Book Excerpt: Prashant Jha's ‘Battles Of The New Republic’

BOOK 1: Politics Of Gradual Revolution

Waging War and Peace 

The Shah dynasty was originally from the Gorkha district in the midhills of central Nepal. It was ironic that the man who could justifiably take a large part of the credit for ensuring the end of the monarchy also happened to be from Gorkha. 

Baburam Bhattarai was born in 1954 in Khoplang village in a peasant family which traced its lineage back to the Gorkha kingdom’s priestly clan. Three years earlier, Nepal’s first democratic revolution had seen King Tribhuvan and democratic activists come together to topple the 104-year-old oligarchic regime of the Rana aristocracy. Through this period, the Rana family had treated the country like a private fiefdom. The king had remained locked up inside the palace. 

Internally, the Rana rulers maintained an extractive relationship with the populace. Family members and administrators took ownership of huge tracts of land, where the poorest worked in the most exploitative of circumstances. There was nothing by way of representative government, and incremental political reform was an alien concept. Next door in India, even the British had— gradually—introduced constitutionalism and sought to accommodate emerging voices through token legislative mechanisms. Unlike the colonial power, the Nepali rulers had made no investment in improving the country’s infrastructure and communication networks. 

Externally, they maintained a subservient relationship with British India. Men from the hills of Nepal served as cheap mercenaries in the British Indian Army, killing and dying for imperial masters even as Orientalists created the myth of the ‘brave Gorkha’ to romanticise and legitimise the practice. When the Sepoy Revolt broke out in 1857, the then Nepali ruler, Jung Bahadur Rana,  personally led troops to north India as a gesture of loyalty to help the British out. The Empire, in return, gifted the area that is today Nepal’s western Tarai to the Ranas. The quid pro quo was simple— the Ranas would help secure key British interests in Nepal and the region, and London would allow Kathmandu to remain notionally independent. 

With the Indian independence struggle picking up steam, stirrings of change had engulfed the neighbourhood. Nepali exiles in India had formed the Nepali Congress (NC), modelled on the lines of the Indian National Congress, while Left activists had drawn inspiration from the Indian communists to set up the Communist Party of Nepal in the late 1940s. Nepali activists participated in the Quit India Movement, calculating that until India was free, Nepal would not be able to oust the Ranas—who derived support from the British. 

In 1950, the NC began an armed rebellion against the Ranas, while the king took refuge in the Indian embassy and flew to Delhi as a mark of protest against the regime. After the British had left, the new Indian government inherited the imperial legacy of influencing Nepal affairs. Unlike the British, though, the new nationalist regime in Delhi was more sympathetic to accommodating forces of freedom. In 1951, the Delhi Compromise—mediated by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru—saw the end of the Rana aristocracy, a new power-sharing arrangement between the political forces, and the promise of an elected CA to draft Nepal’s social contract. 

In 1954, the year Baburam Bhattarai was born, the capital was a hotbed of intrigue. Tribhuvan was dying, and his son, Mahendra, was about to take over. The uneasy pact between the Palace, the old Rana regime, and the NC, mediated in Delhi, had all but crumbled. The monarch had begun shuffling prime ministers at regular intervals. The political landscape was fragmented, with several factions jostling for power and lobbying with the Palace for patronage. Instead of making way for popular democracy, the Shah's reign had slowly replaced the Rana aristocracy. The promise of elections to constitute a CA had remained just that, a mere promise, and, in another five years, the new king would go back on the pledge. Mahendra unilaterally declared a Constitution and held elections for a Parliament in 1959. The NC won a resounding majority in the polls, but Prime Minister Bishweshwor Prasad Koirala’s tenure was short-lived. 

In 1960, Mahendra Shah sacked and arrested the elected prime minister. He used the army to crack down on political activity, banned political parties, and assumed absolute control. Castigating basic liberal democratic precepts and practices as a Western import, monarchists introduced what they termed the Panchayat system. The nomenclature was a bid to project it as a new form of ‘grassroots democracy suited to the soil’. But like experiments of ‘guided democracy’ in Indonesia and Pakistan around the time, this essentially meant centralised control with token elections, the curtailing of fundamental rights and the stifling of freedom. 

