E-Kantipur

The hysteria over Defence Minister Sharat Singh Bhandari’s indiscreet statement about Nepal’s integrity has swept through the public sphere, offering detractors of the present government fresh fodder to rage against. The war of words has broken out in the guise of patriotic duty to discredit Bhattarai.  This discursive diarrhoea has affected every holier-than-thou public figure. In this cacophony the public must not lose sight of what is important—peace and constitution—and the impediments to it derived from a culture of factionalism within parties and unhealthy leg-pulling across parties.

Of all the shouts and murmurs that ensued after the Maoist-Madhesi Morcha alliance took over the helms, the loudest and most vicious has been the protest against Bhandari.  If Bhandari has really said what he is accused of saying (and in this age of audio-visual miracles, there should be recordings of his speech), it shows the convert’s need to demonstrate his zeal for the cause.  Such a statement possesses neither discretion nor restraint. It is absolutely unbecoming of a country’s defence minister.  It also reveals the opportunism of many among Morcha leaders whose Machiavellian career tracks, hemmed in by hill-centric polity, have had only one goal in focus—power. They will bow to any gods and shout any slogans (and change both gods and slogans in a jiffy) in order to occupy ministerial berths.

The media, therefore, needs to separate wheat from chafe and write about it dispassionately.  Bhandari’s loose talk about Nepal’s disintegration may ultimately have good intentions but his position and the phrasing were inappropriate. Thus, by his pronouncement, he has not only harmed the Madhesi cause but given fodder to the detractors of the Bhattarai government, who, jealous of his popularity among Nepalis and driven by Madhesi phobia, had gone on full assault right from the outset and picked on his only vulnerable point—his alleged soft spot for India. 

But this loose talk is not Bhandari’s monopoly.  How should one take the glibness of UML and shrillness Maoist stalwarts?   What is one to make of Mohan Baidya’s fear-mongering and UML secretary Shankar Phokharel’s hullabaloo about Maoist-Morcha alliance as anti-national?  If Bhandari’s pronouncement about Nepal’s disintegration is offensive to the nationalist sentiments of Nepal’s traditional patriots, aren’t their dubbing of the Maoist-Morcha alliance as anti-national and Sikkimisation equally offensive to the patriotism and nationalist sentiments of Madhesis, who comprise almost half of the country’s population? 

To repeal the chauvinist dress code of the previous government and to try to bring almost half of Nepal’s alienated population into the mainstream by group recruitment into the Army ought to have been called a daring move toward making Nepal a stronger nation-state.  But to call it Sikkimisation or Bhutanisation, instead, is deeply offensive to the people of Sikkim who formally and willingly voted to join the Indian Union and haven’t complained since in the 36 years following their sovereign move and to the people of Bhutan who pride themselves globally in their Gross Domestic Happiness (albeit at the expense of the Bhutanees refugees).  Above all, it is particularly offensive to the patriotic, nationalist sentiments of Nepal’s Madhesis; it ought to be taken as a form of hate-speech against Madhesis because Madhesis suffered state discrimination by Mahendrabadis precisely on this count.  Or, are patriotism and nationalist sentiments the private or paternal property of a handful of people who appoint themselves as super patriots and never tire of championing divisive narrow nationalism?  Why shouldn’t Madhesis from Jhapa to Kanchanpur take out protest marches (or should it be mashaal demonstration?) against the divisive fear-mongering and hate speech of people like Baidya and UML stalwarts?  The term Sikkimisation may be an anti-Indian thumb-sucking habit of Nepal’s self-appointed super patriots but it is a slur, an absolute insult to the Madhesis.  The days of such slurs and insults are over. 

Time is not far when Madhesis, tired of such loud mouths’ loose talk (given widespread coverage in the mainstream media), will shout louder as a counterpoint to these self-appointed patriot’s voices. 

Seen this way, Bhandari’s zealous loose talk and Baidya’s and others’ loud-mouth Madhesi bashing by implying that Madhesis are traitors are two sides of the same coin. The emergent Nepal doesn’t need them.  What such indiscreet, outdated people fear losing through open democratic exercise, they try to make up through exaggeration and chauvinism.

And then you have intellectuals and UML politicians calling Baburam Bhattarai’s attempt to do things differently as populist gimmick. Nepali media mogul Kanak Dixit and UML secretary Shankar Pokharel in their recent op-ed pieces devoted significant space to Bhattarai’s choice of car and economy class ticket to New York. They both dismissed Bhattarai’s actions as populist moves.  While Pokhrel’s attack lacks nuance,

Dixit, in his by now familiar Ahab-like obsession, pulls out some dictionary definition of populism to claim that Bhattarai’s gimmicks are nothing but an attempt to leave his political rivals behind.  But Dixit’s arguments is sophistry — was

Gandhi shedding his British-trained barrister’s or rich Gujarati Seth’s garbs and embracing the poor man’s dhoti a populist gimmick? 

Negative connotation of populism stems from the twin fears of dictatorship (as in European fascism or Latin American dictatorships) and of the privileged, propertied elite getting swept away by the needs and demands of the toiling people.  In the Nepali case, the fear of populism seems to have stemmed from the latter.  In a country where patriotism and nationalism have equated until now with open plunder of the country’s exchequer and resources while donning the national dress and speaking the national tongue, Bhattarai’s efforts to simplify his and his government’s lifestyle and push forward a genuinely inclusionary policy ought to be a matter of emulation rather than ridicule and cynical attack.

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