CLOUDED JUDGEMENT DAVID GELLNER asks who is to blame for the crisis in Nepal
THE FIRST OF June will mark four years since the infamous royal massacre in which ten members of the Nepalese royal family were killed and the entire line of the reigning King Birendra was wiped out. Several popular books on the massacre have come out in English. They all follow the official line that the murderer was Crown Prince Dipendra, who then turned his guns on himself. Few of them make much of the most important fact, which is that nobody outside a small Kathmandu-based elite believes the official story. Most Nepalis assume – regardless of proofs, and on the grounds of inherent plausibility – that King Gyanendra, the current ruler, and Birendra’s younger brother, organised the killings. Gyanendra just happened to be out of town at the time of the massacre and all of his immediate family survived the shooting spree. This means that there is widespread dislike, even hatred, for the King, which is now feeding through into rejection of the institution of the monarchy itself. Activists of the younger generation spit on his portrait. All through 2004 students and cadres of the protesting parliamentary parties openly chanted slogans in favour of a republic in the streets of Kathmandu.
Maoist rebels, initially a small band of true-believing Marxist-Leninists brought up in the traditions of Indian communism, with links to international supporters of the Peruvian Sendero Luminoso and revering Mao’s Cultural Revolution, started their armed movement back in February 1996. In nine years they have managed to export it from their western hill heartland, the home of the Kham Magar ethnic group, to the entire country. Nowhere is untouched – every village is subject to some degree of Maoist rule. Even in the cities all major businesses, all prominent persons, pay ‘revolutionary taxes’ to the Maoists. The Maoists have gradually destroyed all vestiges of the state which might challenge them in the countryside. First they targeted unpopular local big men and money lenders. Then they moved on to local politicians, usually of the Congress Party. Later they attacked representatives and prominent supporters of the UML (the United Marxist-Leninists, the main constitutional opposition). In 2004 they started threatening all the local government mayors and representatives appointed by the King, prompting them to resign. Once that level had gone, they extended the tactic to the government bureaucrats who had been left in charge. Anyone who opposes their rule in the villages – any remaining political figures or social workers who refused to accept their ideological line – have been killed or driven out. Only health workers and teachers are left. They are paid by the state, but surrender a both a monthly portion and irregular contributions to the Maoists. Short of the necessary weaponry and firepower to be able to conquer the capital by a frontal assault, and disappointed in their hopes of an urban uprising to match their rural stranglehold, the Maoists have decided to destroy the economy with a series of blockades and general strikes, while pinning down the army with ambushes and mines all over the country. Trucks or buses which defy their general strikes are shot at or blown up. Harrowing stories have emerged of buses driven by passengers after the driver had been shot.
SO WHO IS to blame for the death of Nepali democracy, which was revived with so much hope and fervour in 1990? First in the rank of guilty parties are of course the top Maoist leadership, particularly Prachanda, the overall leader, and Baburam Bhattarai – PhD from Delhi University and the most learned ideologue in the Maoist ranks (and indeed the most educated member of the entire political class in Nepal). It was their decision to attack the state and gradually to undermine the ‘old power’ as they call it, just when it had started out on the process of becoming genuinely democratic. They, above all others, have brought about the dictatorial and oppressive situation which they claimed all long to be opposing. They have offered an intoxicating and seductive ideology – take up arms, kill, and destroy in an altruistic cause, all to produce a better world and eliminate oppression – which has proved irresistible to many of the half-educated young men and women of rural Nepal.
The second guilty party – though now an impotent bystander – is Girija Koirala, 80- year-old president of the Nepali Congress Party. Between 1990 and 2002 he led five out of the twelve democratic governments. He is the younger brother of the charismatic statesman BP Koirala, who before 1990 was the only democratically-elected Prime Minister Nepal had ever known (he was also the grandfather of the Bollywood actress, Monisha Koirala). ‘BP’, as he is called, led a Congress government from 1958 to 1960, at which point he was clapped in jail by King Mahendra – the father of Birendra and Gyanendra – who went on to ban parties and establish what he called ‘Partyless Panchayat Democracy’.
Despite his age, Girija is still a fearsome party organiser, keeping the loyalty of Congress cadres by tirelessly visiting, speaking, listening, and joining them in anti- King protests on the streets. Brilliant as an apparachik, Girija was a disaster as prime minister and statesman: no vision, no understanding of the modern world, no conception of how to solve the Maoist insurgency. Throughout the 1990s Girija’s only aim appeared to be that of occupying the prime minister’s chair or, failing that, making the life of whoever else did as uncomfortable as possible – even if that someone was from his own party.
All parliamentary leaders, as well as the royal palace, are guilty of having tacitly encouraged the Maoists in their early years – the Congress Party because they thought it would embarrass the main opposition party (the UML), the UML (United Marxist- Leninists) because they did not wish to be seen to be opposing ‘friendly forces on the left’ (as well as because initially the targets of Maoist violence tended to be aligned with the Congress Party), and the palace because they thought that parliamentary democracy would be undermined by encouraging the Maoists (which indeed it has been). Of all the irresponsible and corrupt parliamentarians, Girija is ultimately the most responsible, since he held power for longer and more times than any else in the years after 1990. The Nepalese political elite in general (just like the government of India in South Asia as a whole) has been guilty of failing to take the insurgency seriously until it was far too late.
