Dhruba Adhikary
Seeing is believing. The maxim holds good when the situation around you is normal. What Nepal is facing today is anything but normal. This perhaps is the reason Nepalis are reluctant to believe in what they have seen in the past week.
Live television pictures showed former Maoist rebels taking an oath “in the name of God” as members of an interim legislature. It was an incredible scene, and amounted to an epoch-making event. But people at large are yet to be fully assured about the peace process. To them, the transition to a stable democracy remains arduous and unpredictable. Whether this perception will change for the better once Maoists become part of an interim government in about two weeks is once again a matter of conjecture.
In their bid to make the first day of the 10th month of the Nepali calendar year 2063 (January 15) a red-letter day, leaders of the governing alliance of seven parties as well as the Maoist leadership decided to scrap the 1990 constitution and put an interim statute in its place. Together with this, the leaders agreed to dissolve the 205-strong House of Representatives immediately after it adopted the new constitution.
The vacuum then was promptly filled by a 330-member interim legislature. The leaders did manage to complete the job in one day but failed to do it satisfactorily, leaving room for questions on the legitimacy of the measures taken in the context. The draft of the interim constitution, for instance, had attracted amendment resolutions for corrections and changes in 57 of the 164 articles that make up the constitution.
Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala assured the outgoing Parliament that amendments and adjustments would be taken care of by the interim legislature itself. A brief but pithy speech by the ailing octogenarian prime minister convinced the deputies that it was far more important to bring gun-toting rebels into the democratic mainstream than anything else.
Nobody has found any basis to doubt Koirala’s credentials or his commitment to democracy. All present in the legislative chamber agreed to pass the statute even if they were aware that it contained provisions that could turn the prime minister into a dictator.
“All we did on that day was to help keep the passage to the Parliament open for Maoists,” said Rajendra Mahato. “Our reservations and differences on the constitution are still alive.”
There is a consensus that the document called the interim constitution is in essence an agreement full of compromises. And this has been adopted in haste, primarily to take the country quickly to the polls to elect a constituent assembly that will write a proper, comprehensive constitution.
The event was seen by some as a series of political faux pas. First, though the constitution was put into force 15 minutes before midnight, it was deemed to have taken effect from the start of that day. Similarly, exercising the power of head of state, Koirala administered the oath of office to the chief justice of the Supreme Court on the following day. Constitutional lawyers expressed surprise as to how Koirala could perform this job before he himself had taken the oath as prime minister.
Despite these “historic” developments supported by seemingly well-meaning agreements, doubts persist about the Maoists’ intentions. Their senior leaders have chosen to stay away from the legislature, saying they are needed to keep the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) functioning. At the same time, the Maoist leadership has staked a claim for the post of senior deputy prime minister, someone who would be able to succeed Koirala, whose frail health and advanced age continue to be matters of concern.
Recent events and trends provide a reason to believe that what Maoists are doing now is to make use of the platform that party-based politics has to offer.
“We have not renounced the principles of Maoism,” leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal (aka Prachanda) said to a radio interviewer on Wednesday. A day later his deputy, Baburam Bhattarai, told another radio show that the decision to be a part of the legislature must not be understood to imply that Maoists have finally entered the parliamentary system. Their words and deeds clearly reflect the tactical adjustments they have made for the time being. Maoists appear adept in cashing in on the prevalent confusion and apparent contradictions.
One example surfaced when the Maoist leadership got a chance to nominate 10 people to the legislature (where they already had 73 party members) from society at large. One of the people they picked was an army general who retired four years ago from what was then the Royal Nepal Army. Nomination of retired Major-General Kumar Fudong as a Maoist nominee became a sensational issue, which some security analysts think could further demoralize the army when the country is sliding toward widespread violence and anarchy.