Baburam had begun school when the short-lived experiment with democracy failed. But he was too young, and his family too distant from the capital, to be aware of the machinations underway. Life for him entailed walking several miles to a primary school in a nearby village, and helping at home and in the fields. Baburam was lucky that the district had the infrastructure to meet his family’s emphasis on learning. Missionaries, led by teachers from the US and Kerala, ran the Amar Jyoti Janata School, which was also known as the Luintel School, in Palungtar village. Baburam enrolled in the new school in Class 3 at the age of seven. In 1970, he was to rise to national prominence when he topped the national School Leaving Certificate examination with distinction. At sixteen, Baburam had become a ‘Board First’, a prelude to successive academic achievements and a label that would remain with him for the rest of his life. 

The success enabled his shift to Kathmandu, where he joined the Amrit Science College. Baburam recalls that this was where he received his initial political education. He developed an instinctive dislike for the monarchy, which was running a dictatorship under the garb of localised democracy. He was not alone. A new generation was now emerging, which had grown up during the 1960s, which had been exposed to at least a high-school education, had read and heard about democracy, communism, social change and revolutions elsewhere in the world, and wondered why Nepal had to live under an absolutist king. Baburam once again stood first in intermediate exams in 1972, the year Mahendra died and made way for his son, Birendra, as Nepal’s king. Baburam then received a scholarship under the Colombo Plan to study architecture in Chandigarh and left Nepal...

BOOK 4: Politics of Shanti-Sambidhan

‘Did We Wage a War for This?’ 

Dahaban lies in the middle of the Maoist heartland, a few kilometres from the Holeri police station in the Rolpa district, which was attacked by a core group of rebels to launch the People’s War in 1996. 

Fifteen years after the first shots were fired in its vicinity, a blue gate welcomed visitors to the Fifth Division headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Rolpa. A local bazaar had sprung up, with small shops selling items of daily use, tea-shops, a hair-cutting salon, and an eatery serving daal, bhaat, saag—lentils, rice and greens—the staple food of hill Nepalis. 

A guard in combat fatigues checked our identity cards as we strolled up to the middle of the camp. It was an open space, surrounded on both sides by recently constructed structures. A few men had just finished their morning meal and were washing dishes. Some were exercising. But a large group had congregated around a single man, sitting on a chair, fielding what appeared to be aggressive questions. As we learnt later, he was Raj Bahadur Budhamagar ‘Avinash’, the vice-divisional commander and the de facto leader of the camp. 

His presence was a reminder of a major transgression by the Maoists. The Rolpa divisional commander, Kali Bahadur Kham ‘Bibidh’, was in hiding, implicated in the murder of a businessman from Kathmandu in 2008, well after the Maoists had promised not to engage in violence. He had been promoted within the party hierarchy, even after strong evidence pointed to his involvement in the killing. When outsiders visited the cantonment, to avoid embarrassment and tough questions, Avinash was put forth as the visible face of the Fifth Division, and fighters became cagey when asked about Bibidh’s whereabouts.

But to be fair to the former rebels, this was an aberration. The ceasefire had held, and the Maoists had demonstrated enormous discipline, control and commitment in abiding by the new rules of the game. 

It was the end of November in 2011. And that day in Rolpa—and in six other cantonments where the soldiers of the PLA had lived for the past five years—former fighters would finally get to choose their future in a process that came to be known as ‘regrouping’ in popular parlance. Earlier that month, after years of acrimonious negotiations and prolonged deadlock, the Maoists had finally signed a 7-point peace deal with the other major parties involved in the process, the Nepali Congress (NC), the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist) [UML], and the United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF). 

The United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) had verified 19,602 former Maoist combatants. The Comprehensive Peace Agreement had declared that some could possibly be integrated into the state’s security forces according to ‘standard norms’, while others would be rehabilitated. But the issue was closely linked to the nature of power politics and the political transition. 

The future of the armies led to some of the fiercest political battles in post-republican Nepal. The UN’s role and mandate would cause a deep rift between the Maoists and non-Maoist parties. Prime Minister Prachanda’s attempted dismissal of General Katawal—which was to derail Nepali politics for over two-and-a-half years and displace the Maoists from power—had its roots in the existence of the PLA.

