Aheli Moitra
Is anyone watching Nepal next door? Since the last week of December, Kathmandu has been protesting the robbery and rape of “Sita Rai” on November 21 by on-duty civil servants of the State. For a month, people have been standing outside the Prime Minister’s residence in Baluwatar to “Occupy” it. The call is to end Violence Against Women (VAW), not new to Nepali society. Women, like lower classes and backward ethnicities in Nepal, had been battered blue under the Nepali patriarchy fired by the monarchy. New are the protests at this scale against VAW in Kathmandu. Till date, protestors by thousands had gathered when the Maoists organized them—Kathmandu, at the time, detested this. Here, and now, the people of Kathmandu are protesting a Prime Minister, Baburam Bhattarai, who after a decade of waging a People’s War against Kathmandu, from the depths of Nepal, entered mainstream politics.
His party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), had started the revolutionary People’s War in 1996, leading to the overthrow of an age old monarchy in 2006 through a People’s Movement, converting Nepal into a secular state. The UCPN (M) gave up armed rebellion to participate in parliamentary politics after winning the 2008 elections. In 2011, its vice president, Baburam Bhattarai, took over as Nepal’s Prime Minister. But ever since 2008, Nepal’s parliament has been fractured. While the Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda” and Bhattarai negotiated a constitution with the other parliamentary parties, the issue of integration of 19,000 former fighters loomed large. As did the debate on ethno-federalism: small ethnic groups that had lost rights, land and access to resources during monarchic rule now wanted to be self-governing units that would define their political identity and freedom in a future Nepal. By working from within the parliament, the Maoists were well underway to topple also the upper caste hegemony and feudalism that ruled Nepal for all these years.
But politics is rarely simple. The Maoists faced internal opposition. According to some leaders from within the ranks, entering parliamentary politics had compromised their revolutionary position. The Maoists succumbed to a treaty heavily biased towards India. Instead of integrating its 19, 602 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) fighters into the Nepal Army en masse, as was the initial demand, it settled for a much lesser number to be recruited under harsh conditions. The rest were shown the civil life. And opposition streamed in from outside the Prime Minister’s house in Kathmandu from the elite who had always opposed the Maoists. Their demands are well placed, no doubt. Human rights, curtailing impunity and VAW are the fundamentals of society. But questioning the People’s War has become one of the major points on which to argue the Maoist position within the State currently. The same people who opposed identity-based federalism (the Kathmandu elite) yesterday are out to put a break, by Occupying Baluwatar, on the restructuring of the institution (the State structure) that had been the cause of injustices in Nepal.
The lesson in it is for both people and their movements. People cannot stop calling for equality, justice and human rights even after a chosen party or group has come to power. Political posturing, advocacy for rights and justice should be ongoing, even outside the official peace process; structuring governance to sift out inequity and corruption has to be an endless process. Conversely, people cannot ask for universally mouthed rights or democracies that do not fit into the local political framework. Movements, on the other hand, that convert into governing units should re-think their imagination of power—that impunity in today’s world will be more scrutinized and violence made more apparent. Those who transform from revolutionaries to governors should not forget that issues cannot be compromised for tactical gains. Nor can people be dealt with an autocratic hand. If they are, people will fight back. They will occupy the vacuum.