The third guilty party, ostensibly now the most powerful person in the country and the one calling the shots, is the present king, Gyanendra. (Some point to the power of the army behind him; others sneer that he has been reduced to being nothing more than the Mayor of Kathmandu.) He has repeatedly said that he is not like his brother – that he is not content to be a symbolic and fully constitutional monarch, that he cannot be inactive when he sees his people suffering. When he sacked Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba for “incompetence” on October 4th 2002, and prorogued Parliament, he claimed that it was not a coup, and that he was acting in accordance with Constitutional provision 127 that allows the King to “remove difficulties”. Initially many were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, since it was undoubtedly true that Deuba – having dissolved Parliament and called elections – was not capable of actually holding them. But everything that Gyanendra has done since, including appointing two Prime Ministers from the pre-democratic and discredited Panchayat days, and not appointing a Prime Minister at all for three weeks in May 2004 (during which time India was able to hold an entire general election and transfer power to a new government), has led people to conclude that “Birendra was his grandfather’s grandson, but Gyanendra is his father’s son” (i.e., Birendra believed in democracy like his grandfather, King Tribhuvan, whereas Gyanendra is set on destroying it like his father, King Mahendra). The coup of February 1st 2005, when Gyanendra sacked Prime Minister Deuba for the second time – this time putting him under house arrest, along with all other leading politicians, while the telephones and internet were cut off for a week – had long been expected, though it still came as a surprise when it happened.
Support, or rather non-criticism, of the King’s step has come from China, Pakistan, Russia, and Cuba. The USA and the UK have backed India’s strong stance on the coup, condemning it, urging the King to join with the parties in order to form a united front against the Maoists, and suspending military aid. Pakistan, in order to queer India’s pitch, has offered military aid, should the King need it. It is doubtful that the King will risk angering India, with which Nepal shares a long and open border, by accepting the offer. The wide and deep criticism of the King’s coup has taken the palace aback. That the King’s advisors are stuck in a timewarp is all too obvious as they attempt to repeat King Mahendra’s overthrowal of parliamentary democracy in a wholly different world and an utterly changed Nepali context, summoning out of retirement octogenarian politicians most Nepalis thought were already dead. The only concession to the present era has been the King’s repeated insistence, wholly at odds with all his actions, that he is acting in defence of multiparty democracy.
Hardline Maoists – those who wish to fight to the death – must be laughing all the way to their jungle hideouts. For what King Gyanendra has done, by forcing parliamentary politicians into outright opposition to the throne, is to create the very situation of feudal autocracy the Maoists have claimed existed all along. Thanks to Gyanendra, the Maoists’ demands for a constituent assembly to draw up a new constitution appear rational and sensible. He has driven the parliamentary parties to come out openly and directly for a new constitution and even for a republic. In the hands of a serious political strategist, the present moment would represent a historic opportunity. Evidence is beginning to emerge of serious splits within the Maoist movement, with many desperate for a truce and a way to achieve a ‘soft landing’.
Such statesmanship does not appear very likely, however. Large parts of the army are diverted into harrassing human rights defenders, censoring newspapers, and supervising phone services (or the lack of them).Meanwhile, the situation in the Nepalese countryside degenerates still further. Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have warned of a human rights catastrophe. It is true that the King’s step was initially popular among many ordinary people in the cities, fed up as they were with daily violent demonstrations by the parties, and sickened by the corruption of the politicians when they were in power. If the King had had some secret plan – peace with the Maoists, a rapid military victory – up his sleeve, they would have been willing to forgive him. But it has gradually become obvious that there is no strategic vision, no magic solution – just a grab for power and the need to shift the blame for the army’s failure to deal with the Maoist insurgency onto political parties and civil society activists.
Unless the King and the Nepalese army see sense, unless they realise that killing democracy in order to save it will only drive people either to the Maoists or into exile, the situation in the Nepalese countryside will get even worse. Recent events in Kapilvastu in the Tarai (the southern strip of plains bordering India) may be a harbinger of things to come. The army appears to have encouraged mobs to go on killing sprees against ‘Maoists’; tragically and ironically some of those killed or who had their houses burned down were refugees from the Maoist controlled areas of Rukum and Rolpa. There is just a slim hope that the massive international pressure may force the King to change his mind and his mindset – though he has never shown signs in the past of admitting that he was wrong. And there are two big problems with India, Nepal’s giant neighbour, forcing a policy of democratisation: first, it is quite happy to do business with authoritarian regimes in other neighbouring countries (Bhutan, China, Pakistan), so its motives in insisting on democracy in Nepal appear to be less than pure; second, the fundamental theme of Nepali patriotism has always been anti- Indianism and opposing what India wants.
David Gellner is a lecturer in the Anthropology of South Asia and Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford [Photography Kiyoko Ogura]
