E-Kantipur

The home minister’s job, under prevailing circumstances, seems doomed to failure. The first two individuals who held the position after the 2006 Jana Andolan — Krishna Prasad Sitaula and Bam Dev Gautam — were both vilified, either for the ineffectuality of the police administration or for use of indiscriminate, brute force. And following the two recent high-profile assassinations, the current Home Minister Bhim Rawal too has been hounded with demands for his resignation. He is held responsible for the excessive politicisation of the police force, of taking decisions on recruitment, transfers and promotions solely on the basis of loyalty to his party, the CPN-UML, regional preference (he comes from the relatively backward Far West), shoving aside competent and experienced personnel, centralising all power in his hands, and thus causing a breakdown in the chain of command and general morale of the state security forces.

  It is natural, of course, that the nation’s top functionary for the maintenance of public security be blamed for lapses. And Rawal may indeed be guilty of all that he has been charged of. But to locate the source of the current security crisis solely in the actions (or inaction) of a single individual, without taking into account the broader political context and the responsibilities of the other ministries, would be to let off the government and the entire political class too lightly.

The root cause of the failure to curtail the violence, extortion and murder committed by both purportedly political and blatantly criminal groups operating in the Tarai is the ineffectuality and lack of direction of the current governing coalition. Formed through accidental circumstances, consumed by fear that the Maoists have become too powerful and the various political interests that have emerged over the past few years unmanageable, it is afflicted by paralysis. Its commitment to a more inclusive state with a radical devolution of power is limited to rhetoric; in fact it desires nothing more than a return to what in memory are the halcyon days of the 1990s when the power of its major constituent parties was undisputed. Since its interventions to reverse history have been futile, it stands — helplessly, shakily — on political ground that is swiftly shifting under its feet.

There is refusal to understand that the solutions to the security crisis — as with all other political crises facing Nepal today — are long term and require fundamental changes to the entire apparatus of the state. The much-touted Special Security Plan has as its basis the belief that problems of security can be solved through the crudest application of brute and indiscriminate force. The understanding is so unsubtle that there have been no attempts to distinguish between groups with an actual political agenda and those that are solely criminal. And the government’s refusal to see the distinction of the two has actually brought the political and criminal groups closer. As a recent report on torture and extra-judicial killings in the Tarai by Advocacy Forum reveals, faced with a crisis of existence and ignored by the state, armed groups with a political agenda have been patronising groups that are purely criminal. The latter are allowed to operate freely as long as they give a cut of their extortion profits to the former.

The previous two governments at least had an idea that improving the security situation would have to involve political engagement with groups claiming to represent the Madhesi population. By attempting to draw these groups into the political mainstream, it was recognised, criminal gangs could be isolated and so the action taken against them would enjoy broad societal and political support. The current government appears to think that such political negotiation is no longer necessary, as all Madhesi groups have diminished in political importance. But what is unrecognised is that armed groups still have connections with locally and nationally influential political leaders, that it is through these connections that they ensure they remain unpunished, and it is these connections that give them power to further patronise groups that are wholly criminal. Political engagement thus still remains essential: the major parties in power need the Madhesi parties with links to the armed groups on their side in order to isolate and punish those engaged in extortion and murder.

But of course, the parties in power have more important things to think about. Previous ministers of peace — Ram Chandra Poudel and Janardhan Sharma ‘Prabhakar’ — may have had time to reach out to these groups and attempt to defang them, but the energies of the person currently holding the position, Rakam Chemjong, is wholly consumed in his mission to weaken the Maoists and their PLA. So he is furiously engaged in a pointless public war with UNMIN, accusing it of being biased in favour of the Maoists and demanding that it reveal all details regarding combatants in cantonments.

This is but one example of how narrow the government’s outlook is, how its constituent parties are concerned with nothing but fighting the steady decline in their support bases. And here too the strategies they have adopted are characterised by extreme myopia. In the Tarai, for example, they could have gained greater credibility by moving towards taking the Madhesi parties into confidence to draft legislation that ensures greater inclusion in state bodies. This would help raise morale in the Tarai and, in the longer term, lead to an improvement in the security situation there. This was what, as will be remembered, the Maoists sought to do through their attempts to pass an Inclusion Ordinance. But that lapsed without ratification by parliament and no word has been heard about it since. Instead, as the Advocacy Forum report states, the Nepali Congress and the UML have sought greater influence in the Tarai by competing with Madhesi parties in intervening “with police to get members of armed groups accused of serious crimes, including rape, released from police custody apparently in return for their future loyalty.”

Expectations of what the current government could accomplish were low even when it assumed power in May 2009. It is now time to say that it has failed; that it is so deeply sunk into a mire, largely of its own making, that extrication from it is impossible.

Aditya Adhikari

aditya.adhikari@gmail.com

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