Last Call For Democracy

The King’s latest gambit –a reluctant offer to allow the agitating Seven Party Alliance (SPA) to nominatetheir Prime Minister and join a ‘national government’ – has predictablyand rightly provoked contempt and fury in the Nepali street. The King offerednothing that could have been acceptable to the SPA and, more importantly, to thepeople who have now clearly gone beyond party campaigns and affiliations todirectly challenge and reject the monarchy in what is increasingly taking theshape of a people’s revolt. Indeed, it should have been clear that, since May22, 2002, when he dissolved Parliament, and acutely since the February 1, 2005,‘King’s coup’, in which he seized direct power, the King has been part ofthe problem, and has systematically destroyed the very possibility of being partof any permanent solution in Nepal.

It is a measure of its absolutedistance from the situation on the ground in Nepal, that the internationalcommunity – particularly India, the US, UK and the EU – chose to‘welcome’ the King’s worthless offer as a "step in the rightdirection", and to exhort the agitating political parties to end theirmovement and join the government. The delusional quality of the internationalresponse is, however, entirely consistent with the record of the recentpast.

Indeed, as Nepal spirals intowhat appear to be the penultimate disorders preceding the end of the monarchy,there has been a flurry of diplomatic activity, with India in particular, butother concerned powers as well, striking dramatic postures, exhorting the Kingto greater sagacity and restraint, and demanding a return to ‘democratic’norms. In this, it would seem, these governments have been given more to theatreand appearances, than to any concrete perspective or prospect for correctiveaction, and are attempting to salvage with mere words and pretence, a situationthat has long been lost to the lack or infirmity of actions.

India and the internationalcommunity could have enormously empowered democratic forces in Nepal 14 monthsago – or even earlier, when the King dismissed Parliament, hiring and firing asuccession of governments after 2002 – by exerting irresistible pressure onKathmandu to immediately restore the integrity of constitutional democracy. Aclear model for such pressure existed in the Indian blockade of 1989, whichforced King Birendra to introduce multi-party democracy in the country. But theychose, instead, to restrict themselves to the symbolism of interrupted militarysupplies and partial withdrawals of economic aid, even as political parties wereprogressively marginalised and eventually driven into an alliance with theMaoists.

Significantly, moreover, theagreement between the SPA and the Maoists was secretly brokered by Indianagencies – and to this extent, India has directly contributed to theescalating crisis in Nepal. Unfortunately, this was done in the absence of aclear game-plan, and under what may prove to be misplaced confidence in thenotion that the Maoists are, in fact, engaged in a good-faith process ofnegotiations with the powerless political parties, and would be willing to joinin a democratic process which their ideology unequivocally rejects as a‘bourgeois-comprador’ corruption of the ‘people’s democracy’ that theyseek to impose ‘through the barrel of the gun’.

The Indian state has, in thepast and within the Indian context, entirely misjudged the Maoists’ commitmentto their own radical ideology, and grossly overestimated their willingness toarrive at compromises. There is no reason to believe that the much strongerMaoist movement in Nepal would be willing to embrace any remarkable compromises,particularly at a time when events in that country are so clearly following atrajectory that they have scripted.

Indeed, India’s recentposturing is particularly embarrassing, as it pretended to take up a‘leadership role’, sending special envoys to intercede with the King and theparties, and attempted to share, if not take, credit for the King’sinevitable, and evidently worthless, ‘concessions’. The fact, however, isthat the King’s limited ‘concessions’ did not come as a result of anythingIndia chose to say at this juncture, but are, rather, a response to theunmistakable message of the Nepali street.

What is insufficientlyunderstood in all this is the degree to which the initiative has beenrelentlessly held by the Maoists since the Dang attack in November 2001, whenthey decided they were strong enough to take on the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA).All other parties to the conflict, domestic and foreign, have, since then,merely been reacting to the realities of the ground created by theMaoists.

Over the past fourteen monthssince the King’s coup, moreover, the RNA has essentially ‘hunkered down’in defensive positions, basically protecting urban concentrations, andparticularly the Kathmandu Valley, with little effort to challenge the Maoistsin their areas of domination in the rural hinterland. A review of incidents ofviolence over this period demonstrates that an overwhelming majority offatalities have occurred during Maoist attacks on Army and Police posts, camps,establishments and transports, or on government facilities in well protectedurban settlements.