The top brass of the Nepal Army (NA) was opposed to integrating any former combatant in their ranks at all, while the Maoists had hoped to ensure a pliable chain of command to enable relatively smooth integration on their terms. But precisely because they had a separate coercive structure, doubts about their intention had deepened, and all anti-Maoist forces had stood against them. 

The PLA’s presence would once again become a stick to use against the Maoists when other parties insisted that until the question of integration was settled, the former rebels could not be allowed back into the government. The democratic parties also refused to discuss the Constitution as long as the Maoists maintained their army. Some openly suggested that the CA was the Maoists’ agenda, a new Constitution was the Maoists’ agenda, and if they wanted a Constitution to be written, they should give up the PLA to first create a level playing field. 

For their part, the Maoists insisted that until they returned to power, they would neither detach themselves from the PLA nor take steps that would lead to its disbandment. They were suspicious of the attempts to link the peace process with Constitution-writing, and argued that both processes must happen simultaneously. As Barshaman Pun ‘Ananta’—a former deputy commander of the PLA, one of the men who had been a part of the first Maoist attack on Holeri, a key member of the Maoists’ negotiating team, and a future finance minister—told me in 2010, ‘They want us to surrender our strength, the PLA.

But they will not write the Constitution after that because if a Federal Democratic Republican Constitution is written, Maoists will become even more powerful and NC and UML will get marginalised.’ The Maoists were to argue that, were it not for their army, the anti-Maoist forces would have succeeded in their plans to dissolve the CA in May 2010 or 2011—the presence of thousands of combatants deterred them from taking an action that would alienate the Maoists and irreversibly push them out of the political process. 

The PLA’s future was also inextricably linked to the future of the erstwhile Royal Nepalese Army (RNA). The peace accord had categorically stated that the ‘democratisation of the army’ should happen simultaneously with the decision on the PLA. While many who wished to preserve the status quo argued that an army could not be ‘democratic’, since it runs on strong hierarchies, the issue was deeper, for the size of the NA, the nature of its composition, its role, its professionalism or the lack of it, and its human rights abuses had become apparent during the war. 

The objective of the peace accord was to detach the NA from the Palace’s control. It was strengthening the Ministry of Defence, instead of allowing the army to operate autonomously, and instituting civilian control. The army’s strength had swelled from 45,000 in 2001 to 95,000 in 2006, and there was little doubt that an impoverished country like Nepal, with no major external or internal threats, could ill-afford an army of this size. Downsizing made political and economic sense, and would help reverse the militarisation which had deepened over the course of the war. 

The NA was also an exclusivist institution which did not reflect the country’s diversity. Its leadership was primarily from the aristocratic Thakuri-Chhetri clan. Chhatraman Singh Gurung was the first member of the marginalised Janjati group to have risen up to become the army chief. But that was an aberration rather than a trend. The chain of command reverted to officers of the Hindu ‘warrior’ castes. There were fewer than 6,000 Madhesis in the entire force, less than 7 per cent, largely as technicians, engineers, doctors and barbers, people with no combat responsibilities. Making the NA inclusive and representative had become even more urgent in the wake of the rising aspirations of the underrepresented ethnic groups. Tales of corruption in the NA, particularly during the war, were spoken of in hushed whispers in Kathmandu. Financial transparency, cleaner audit management and the investigation of past deals would help the NA function more professionally in the future. 

The NC and the UML had suffered at the hands of the army when the monarch held sway, and were keen to detach it from the Palace. This was, in fact, one of the first major policy decisions taken by the reinstated Parliament in 2006. But beyond this, any demand for ‘democratisation’ was interpreted by the older parliamentary parties as a move by the Maoists to enhance their control over the army. The NA had become an ally in the political struggle against the Maoists, and the army itself was reluctant—as expected—to institute fundamental changes in its functioning. Geopolitics and the balance of power favoured the NA’s preference for the status quo, and the agenda for democratisation would soon be lost

Excerpted with permission from Aleph Book Company.