It is good that the Maoists have put off the third phase of their three-phase agitation to restore “civilian supremacy.”  It is also healthy that Dahal is once again doing the diplomatic dance in order to find a middle path out of the present impasse.  If the Maoists are willing, it behoves the Congress and the UML, too, to show flexibility and walk to the middle to find a compromise solution, a middle path that discards the zero-sum politics of either the Maoists must lose or the non-Maoists must lose.  The middle path will make both win in the eyes of the people as well as the international community.  The middle path will help focus their energy on the most important task that history has thrust on them: the framing of the constitution. 

What the middle path basically means is that the Parliament/Constituent Assembly doors ought to function as what it is and should be: a talking shop, as the English writer E.M. Forester called it as one of the two cheers of democracy. The Maoists need to vent their disagreement over the president’s move and criticize the president (in a democracy even the perfectly legal and morally sound decisions by the highest elected authority in the land are open to debate and criticism, leaving room for the people to decide in the next elections who is right and who is wrong) inside the Constituent Assembly.  And those parties that persuaded the president to intervene in the Katawal imbroglio ought to be ready to use their power of reason and argument to defend the president’s decision.  But what they must not adopt is what they ought to abhor the most as champions of democracy: a ban on debate and discussion in the Parliament.  Let the people hear what arguments the Maoists can muster against the president’s move on the Katawal affair.  And let the people also hear the seasoned debaters of the non-Maoist stalwarts; we can’t wait to see how they have honed their debating skills as parliamentarians. 

Ideally, what should happen is both the Maoists and the non-Maoists acknowledge that on both sides the Interim Constitution was violated no matter which side violated it more and that, despite the consequences, both sides had to act the way they did in order to prove that Nepal could not tolerate either an activist, politically motivated army chief, permitting him to make a mockery of civilian supremacy or the violation of constitutional provisions by any individual or group, no matter how angry or unhappy. In other words, Prachanda as prime minister had to act the way he did, given the circumstances and the president had to act the way he did, given the circumstances.  If Prachanda had not handed the dismissal order to the then Army Chief Katawal and sent home a message to those who still subscribed to the old ideology of behind-the-scene army supremacy, they would have taken future civilian governments for granted, as they had done before in Nepali history, never taking seriously those who didn’t appear in army uniform bedecked with medals (one of the reasons why the Shah monarchs’ pictures frequently appeared in army uniform was to impress the army that its supreme commander, too, was a soldier).  And if the president had let prime minister’s minority cabinet and its hasty, out-of-protocol dismissal of the army chief go unchallenged, the checks and balances principle so important for a smooth functioning of democracy would have been shattered, and the future of democracy in Nepal jeopardized, setting a bad precedent.  So, what happened on both sides was a lesson for both Maoist hardliners and right wingers of the old regime.  This also proves that history, especially democratic history in its incipient phase, seldom proceeds in giant leaps but moves by fits and starts, in small steps, by two steps forward, one step backward.

Even though the Maoists have played a pivotal role in achieving secularism, republicanism and the Constituent Assembly, the role of what used to be the seven-party alliance has not been any less important in bringing about the Comprehensive Peace Agreement and the Second Spring Uprising of 2006, the secular republican set-up and the Constituent Assembly.  There are lessons to be learnt on both sides.  On the one hand, the Congress and the UML, including other smaller parties, must leave behind their 1990s culture of factionalism, horse trading for individual brinkmanship, a leader’s or party’s ambition to get into government by hook or by crook.  On the other hand, the Maoists must read history as carefully and creatively as the moderates among them have done so far; they should realize that in forsaking the dream of one-party rule by violent takeover of the state in the classical communist fashion and in embracing the electoral practices of multiparty social democracy is their long-term future secure.  The 1990s practices and modus operandi will never endear the Congress and the UML to the people in a new Nepal.  Nor terrorizing their opponents and the common people by its leadership’s words or YCL’s deeds will help the Maoists achieve their economic, social and political objectives in the unfolding Asian century.

Nepalis, however, already know the workings of the UML and the Congress from the 1990 to 2002; they are yet to be positively surprised by these two parties.  They are not interested in criticizing these two parties as much because each hasn’t given up washing its dirty laundry in public: open factionalism and scramble for realizing individual ambition for power at the expense of party unity.  That’s why they didn’t put them on an equal footing with the Maoists in the Constituent Assembly in the first place. But they had hoped that the Maoists would act differently, more wisely, more prudently.  But because the Maoists, too, have shown undue haste and inability to handle power with sagacity and due deliberation despite such political strength and because they are in every way the strongest among the parties, their every move deserves the most merciless scrutiny, and their every word the most critical analysis.  Because they are the most powerful, most well-organized political force in the country, capable of effecting the most public good if they harness their energy constructively or inflicting tremendous damage on the country and unprecedented pain on the people if derailed, all eyes are upon them and their every move, all ears on their every word.  This dialogic political circumstance of scrutiny, criticism and analysis ought to be a landscape of mirrors for Maoist self-reflection, original thinking and learning if they take them as such.

So, flexibility and staying the course for drafting the constitution ought to be the underlying goal of all the parties; nothing should stand in its way.  Compromise, therefore, is good for all sides for the historical task ahead.  One’s own home-grown learning earned through toil and tears will endure more than the readymade wisdom offered on a silver platter by one’s big brother. The prime minister’s chair in the transitional period ought not to be the end of the political road for Madhav Kumar Nepal nor “civilian supremacy” the end of all political strategies for the Maoists.  Another day will bring another sun for both. The politics of compromise to frame the constitution ought to be another form of waging a war of positions for all political parties under the new constitution.

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