Oped»
The lure of power
- STATE OF FLUX
MAY 03 -
Madhav Kumar Nepal’s chief strengths, according to those close to him, are his keen instinct for survival and his accommodating, conciliatory nature. These characteristics were no doubt what enabled him to become prime minister in May 2009. If one takes a longer-term view, however, it becomes clear that it is precisely these characteristics that have caused steady erosion in his popular credibility and support base. For, Madhav Nepal lacks the firmness of character and conviction to transform his survivalist and conciliatory instincts into major political strengths. As a result, he is pulled in a thousand incoherent directions when he attempts to bring diverse groups together. And unable to provide leadership, but driven by the desire for power, he assumes the position of supplicant at the feet of powerful patrons.
Once a respected communist organisation builder, Nepal appears to have realised sometime in the mid-1990s that the cultivation of an electoral support base could take him only so far. That if he was to rise, he would have to engage with and gain the trust of powerful forces in Kathmandu and beyond.
And if the demands of the latter meant that he had to antagonise loyalists in the party and among the population, he was willing to do so.
The first major occasion on which he decided to follow these principles was perhaps in the mid-1990s when he decided that his party would accept the Mahakali Treaty regarding the development of Nepal’s water resources with India. Despite severe opposition from both smaller communist groupings and within his own party, Madhav Nepal was steadfast in his belief that the Mahakali Treaty was beneficial to the country. He also almost certainly calculated that by supporting it, he would gain the favour of the powerful Delhi establishment.
As is well known, the Mahakali issue led to great polarisation within the UML; leaders such as Madhav Nepal and K.P. Oli utilised financial and other inducements from India to strengthen their position within the party, marginalise rivals and force them to support the treaty. Eventually, due to a number of reasons including the great resentments that were aroused by Mahakali, the UML split. A large number of cadres from the breakaway faction led by Bam Dev Gautam later entered the Maoist party. This was the first major occasion in the post-1990 period when leaders of the largest political party in Nepal had enabled Indian penetration into their party with the objective of shoring up their own power. The choice before them was to either resist external demands in the interest of maintaining a unified party organisation of committed cadres or to utilise external threats and inducements to the detriment of the party body. Madhav Nepal and K.P. Oli, on this occasion, chose the latter.
Over time, gaining proximity to powerful establishment forces in the hope that this would enable him to gain access to state power became Nepal’s overarching ambition. In 2004, for instance, King Gyanendra requested applications from “suitable candidates” for the position of prime minister. Most parliamentary parties, including the Nepali Congress led by G.P. Koirala, were not willing to put forward candidates. In their opinion, the only way forward was to pressure the king into reestablishing constitutional rule, which had been in limbo since parliament was dissolved in 2002. Madhav Nepal’s desire for power was so immense, however, that the communist leader rejected this principled position and went to stand in line outside the palace, application in hand, in the company of such monarchical loyalists such as Pashupati Shamsher Rana, Kirtinidhi Bista and Badrinath Mandal.
The ridicule and derision he faced then from all the forces that had by that time realised that the king was intent on demolishing democratic parliamentary governance was matched only by the humiliating position he was put into by the king when the latter decided to reject all the applications that had been put before him and instead appoint Sher Bahadur Deuba prime minister.
And yet, Nepal was unfazed. His drive to power remained as strong as ever and his ability to view the political sphere through a broader lens as limited. So the UML joined the Deuba government under Nepal’s leadership. Through the next two years, when the G.P. Koirala’s Nepali Congress and other parties were agitating on the streets demanding that parliament be reinstated, Nepal claimed that the “regression” had been “half-corrected” and became an instrument that the king used to give his regime a veneer of popular representation. Only when he was thrown out of power in early 2005 as a result of the king’s assumption of all executive power did it occur to Nepal that the regression had not been half-corrected after all and he was forced to seek refuge in GPK’s movement against the monarchy.
In 2008 the UML undertook a review of the causes underlying their disastrous performance in the Constituent Assembly elections. The conclusion was that the party’s decision to join a government convened under the king was responsible for the arousal of great popular disillusionment towards it. Doubtless, Nepal himself must have privately felt that his actions in 2004 were in large part responsible for his ignominious defeat in both the constituencies where he contested elections.
But it is one thing to identify past mistakes; quite another to rectify habit so that mistakes aren’t repeated. After the King was rendered ineffectual, the Indian establishment became the most powerful force defending the status quo. When the Maoist-government fell in May 2009, India spent a number of hectic weeks brandishing about lures and threats to cobble together a governing coalition that would keep the Maoists out of power. For the first time in his life, Nepal was granted a position he had always coveted but had been beyond his reach. In exchange, of course, it was assumed that he would demonstrate gratitude by following the guidelines set down by his patrons.
A year after his assumption of office, it has become clearer than ever that the position Nepal finds himself in now is equivalent to the one he held between 2004 and 2005. Then an unwitting instrument of the monarchy against the parliamentary parties, he now finds himself an unwitting instrument of the Indian establishment and the traditionalist Nepali forces against the Maoists. In his mind, however, this fact is obscured by his personal animosity towards the Maoist chairman and his illusory beliefs that he is fighting on the behalf of “democracy” and that to resign under Maoist pressure now would be to humiliate himself in the eyes of the public. And so he stays on, without realising that he has already been deeply humiliated, that his popular reputation has declined to such an extent that it is unlikely now to be salvageable.
Aditya Adhikari
aditya.adhikari@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-05-04 09:30
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