RSP must use it as the onset of a sustained campaign for clean politics
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
WAGLE NOT ONLY WON BUT ALSO FLOORED THE NC LEADERSHIP BRIGADE
Swarnim Wagle’s massive win in Tanahu is not only a big vindication of his highly refreshing stance in Nepal’s corrupt national politics; it is also a big slap on the face of the top NC leadership that otherwise had left no stone unturned in a bid to punish Dr Wagle by giving him a sound defeat in the election. It would have been to avenge themselves for the distinguished economist’s audacity to quit NC and, what’s more, to protest in public against “Dai Bhauju’s nepotism and corruptibility”, meaning that of president Sher Bahadur Deuba and his wife Arzu Rana Deuba. In today’s NC, criticizing the invincible couple certainly counts as the sacrilege of the first order.
After Wagle joined Rabi Lamichhane’s Rastriya Swatantra Party and showed up in Tanahu-1 as a candidate in the by-polls, the NC leadership unleashed its full force to make sure that Wagle pays with his defeat.
Given such a context, Wagle’s own big win meant much more than his NC rival, Govind Bhattarai’s humiliating defeat in his own constituency; Bhattarai’s defeat and Wagle’s win exposed the fact that the NC as a political party has lost all its credibility among the people, and its big-name politicos have already degenerated into being nothing more than paper tigers.
TANAHU ELECTION – THE NC WATERLOO
NC had opened its volley fire against Wagle by deputing its two, supposedly ferocious, fail-proof artillery units, the two secretary generals, Gagan Thapa and Biswo Prakash Sharma.
But there was a catch. Lately, the NC is increasingly infested with internal, however subterranean, dissent due to the irrepressible and openly visible penchant for corruptibility and mismanagement in the party. The result has been that in the last general election in November, a large section of NC supporters had voted for RSP whose election symbol was a bell, ghanti in Nepali, thus leading to the creation of a new moniker called Ghanti Congress, is, those Congress voters who voted for RSP candidates.
Gagan Thapa himself too has been labeled Ghanti Congress because the RSP had not fielded its candidate against him in the last election, thus leading to allegations of his collusion with RSP. The Deuba leadership has been particularly vicious in the persecution of Thapa also for the fact that he had contested against Deuba for the leadership of the NC parliamentary party in pursuit of his own election slogan of becoming the next PM of the country.
So, the Deuba Congress took special yet sadistic satisfaction in deploying Thapa to lead the first foray against his own alleged soulmate, Wagle. Thapa, for his part, true to his party, right or wrong, along with Sharma set out on his quixotic mission against Wagle soon after the electioneering got underway in the district.
But what was strange was that Thapa was clearly aware of the Ghanti Congress having metastasized in the body politic of the NC party. So, poor Thapa, in his public appeal to vote for NC candidate, Govind Bhattarai, had to invoke the all-seeing eyes of God and possible retribution from the celestial power lest the NC voters in Tanahu too turned out to be Ghanti Congress.
But the NC wrath against Wagle, particularly for his audacity to finger-point Deuba and his wife Arzu for all the ills in the party, was so deep-seated that they were not relying only on the Thapa and Sharma duo to deliver an NC win in Tanahu. They were soon followed by the whole host of NC leadership including party chair Deuba. They were also accompanied by leaders of the ruling alliance including PM Prachanda and other characters like Madhav Kumar Nepal as if they mattered too.
Thus, Swarnim’s massive win and NC’s Bhattarai’s humiliating defeat at his hands turned out to be the proverbial Waterloo or the graveyard of the credibility of the NC leadership, lock, stock and barrel.
As if this was not enough of an insult to the oldest party in the country, NC (and UML too, the second largest party), RSP chair Rabi Lamichhane delivered an even more humiliating defeat to their candidates in Chitawan by garnering even more votes than in the landslide of the last election.
NC (AND UML) CREDIBILITY IN TATTERS
For all practical purposes, the two massive RSP wins in Tanahu and Chitawan have left the credibility of the two largest parties in the country in tatters. This results primarily from their boundless penchant for corruption. While Deuba during his many premierships reportedly bartered everything–policy decisions, appointments, promotions, and construction contracts– for hard cash, UML chief, Oli, has been even more notorious, as the chief architect of Widebody, OMNI, Yeti Holdings multi-billion scams and lot more.