The truth is, the King isfighting an un-winnable war, and was apparently gambling on the inevitableexhaustion that he hoped would result from a long drawn out confrontation, withRoyalist forces holding on to the urban areas, abandoning the countryside to theMaoists. The error of such an assessment is twofold: for one thing, exhaustionworks both ways, and does not necessarily benefit a passive state; for another,there can be no strategy of permanent defence: if the initiative is constantlyheld by the more aggressive anti-state force, a necessary process of ‘nibblingexpansion’ eats away at the vitals and capacities of passive defence.

Nevertheless, the Maoists alsolack the armed strength to ‘sweep down the hills’ and ‘take Kathmandu’in positional warfare, engaging the well trained and better armed RNA in aconventional confrontation. The end, consequently, if it was to be brought aboutwithin the foreseeable future, had to come, not through some dramatic militaryconfrontation at the gates of Kathmandu, but through a combination ofdemonstrations, disruptive activities, blockades and targeted violence. It waswithin this scheme that the exhausted political parties found a role, as BaburamBhattarai, the Maoists’ ‘ideologue’ expressed it, because "thehistorical necessity and the new objective reality of the country is that thenew ‘two pillars’ of parliamentary and revolutionary democratic forces joinhands to uproot the outdated and rotten third ‘pillar’ of monarchy". Thisis, in essence, a marriage of convenience, and will last as long as the commonenemy, the ‘rotten third pillar’, survives. But ‘revolutionarydemocracy’ is just as irreconcilably opposed to ‘bourgeois-comprador’parliamentary democracy, and this alliance will crumble swiftly in the wake ofthe collapse of the monarchy.

That collapse is nowinevitable, though not necessarily imminent, as protests by the SPA bring outtens of thousands into the streets, defying curfew orders; and as the Maoistslaunch a coordinated campaign to defy the curfew, ‘capture’ highways, andbreak down royal statues across the country. Within the Kathmandu Valley, theMaoists have declared a ‘unilateral ceasefire’, but their war of attritionagainst the state’s forces continues in other parts of the country.

It has long been an urgentimperative that the issue of the imminence and character of the successor statein Nepal be addressed directly by both the international community and thepeople of Nepal. Politically correct slogans of a ‘Republic’ created out ofa ‘negotiated settlement’ between the Maoists and the political partiesmilitate against reality and the lessons of history. The contours of Nepal’send state cannot, of course, be currently predicted with any measure ofprecision, but it is clear that the equation of power is overwhelmingly infavour of the Maoists, who may seize power either directly in the ensuingdisorders, or through a temporary alliance with the ‘parliamentary parties’,exploiting democratic processes to neutralize or secure control over the oneforce that remains an obstacle to their absolute sway – the RNA.

The situation in Nepal is notyet irreversible, and concentrated international action to restore the integrityand power of parliamentary forces at Kathmandu, combined with a long-termstrategy of recovery of the regions lost to the Maoists, remains a theoreticalpossibility. The agitating political parties will enjoy a flush of popularsupport and confidence in the immediate aftermath of a possible success, andthis will create some space for consolidation in Kathmandu, and a transientshift in the equation of power, vis a vis the Maoists.

The role of the RNA in such ascheme, and its transformation into a National rather than a Royalist Force, isintegral to the realization of such a possibility. Regrettably, whenever aproposal on these lines is articulated, the immediate response has been thatthis is ‘difficult’. This has been the core of the problem in addressing theconflict in Nepal, certainly since November 2001: realistic solutions aremechanically rejected as ‘difficult’; and those who ally themselves to theideologies of freedom the world over, it would appear, are no longer willing todo ‘difficult’.

The enemies of freedom – theMaoists, the mujahideen, the warriors of assorted exclusionary ethnicfundamentalisms – however, are willing, even eager, to confront difficulties,and will, consequently, tend to prevail in the very long run within which their‘protracted wars’ are conceived – and which democracies fail toacknowledge in their policy projections and paradigms.

As the Maoist script continuesto be played out in Nepal, Kathmandu will probably be the first to fall. Butothers will follow.

Ajai Sahni is Editor, SAIR;Executive Director, Institute for Conflict ManagementCourtesy, the South AsiaIntelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal