Puppeteer’s show in which political promiscuity, corruption, impunity and lack of scruples remain the name of the game
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
POST-ELECTION RAMPANT PROMISCUITY SANS PRINCIPLES
Following the results of the new round of the election in republican Nepal, the country has been witness to sights to be found in no other democracy. While no single party secured a majority, a wide array of parties were found jockeying for power by aligning and re-aligning in various combinations that gravitated around the two major ones, the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Nepal Communist Party (United Marxist Leninist) or NCP-UML with 89 and 78 seats respectively in the 275 member Lower House of Parliament.
The first willful departure from a basic principle of democracy was committed by the remote third biggest party, the Nepal Communist Party (Maoist Centre) or NCP (MC) whose president, Prachanda, despite his party’s diminutive size with 32 parliamentary seats, insisted on his pre-election bargain with its electoral ally, NC, that he should be made the PM for the first half of the five-year tenure.
NC president Deuba was reportedly initially agreeable to this arrangement. However, at the last minute, Deuba backtracked on this deal and insisted, apparently at the instigation of India which considers him the most acquiescent ally in Nepal, that he as the leader of the biggest party in parliament must head the government, with conjectures swirling around that Deuba was aiming to be PM for the full five-year term.
Deuba was reportedly emboldened in his new posturing against Prachanda also by assurances he was being separately given by UML chief, Oli, that he would not under any circumstances team up with Prachanda. This apparently elevated Deuba’s confidence that Prachanda would be forced to come around and cede to his new demand.
However, Oli himself was found to be conducting clandestine negotiations with Prachanda’s MC for an alternative alliance that would make Prachanda the PM for the first half of the tenure to be followed by Oli for the second. Oli had also secretly enlisted the support of other smaller parties like the newly formed party of independents, the RSP (Rastriya Swatantra Party), the royalist RPP (Rastriya Prajatantra Party), the tarai-based parties, JSP (Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal) and JP (Janamat Party) and the predominantly Tharu party of the far-west, the NUP (Nagarik Unmukti Party) to make sure that Deuba would be unable to make last minute move to form an alternative coalition.
So, while Deuba waited in Baluwatar for Prachanda to come around in the last hours of the last of the seven days allowed by the president, Oli had managed to strike a deal with Prachanda. When Deuba found out about it, the new coalition was already on its way to the presidential palace at Sital Niwas where Prachanda, the leader of the remote third party was sworn in as the PM following the second general election of republican Nepal.
The Oli-promoted coalition even worked out a 19-point common minimum programme based on which a new cabinet was formed and included ministers from almost all constituents in the coalition.
PRESIDENT AN ACCOMPLICE IN SUPPORT OF OLI DESIGN?
The then president of Nepal, former UML leader, Bidya Devi Bhandari, too seemed as much of an accomplice in this game of opportunism and political promiscuity in favor of Oli’s scheming.
For comparison, let us take a look at what recently happened in Israel where a multiplicity of parties has made it difficult for forming a workable coalition. While Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party had won the most seats in the latest election, he had to cobble together a coalition with various, often ideologically distinct parties to find a common ground before forming the government. Recognizing the intractability of the problem, president Herzog gave Netanyahu 28 days which was further extended by two more weeks before the latter was able to lay claim to forming the government at the very last minute at midnight.
In Nepal too, given the multiplicity of parties and their ideological stands (or lack of it), forming a seemingly honest coalition based on principles would be a time-consuming affair. However, President Bhandari with her palpable continuing bias for her earlier party had given only seven days to form a coalition that precipitated the flow of events sans any ideological grounds. It was bound to be an opportunistic coalition, because, unlike in Israel, most of the parties are predominantly populated by people who would pass for thieves, dacoits and murderers.
PROMISCUITY UNBOUND: COALITION 2.0 IN A SPAN OF LESS THAN 100 DAYS
However, soon after Prachanda had managed to find himself elevated to the pedestal of the office of prime minister, he had started renewing his hobnobbing with NC’s Deuba once again, to ask for NC’s support too in his vote of confidence, ostensibly to become the PM of national consensus. As events unfolded, NC too voted in Prachanda’s support in a confidence vote even as the party unabashedly continued to occupy the opposition bench.
Prachanda persisted with his newfound agenda of making an NC nominee the next president of the country even in the face of Oli’s repeated pleas to honor their agreement. As if to formally announce the end to the agreement with UML, Prachanda insulted the party by ordering at the very last minute the UML-nominee foreign minister, Bimala Rai Poudel not to proceed on her pre-planned visit to participate in the meeting of UN Human Rights Council in Geneva.
As if to demonstrate his capacity for remorseless recklessness, Prachanda instead anointed his own personal advisor as a last-minute nominee to lead the delegation. The defamation that it would bring to Nepal in an important UN forum clearly did not matter.
In response, all the UML ministers quit the cabinet as did the royalist RPP which had come under severe criticism of its own for joining the government under Prachanda, the chief conduit of Indian design to abolish the monarchy in Nepal a decade and a half ago.
However, although the failed coalition itself was the handiwork of UML’s Oli, the other small parties simply switched their allegiance and continued to remain in the government. The fact that they had worked out a common agenda for themselves did not matter.
PM Prachanda has once again successfully won the confidence vote in the parliament, this time with the support of the NC and other smaller parties.
In less than 100 days, the chief architect of the previous coalition, the UML has now found itself in opposition.
THE FOREIGN PUPPETEER’S SHOW
As unbelievable as this sequence of events may seem, particularly in the immediate aftermath of an expensive general election, there was an expert puppeteer at work and these self-styled politicians in Nepal were more the puppets on the stage dancing to his pulls and pushes from behind the curtain that often seemed wide open too.
Firstly, about NC’s Deuba’s change of heart and insistence on becoming the PM first, after clearly agreeing to let Prachanda take precedence on it. As reported in the social media, it was India that wanted to see Deuba as PM in Kathmandu and remotely piled pressure on him, also through his wife Arzu Rana who has since cultivated her own links to Indian politicians, to go back on his words.
But Oli’s own clandestine scheming had drawn the carpet from under their feet, leaving both India and Deuba failed and embarrassed. The Oli-crafted coalition had become a reality.
However, India was not giving up. It was further reported that NC’s first vote of confidence to Prachanda even as it sat in the opposition was indeed a part of India’s new design. With a view not to take any chances, this time India sent its own foreign secretary, Vinay Mohan Kwatra on a two-day visit to Kathmandu and in a sweep, met all the people who mattered in Nepal. The new drama of coalition 2.0 started to unfold only thereafter.
For all practical purposes, it was the Indian puppeteer’s show and the Nepali politicians who masquerade as people’s representatives in effect remain nothing more than puppets on the stage dancing to the pushes and pulls of this puppeteer mostly from behind the curtain but unabashedly also on stage — like Kwatra landing personally in Kathmandu — when puppets seem to develop a mind of their own.
While Oli’s scheme had upset India’s initial design to install Deuba at the helm, with India deploying more powerful ammo, it is now the UML chief’s turn to be failed and be humiliated. Oli himself, saddled with the reputation of being India’s man responsible for gifting the Mahakali river to India on a silver platter a little over two decades ago remains encumbered too.
Common Nepalese just went through a very expensive general election to elect a phalanx of characters who are no more than puppets of a predatory foreign power.
But for the Western powers like America, Nepal, like India too, remains a democratic country with the people enjoying such democratic rights as dutifully casting ballots during periodic elections.
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