Ire, fire and gyre
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The peace agreement signed by the major political players of Nepal, the UCPN (Maoist), the Nepali Congress, the CPN-UML and the alliance of Madhesi parties on Nov 1 has dominated the mood of the country. The media is filled with the agreement made on all the major issues of number, package, size, timeline, mandate, modality and ranks of the combatants, among other things. Expressions of certain euphoria, surprise, ire and hope are pouring in. Most important of all, soul-searching is going on at the right places. It is very interesting to see the rhetorical somersaults coming from the major political leaders. I consider this change a very welcome and dynamic development. Even the discourses of dissent over the agreement are interesting and important. Everything shows that Nepali political developments have always followed the track of dialogue even in difficult times.
Ripeness is all, says Shakespeare in his tragedy “King Lear”. It is difficult to say if the ripeness has come. Some wise people of this country have also been saying that this is a mode of confusion and nobody sees the future clearly. But that is a universal truism. Nobody sees the future clearly especially in today’s world of post-developments. Doing a bit of soul-searching, listening to the voices of others and reading their impressions, I have developed a caveat — perhaps thinkers on the civil fringe and others churning out wisdom have begun to feel that they should change some modes of their perceptions. The reason is that the peace accord made by the parties has trespassed certain invisible borders and challenged certain reifications made by thinkers, theorists and media pundits.
Given to literary imagination, I seek metaphors to make sense of the flow of events. Memoirs speak volumes. A surfeit of events makes people wise, but only if they look above them. Such people would be called meta-historians, people who use history itself to look at history. A tumultuous history of the past 15 years has taught us many things. Its impact is not homogenous. Anguish and happiness have grown side by side. People who are prone to look at the negative side of history have one dominant tendency. They want to plough up the events and sow ire in the furrows. They fire shots into the void and are caught in the vortex. But it would be equally unwise to be totally optimistic. But based on the agreement, I want to present my interpretation of the history of transition in Nepal and write a few words in appreciation of the politicians who have worked during the difficult times.
Political persona, their wishes and hubris have worked in the politics of transition. After the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord between the SPA and the CPN (Maoist) on Nov 21, 2006, a victorious Girija Babu had said he was pressed for that agreement because he feared that if he had died without signing this deal, he would have become a “bhut” or ghost. Girija Babu’s evocation of the spectrality of history was not just a joke because, he added, Prachanda whom we had imagined to be uncannily extraordinary was human like us.
It is a matter of great interest that Prachanda instead of iterating the names of great communist gurus, repeated the names of BP Koirala and Girija Koirala at different moments of challenge and uncertainties and paid glowing tributes to the latter on his death two years ago. Before signing this agreement, he was quoted as saying that as Girija Babu was not there, it was his responsibility as the surviving partner to complete the peace accord. Much water has flown under the bridge since 2006. The element of a dominant persona in Prachanda’s own party and within the NC has been ruptured today. But why he chose this juncture in history to repeat that is because he has once again taken a leading albeit difficult decision to make this accord possible. And he wants to accentuate that.
I recall one humble but telling incident here. Indian journalist Anirban Roy, who wrote a book on Prachanda, and its publisher Mandala Book Point wanted me to give what they called the keynote speech at its launch on Sept 19, 2008. Despite my doubts if I was the right person to do so, I agreed to speak. Prachanda was the prime minister then. On the dais was seated Prachanda’s father Mukti Ram Dahal with the chief guest Speaker Subash Nembang. As I was seated next to Mukti Ram Dahal, I asked him to sign my copy. He complied with my request; he signed with difficulty, which I guessed was because of his age. I asked him if he knew anything about the book. He said, “Babus, you should tell me what he has written here, and you know what Prachanda is doing better than me.”
I was moved by the answer. When I rose to speak, this challenge was reverberating in my mind. I did not know what to say. I interpreted the book as a combination of fiction and reality, and Prachanda emerges as a hero in the book. Subash Nembang somewhat sarcastically used my terminology and said Prachanda has yet to prove himself a hero. Nembang’s jeremiad about the constitution was the same then as it is today. I spoke about violence and peace; and in admiration of the Nepali politicians I said they had kept the culture of dialogue alive. I compared the situation with Afghanistan. A senior and respectable Afghan diplomat there became irate with me for this remark. Perhaps I was wrong. But since that moment, violence in Afghanistan has became more colossal. Nepali politics created a structuralism of no decision and yet no closure and no big violence. Debates became part of the process. Ire, fire and gyre, the three words in our maverick repertoire, summed up the character of politics here. They still do.
In the previous year, publisher Mandala Book Point had similarly invited me to speak on Girija Babu’s book “My Simple Conviction” at its launch on Feb 1, 2007. I felt very free and spoke in literary language making the audience roar with laughter. I had spoken about Girija Babu’s commitments, the thin size of his book and the fat size of the memoirs of opportunist players which were also published during that period. Prachanda’s book was not his memoirs, but Anirban Roy was given access to details of his life.
I alluded to these two politicians because of similar contexts in which I was asked to think about them seriously. These leaders impacted the structures of agreements; but today it is difficult to say with certainty if Prachanda alone had played the decisive role. I must confess I admire all the political leaders who sat down to make the present accord. Having said that, I would like to repeat my belief that Nepali politicians very happily corrected their image as those who had been deceiving the entire country. It is also time the intelligentsia looked at them and saw if the time had come to search for newer idioms to speak and keep pace with the politicians’ achievements.
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