This vulnerability was as much acknowledged by the NC candidate in Chitawan Jit Narayan Shrestha who, magnanimous in defeat, not only congratulated Rabi on his win. He also laid the blame on his party’s doorstep for his defeat by saying that there was no escape for his party from the need “to correct itself”.
The sins of these corrupt leaders also include appointing yes men to such important constitutional bodies like the anti-corruption watchdog, CIAA, judiciary, Vigilance Commission, and so on. As things stand, every single top politician has one or more grievous criminal cases standing against them in those outfits and, if proper decisions were to be taken on them, all of them would have been behind bars today serving long-term incarceration.
What’s more, there is no limit to their greed. In their bid for continued influence in government decision-making for profit, lately, they have ended up colluding with the tiny Maoist party in parliament, Installing its president Prachanda–the man who by his own admission has the blood of thousands of people on his hand– as the new PM of the country following its “democratic” election in November.
LOOKING FORWARD — WHAT LIES AHEAD FOR SWARNIM, RABI AND THE COUNTRY?
What is worth noting at this point is that Swarnim’s entry into RSP goes a long way towards making sense of that party in the first place. Soon after Balen Shah’s win as Kathmandu mayor as an independent, popular TV host then, Rabi Lamichhane hastily put together his Rastriya Swatantra Party with an ideological statement that essentially made no sense. He had then said that his new party was there, “not to change byabastha (system), but to change abastha (condition of the people”, whereas most of the ills that ceaselessly torment the people and country emanate from the federal and republican political system that still remains to be endorsed by the people and that has only perpetuated and aggravated the wanton corruptibility that was unleashed with the restoration of the multiparty order in 1990. From this perspective, Swarnim Wagle’s membership in the new party brings in a rare and much-needed talent to define the role of the RSP in the remaking of Nepal’s ruined democracy.
Soon after his win, Dr Wagle put out a statement that seems to directly connect with this need. He has said that the votes he had garnered in the election in Tanahu were indeed “to change the face of the nation”. As a visionary and committed politician, he did not limit his mandate to the voters of the district.
LIVING UP TO PROMISE IS CHALLENGING – AVOIDING THE LINGDEN BUBBLE
Some time before Rabi’s arrival on the scene as Nepal’s most popular politician, RPP’s Rajendra Lingden– the new Janajati president of the royalist party that had otherwise been dominated by mutually feuding high caste feudal elites–had been placed on that pedestal after he told the NC national convention that “people viewed politicians as thieves in the villages; the parliament did not look like a parliament any more nor the judiciary as the judiciary”. Soon afterwards he reinforced his commitment to cleaner politics by claiming that being corrupt is “tantamount to sucking one’s own mother’s blood”. These pious pronouncements immediately put him in the ranks of political saviors in this ever-suffering, ever impoverished and ever-backwards nation.
But lit did not take long for the Lingden bubble to burst. He not only cooperated with corrupt politicians in order to secure wins in elections. After being returned to parliament with a respectable number of 14 representatives, he not only went on to become one of the deputy PMs under the most notorious of politicians, Prachanda, as PM; he even forwarded one of the most ill-reputed contractors, Bikram Pande as the minister for urban development, a situation that also carried the excess baggage of conflict-of-interest implications. As things stand today, Rajendra Lingden has ceased to be seen as the paragon of democratic virtues. The Lingden bubble has burst.
At this point, it is necessary to recall that in one public function in the recent past, Swarnim Wagle had commended Baburam Bhattarai and Madhav Kumar Nepal as “clean politicians” whereas nothing could be further from the truth. At least in one case, both of them remain implicated and tarnished in the Lalita Nivas land embezzlement case that has the potential to put them behind bars at any time. There is clearly a great need for caution while making pronouncements.
In this regard, Rabi Lamichhane, who too had gone on to become one of those deputy PMs under Prachanda, has this time around made the right noises. Upon winning the Chitawan election the second time, he said that the main culprit was “corruption, poverty and lack of education” in the country and added that he would be focusing on the designing “right policies” that, among others, should ensure the children’s access to good education. Even more importantly, he further said, they would work for growing into a big party “able to form a majority government of its own in five years.”
Sarnim Wagle and Rabi Lamichhane now have the task of charting out a new course for our democracy that shuns corruption and is structured to empower the people themselves all across the country to define and meet their own aspirations.
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