR vote, while the remaining 26 representatives are to be nominated by thecabinet. With just over 9.7 million votes counted, out of the estimated 10.6 million votes cast, the Maoists account for just over 30.4 per cent of the present PR tally. [The NC follows with 21.45 per cent; the CPN-UML with 20.75 per cent; but the MPRFN, which did rather well with about 12 per cent of seats in the FPTP tally, with just 5.68 per cent.] By the time the vote settles, and thecabinet nominees are defined, the CPN-M can be expected to end up with a final tally of around 230 seats--if the nominated seats are allocated on a proportional basis, or a few more, if the Maoists corner alion's share. They will, however, fall far short of the majority that they would need to railroad the Constitutional process according to their will.
The relative absence of overt violence during the elections, and the divided outcome, has given rise to many sanguine expectations onNepal's future. Some pundits in India have articulated the hope that India's own rampaging Maoists will draw lessons from the'Nepal experience' and join the democratic process (the Indian Maoists are certainly drawing lessons from their Nepalese comrades--but not this one). An overwhelming make-believe among commentators and international observers appears to be that the worst is now over, and Nepal is now firmly fixed on a trajectory of gradual--even if, possibly, slow--recovery and reconstruction, with the nightmare of the'people's war' left irrevocably behind.
What has been engineered in Nepal through the electoral process, however, is unambiguously a partial'seizure of power'. This seizure is no less a reality because it has not been effectively resisted by democratic forces. Nor, indeed, is the Maoist ideology any the less totalitarian because power is secured through a manipulation of democratic processes and institutions. The state may not have manifestly been captured through the'barrel of the gun', but it has certainly been secured under the shadow of the gun. This is borne out by the wave of violence and intimidation that had preceded the elections, creating what the EuropeanUnion's election observers described as "a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation" under which the polls were eventually conducted. Domestic observers, including the Nepal Election Observation Committee (NEOC) and the Nepal Election Monitoring Alliance (NEMA), who had the deepest penetration, with thousands of observers positioned across the country, noted that the Maoists had systematically resorted to "threats, intimidation and violence to terrorise voters and political rivals."
More significantly, the Maoist leadership had, in the run-up to the elections, clearly and repeatedly stated that the election outcome would be rejected if the outcome did not favour their party, with Baburam Bhattarai, theCPN-M's chief ideologue threatening a 'new revolution', and to 'capture thestate' in 'not… more than ten minutes". Ominously, Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda, the Chairman of the CPN-M, had spoken of an undefined "new method" to "capture the Constituent Assembly through elections" in February 2008. The effect of Maoist tactics was, no doubt, compounded by widespread disillusionment with the mainstream parties--but the eventual outcome certainly reflects a quantum secured through strong-arm measures across the country.