Editorial
To those perceptive enough to recognize the inevitability of politics in human behavior, the notion that politics is all-encompassing is easily accepted. The person denouncing politics, it is seldom realized, is making a political statement on its own. Denouncing politicians, as it is, is a popular exercise of course. Such mundane comments, on the other hand, are favorite cover-ups masking the individual’s politics and this need not have to do with national politics but simple human behavior as from person to person. More often than not a person in politics can be bewildered at how he or she can be overtaken in relationships to one’s detriment by individuals distant from politics. Politics, after all, is behavioral, and everyone is behaving one way or the other in interacting with others. It is not the interaction that must limit itself to state politics. Indeed, it is often forgotten that political interaction forms just one aspect of human behavior and it is not just this that is political.
So when one comments that such and such an action is just not political, one is pronouncing that the commentator knows politics more than the actor. This is where one is treading on dangerous grounds. What, after all, makes one more political than the other? It is the same thing with the ‘politician’ tag. What makes one more a politician for someone to be introduced as a politician? Is the person making the introduction less a politician? These are not mundane issues in the current milieu. Nepali traditional elite considers the politician a threat to their elitism as much as the political elite sees a challenge to their politics from the traditional elite. Indeed, in the Nepali case, the fine line that divides the traditional elite (as opposed to the modernist) from the political elite makes the distinction even more politician. It is like former RPP chairman Kamal Thapa tacitly admitting that the palace behind him when he ruled the roost over the party was okay and the palace against him after his recent ouster was not. Where is the politics in this, one might ask! Perhaps it is in the question itself that politics exists.
And so the political elite and the traditional elite are not much different except in pretensions perhaps. Yes, we are a very pretentious society. Perhaps our three generations or so of modernist education has so steeped us in the politics of exploiter and exploited that we are looking at everyone else through strange prejudices. The palace secretaries in Kamal Thapa’s eyes are
‘playing’ politics to Thapa’s detriment. Since the secretaries are the king’s personal secretaries, is the king playing politics? Was he playing politics when things favored Kamal Thapa’s politics? The RPP’s new chairman Rajendra Lingden is no wonder hard put to answer to what others do in his favor. That is exactly what big men like Kamal Thapa relish doing. The political elite or the traditional, belittling others make one big whatever the expense. This applies every which way. It is such behavior that calls for societal studies on a national mentality that must make others small to appear big. Rather than a modern trait, such mindscape is often associated with outdated ‘provincials’ elsewhere.
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