Corrupt parties force Nepal to live with Thucydides’ curse
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
NEPAL’S DEMOCRATIC FARCE
With the announcement of the new round of the election on Mangsir 4, 2022, the political parties are now going through the crucial exercise of choosing candidates for contesting it. During the first round five years ago, this exercise was dominated by the unholy rumours of pecuniary deals in exchange for nomination tickets. This time around, this exercise has taken a turn for the worse. While the announced or putative prime ministerial candidates from all major parties count among the most brazenly corrupt that Nepal has ever produced historically, what is defeating for Nepal’s democracy is that the rest of the pack seems to be different.
While going by the cannons of political science, democracy with periodic elections remains the most preferred form of government because it is believed to be self-correcting. In real democracies, voters exercise the authority to kick out the bad politicians and elect better ones in their place. But not so in Nepal! These same terrible crooks, besmeared with the reputation of being the most corrupt have been around in politics during the entirety of the multiparty system restored in 1990. When corrupt Girija Prasad Koirala was forced to leave, he was succeeded by Deubas, Olis, Prachands, and Bhattarais.
By all indications, what Nepal has is anything but a democracy. it is the farce of democracy, a vicious cycle of corrupt governance.
NON-ALIGNMENT BETWEEN CHINA AND INDIA IS THE LIFEBLOOD OF NEPAL’S SOVEREIGN INTEGRITY AND THE PROSPERITY OF THE PEOPLE
One of the eternal facts of life for Nepal is that the father of the nation, Prithivi Narayan Shah, had, in his Great Sermons, dubbed the country a “Yam between two boulders.” By using this down-to-earth analogy, he was basically reminding his people and successors of the essential fragility of Nepal’s sovereign status due to its geographical location between two Gargantuan powers, China in the north and the steadily expanding British rule to the south that has since become India today. However, the analogy coming from a ruler of his grit and imagination also meant that the yam as an organic entity must find room for its healthy and unhindered growth even as the relationship with the two giant neighbours be managed in such a way that they remain in good humour, willing to come to Nepal’s aid when in trouble.
Nepal, given its demanding position of being sandwiched between the world’s two biggest countries, faces a very special problem in asserting its sovereignty. The fact, as it stands, is that Nepal can become genuinely sovereign only if it also remains genuinely non-aligned at the same time between these two behemoths. This is essential not only for ensuring its security from either side; equally importantly, it is also absolutely essential for Nepal to attract their investments in a major way and access their massive markets for imports and exports.
Furthermore, this non-alignment can be managed only on the bedrock of good and accountable governance that surely would yield greater dividends for the country by making an attractive destination for investment and engagement by other countries of the world too. After all, Nepal remains a special place of attraction for most people around the world, because there is only one Himalaya on this planet and Nepal boasts of most of its major peaks. This one attribute alone, if properly managed, would go a long, long way towards making Nepal one of the most prosperous places in South Asia
The bottom line for landlocked Nepal is that it can grow and prosper only if it can win the trust and respect of both China and India at the same time and in equal measure. While maintaining this balancing act may be a demanding exercise, Nepal has no option but to succeed in this mission.
Nepal’s enormous potentiality in this regard seems to have been well acknowledged by China when L. Tao, executive director of the Institute of South Asian Studies of Sichuan University wrote in the Kathmandu Post on February 3, 2017, under the appealing title, “From Yam to bridge” said, “China needs to value Nepal’s geostrategic location as not only a bridge between China and South Asia but also a ‘safety valve’ for Asia….The transit economy will also help the development of a China-Nepal-India economic corridor”.
This policy of equi-proximity with both powers is even more compelling in view of the fact that the two neighbours, China and India, although major trading partners mutually have been not only rivals and competitors aspiring for their own spheres of influence; they have also been embroiled in militaristic confrontation since as far back as the 1962 war and have witnessed deadly skirmishes in the Ladakh region in the recent past too.
KING MAHENDRA’S HISTORIC ACHIEVEMENT: DIPLOMATIC PRECONDITIONS OF YAM ANALOGY
While Nepal started out on its democratic rebuilding in 1951 with inspiration and help from India’s own struggle for independence against British colonial rule, what followed thereafter was a willful effort by the southern neighbour to rob Nepal of its sovereign status and render it its protectorate. India was present all over Nepal, in the army, in the bureaucracy and even in the palace with an Indian bureaucrat working as King Tribhuvan’s principal secretary. India had also managed to set up the Indian army’s listening posts at 18 different locations all across Nepal’s border with China including the Lipulekh Kalapani region that continues to be under India’s illegal occupation.
India’s big-time predatory intent on Nepal was clear when India’s then PM Jawaharlal Nehru declared in parliament that the Himalayas was India’s real border with China. It was only after King Mahendra acceded to the throne in 1955 that Nepal gradually but steadily weaned itself off the Indian hegemonic presence, even as he also managed the same year to forge diplomatic relations with China in a manner totally unbeknown to India before it was simultaneously announced from Kathmandu and Peking.
King Mahendra further reinforced the diplomatic relationship with China by building road infrastructure to complement it. He got China to build the Kodari road linking Nepal with Tibet in 1961 following his coup in 1960 against the elected government of pro-Indian PM BP Koirala who had twice turned the offer of the road, the first time made by Chinese premier Zhou Enlai in Kathmandu and the second time by Mao Zedong himself in China. With the road, China’s capacity to countervail India’s excesses in Nepal had been further reassured.