But Fudong told Asia Times Online that he has never been a Maoist party member, and the reason he accepted the nomination was that it provided him a forum for his views on issues pertaining to national security. Maoists, in the meantime, got an opportunity to publicize the fact that they have sympathizers within the army. After all, one of their goals is to have their cadres integrated into Nepal’s national army.
Koirala, whose current status is that of the head of a caretaker government, has publicly assured Maoists that he will form an interim government (to match the interim constitution and interim legislature) by February 4, anticipating that the ongoing work to store Maoist weapons in designated containers and assemble their combatants inside special camps would be completed by that time.
And this is where snags have surfaced: Maoists do not want United Nations monitors to give access to the media because visualization of the process would send message to the grassroots that Maoists have surrendered their arms and armies.
Sources close to the official security apparatus say Maoists have exaggerated the data about the weapons in their possession and combatants under their command. What they were doing in recent days was to procure locally assembled guns and bring in abducted high-school boys and girls to be registered as their combatants. Maoist leaders have been claiming that their People’s Liberation Army has a strength of 35,000 members.
One person who has contested the latest Maoist maneuvers is Ambassador James Moriarty of the United States, which has not removed the terrorist tag from the Maoists. “They are trying to buy primitive, hand-made weapons down in [the neighboring Indian state of] Bihar so that they can put crummy weapons into the containers instead of the modern weapons,” he told journalists on Friday.
Moriarty also alluded to a big recruitment drive Maoists conducted in November. Political analysts were flabbergasted when Moriarty’s observations were contradicted on Saturday not by Maoists but by Home Affairs Minister Krishna Prasad Sitaula. He called a press conference on Saturday, a public holiday, and said: “The government does not believe that Maoists have purchased arms from India ... and [will] not run after any statement made by any diplomat or groups.” It is incredible to hear a government minister speaking like a Maoist spokesman, quipped an official who did not want to be named.
In fact, Sitaula conveniently ignored violent incidents where Maoist guerrillas have flashed their weapons in the midst of unarmed crowds and also used them to kill civilians. In an incident reported from Lahan, in the southeast region, Maoists clashed with a rival crowd in which a person was killed and several others were wounded. More than 100 “security personnel”, carrying AK-47 and M16 rifles, escorted Prachanda when he made a fleeting visit to Dolakha, a hill district to the east, a couple of weeks ago.
Several Kathmandu residents have said they have seen private houses and unoccupied public inns on the outer parts of the road ringing the city being occupied by armed personnel. They are mobilized to launch quick strikes in the capital.
On Thursday, Maoist leader Prachanda issued a statement formally dissolving all local-level structures of the “people’s government” and “people’s court”. Earlier, the Maoist leadership issued circulars to their local units to reopen police posts. But reports coming from across the country show that abductions, beatings and extortion have not stopped. The Maoists’ sincerity is facing a hard test.
“Maoists will not be able to establish political legitimacy if the power they gained through weapons did not get endorsed at the people’s level,” editor Yubraj Ghimire wrote in Samaya, a Nepali weekly.
Although Maoists do appear as a formidable force, an immediate Maoist takeover is not likely. What looks more probable is a prospect of an ascendance to power by a communist front. In the interim legislature, Maoists with 83 seats can forge an alliance with the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist), which also has a strength of 83. The total, 166, represents a simple majority in the House of 330. If they decide to work in tandem, they can snatch power from non-communist groups immediately. The leftist front would be even stronger if smaller left-wing parties agreed to lend their support to Maoist-UML group.
In the real world, however, unity among left-wing parties has not been easy. The personalities of individual leaders have often clashed, producing rival factions. There was one communist party in Nepal in the early 1950s; now there are more than a dozen groups, and not all of them have representation in the Parliament. Maoists are just the latest and the most potent one that has suddenly become a real rival of the UML.
Unity among leftist parties, said UML spokesman Pradip Nepal recently, “is impossible due to Maoists”. What has made the UML - and the rest of the political groups - unhappy is the Maoist policy of continuing to terrorize people even after entering Parliament.
