Unsubstantiated reports indicate that President Ram Baran Yadav has further intensified private consultations. He has been liberally granting audience to leading lights of Kathmandu high society. Among various intellectuals, serving and retired officers of the government, media persons, legal eagles and moneybags of all shades that claim to have submitted their views for the kind consideration of the head of the state, almost everyone concedes that they have privately petitioned the president to take a ‘historic step’ and free the country from its present miseries. By threatening to handover the reigns of the government on his own, caretaker prime minister merely hinted that he was ready to play ball if the initiative was taken from the other side.
The composition of the Constituent Assembly is most inclusive in the history of universal suffrage in Nepal. Critics of Subhas Nembang want that the beleaguered chairman become an instrument of those who want to subvert the legislature. He has chosen to be a spectator mainly because he can do very little to prevent leaders of political parties from committing hara-kiri. He has very little constitutional authority at his disposal to prevent the complete eclipse of the supreme and only elected body at the moment in the country.
The judiciary in Nepal is adept at gauging the direction of the wind of public opinion. When the law is unclear, it does not hesitate from taking populist positions on the basis of traditions, parallels or plain common sense. If recent ‘suggestions’ of the judiciary to the legislature is anything to go by, extra-constitutional steps taken in the name of promoting democracy or protecting the people will be getting a sympathetic hearing of the courts in the future. The exasperation of the chief justice that the legislature must put its own house in order can also be read as a veiled threat of asserting supremacy of the judiciary if and when it became necessary.
The executive is ready to make way for an effective rather than a legitimate government. The legislature has repeatedly failed to resolve its congenital contradictions. The judiciary seems to be more worried about the ‘greater good’ than the fate of people’s mandate. The less said about other constitutional bodies and the civil society the better—most of them have begun to function as anti-Maoist fronts of various political parties.
GHOSTS OF COLD WAR
Ironically, a section of Maoists would probably welcome the advent of a supreme commander-in-chief in civvies. Such a step will validate their position that bourgeois democracy is merely a cover to protect capitalists and the moment their interests are at risk, supremacy of the military comes to the fore. In confrontations that would ensue after the suspension of parliament—the very phraseology is eerily reminiscent of King Mahendra’s supposedly benevolent dictatorship that the cultural elite of Nepal periodically yearns for—Maoists would have an upper hand.
Impending budget, whether full, partial or contingency, will merely be a palliative. The cure is a government of consensus from within the legislative parliament. Political parties need to work further toward that end rather than wasting precious time in enacting dramas at various locations.
They would probably lose the war ultimately when outside forces decide to become direct participants. In the short-term, however, battles fought on every doorstep would make decade-long armed insurgency disappear from public memory. Like the Ho Chi Minh Sarani of Calcutta, the US Embassy in Kathmandu may have to acquire a new letterhead with its address listed as Maokhel or Marxpur rather than Maharajgunj.
With a very high degree of ideological flexibility, the UML would still survive and may even thrive in any hybrid regime of the future. The Madheshbadis too will have little hesitation in making peace with a strong usurper if they can cut a mutually advantageous deal. Former Panchas in different political parties would rejoice at the reinstatement of politics of certainties where political career is free from the fickleness of ordinary voters.
Paradoxically, Nepali Congress would have to lose most if wishes of some of its leaders were to come true and the political process of mainstreaming Maoists, of which the ongoing peace process is an important but not the only component, were to fall apart. World leaders are rejoicing that the Burmese pro-democracy leader Aung San Suu Kyi has been released from house arrest after spending most of the past two decades in detention; few of them have the time or inclination to worry about political prisoners whose cases have not been championed by Nobel Laureates.
Experiences in Burma show that once a hybrid regime is in place, it becomes extremely difficult to check its degeneration into self-perpetuating dictatorship. In recent days, Bangladesh did make a transition from the guardianship of the military general as chief advisor of a donor-designed caretaker government to a system of popular leadership. But the lure of repeating innovations of Dhaka, however, is fraught with untold risks—ghosts of Marx and Mao have been walking free in the streets of Kathmandu at least since the early 1960s under the benign eyes of the incarnation of Lord Bishnu. The twenty-first century, however, belongs to the priests of Laxmi rather than her male consort.
ABSURDISTAN
These days, the term Absurdistan brings images of Baghdad and Kabul to mind—cities that have almost been lost to human civilization in the name of democratization. Of the 149 countries in the Global Peace Index (GPI) ranked in 2010 for key peace or violence drivers, Iraq and Afghanistan were the last and third-last respectively. At 82 position, Nepal still holds the hope of becoming a stable state-nation, but nothing can be said if the absurdities continue to mount.
In philosophy, absurd is the condition of existence in a meaningless and irrational word. In everyday use, the word is an adjective that qualifies something utterly illogical or ridiculous. That was the sense with which it was used in the 1970s when Germans made it a wordplay upon Absurd-ist-an, meaning the absurd is on, to describe the condition of satellite states of the then Soviet Union. Prominent dissident leader and later president Václav Havel popularized the expression. The original intent of the word remains the same: Absurdistan is a country where the entire system has become dysfunctional and is waiting for its final disintegration.
In Absurdistan, a government does everything other than governing. The legislature is paralyzed due to disagreements about rules of the game. Courts obfuscate because they have little moral strength left to administer justice. The civil society looks outwards for sustenance rather than feel the pulse of the people in the streets. When the scene is thus complete for total chaos, outside interference has to be welcomed as generous gestures from benefactors, friends and saviors. Nepal is not there yet, but for how long can the regime hold? The Supreme Court has perhaps been correct in pointing out that the chair of the Constituent Assembly has to seize the opportunity and free the house from the stranglehold of meaningless charade. Impending budget, whether full, partial or contingency, will merely be a palliative. The cure is a government of consensus from within the legislative parliament. Political parties need to work further toward that end rather than wasting precious time in enacting dramas at various locations.
cklal@hotmail.com
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