In a way, the preconditions envisioned by King Prithvi Narayan Shah two centuries earlier of a close relationship with the two neighbours north and south as demanded by the Yam analogy had finally been achieved only during King Mahendra’s reign. This time in Nepal until his death in 1971 in particular was a period of rapid institution building and national development in the country and all major powers such as the USA, USSR, China and even India, although grudgingly, had contributed to it. The King had launched and headed his own grassroots-based democratic experiment free of political parties, the Panchayat System, in the country that brought even the remotest communities of mountainous Nepal into the mainstream of national politics. King Mahendra himself was hailed as a statesman internationally even as Nepal spread its diplomatic tentacles further afield in the world.
NEPAL LIVING WITH THUCYDIDES’ CURSE WITH THE UNETHICAL AND CORRUPT PARTIES WORKING AS ENABLERS
But with the restoration of the multiparty system in 1990 with India’s intervention that included an extended blockade of landlocked Nepal, Nepalese politicians’ servile loyalties to the Indian establishment reasserted themselves all over again, and over the last three decades, they have only gotten worse.
What is downright harmful about these loyalties is that while the Nepalese politicians looked for political support and mundane personal gains from such unpatriotic bargains, the Indians use them as conduits to further destabilize and debilitate Nepal’s body politic even as the former remains fully aware of the evil intents of the latter.
Some major instances of this unpatriotic slavishness of these Nepali politicians in the service to India include the following. Soon after King Birendra gave in to Indian demand following India’s blockade of Nepal and these multiparty politicians sheltered and aided by India were restored to power in 1990, the first thing India did was to encourage its protectorate Bhutan to go for ethnic cleansing against its citizens of Nepalese origin and transport more than one lakh of them into Nepal. The corrupt Nepalese politicians had absolutely no word of protest against their Indian masters even as the issue remains unresolved and India is uncooperative to this day.
Six years down the road in 1996, a bunch of self-styled Maoists launched an armed insurgency against Nepal from Indian soil. While India officially dubbed them “terrorists”, more as a red herring tactic to mislead the world, it went on to shelter, aid and abet them, even as these Maoists had gone on to slaughter 18,000 fellow countrymen and maim and displace hundreds of thousands more before India drew up the infamous 12-point accord that catapulted them to power and pelf in Kathmandu. With India’s blessing, they continue to evade transitional justice so far. Today, these Maoists remain useful conveyers of Indian hegemony. For instance, Maoist supremo Prachanda was against giving instant citizenship to Indian brides in Nepal. Lately, however, following his recent visit to India, he remains its strong advocate and is demanding President’s resignation for her failure to rubberstamp the new citizenship legislation to that end. But Maoists are not the only ones to support it, the entire governing coalition led by the Nepali Congress is spearheading this national hara-kiri.
In 2008, when Nepal was going through immense turmoil, much of it choreographed by India, India’s spy agency, RAW, brought all the Madhesi violent and non-violent political formations — most of them led by first-generation Indian immigrants — to a meeting in Patna with the intent to dismember Nepal by having these Madhesi groups declare the entire tarai strip of Nepal as “Independent Madhesh”. The conspiracy collapsed only because the most elderly Madhesi politician in the meeting, Ram Raja Prasad Singh, declined to be its “first president” by dismembering his own country. While, in any other country, such treasonous characters would have been serving life sentences, in Nepal, they are in regular politics with one faction even in governing coalition.
Nepal’s far western Kalapani region, one of the 18 places where India had installed military listening posts during the fifties of the last century, continues to remain under India’s illegal occupation. In the 1962 war, India moved its defense forces there to prevent the advancing Chinese army from crossing the Himalayas and making it to the heart of India. While King Mahendra had managed to coax and cajole India into withdrawing from 17 of these listening posts during the late Sixties, the Kalapani region, due to its strategic value to India, had remained an unfinished job, although Nepal had been asking India through diplomatic channels to vacate it. But when the Indians built a fresh road instead recently, Nepal’s parliament unanimously passed the new political map that included the Kalapani region too to build additional pressure on India to return it. But, it has been pathetic that no Nepali leader would bring it up with their Indian counterpart in face-to-face situations, apparently, for fear of the latter’s displeasure.
The above are only a few specimens of a long litany of indiscriminate acts of ill will that India has inflicted on Nepal over the years. Unfortunately, this only seems to prove one of Thucydides’ maxims to be correct. Thucydides, one of the greatest historians from the fifth century BC who, after chronicling 30 years of war between imperial power Athens and powerful Sparta and Athens having crushed neutral Melos who had done nothing wrong to the former had laid out as one of his “principles of international affairs’ that “the strong do as they can and the weak suffer what they must”.
To recall, this is exactly the situation Prithvi Narayan Shah intended to avoid through his Yam analogy, and King Mahendra acted out succeeding much of the way in avoiding it in reality. Even PM Oli successfully tried it in the 2015 blockade, forcing PM Modi to go through the humiliation of having to withdraw the blockade unconditionally and roll out the red carpet to him in New Delhi.
But Nepal’s case is different from the Thucydides days. While powerful Athens had gone after weak Melos out of its own volition during the fifth century BC, in the twenty-first century Nepal’s case, it has been our own corrupt politicians –otherwise the most marketable commodity in the country in recent decades and willing to sell anything for cash and power — have been the unpatriotic enablers of this Indian transgression. They have been the ones to invite India to inflict Thucydides’ curse on their own country. Even former PM Oli, soon after his 2015 demonstration of neutrality by siding with China, had gravitated back to the Indian fold, apparently his long-time patron from the Mahakali Project days in 1996.
And our democracy has been such that the voters are bound to elect these very corrupt thugs over and over again to ensure that Nepal remains continuously robbed of its potential for growth and prosperity.
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