Dinner with friends

Unification of like-minded political parties has become a matter of public debate and of pursuit by the parties concerned. This became stronger after the Jana Andolan of last April, and shows signs of gathering greater force in the days to come. The Nepali Congress of Girija Prasad Koirala and the breakaway NC-D of Sher Bahadur Deuba have talked much of their re-unification, though both recently registered themselves separately with the Election Commission. The Nepal Sadbhavana Party (Andandidevi) and the Nepal Sadbhavana Party that supported the active royal regime have been engaged in unity talks for some time, but hitches persist. Neither the NC breakup nor the NSP split had resulted from serious ideological differences, but principally from personality clashes of the top leaders, the tendency to one-upmanship, and opportunistic moves of their top leaders to grab power.

The same is true of the factions of the RPP, the party of former Panchas.As for Left unity, or the re-unification of the various communist parties, some of their top leaders have expressed their sentiment in favour of the idea, and some of them may indeed be doing the homework to explore the possibility in the country’s peculiar and fluid situation. Speaking at a programme in the capital on Sunday, leaders of various communist parties emphasised Left unity to overthrow the monarchy and establish a democratic republic.

Maoist leader Dr Baburam Bhattarai floated the idea of how such unity could be forged — by combining in a single theory the New Democracy of Pushpalal Shrestha, People’s Multiparty Democracy of Madan Bhandari, and the Prachanda Path of the CPN-Maoist. CPN-UML general secretary Madhav Kumar Nepal said the Leftist forces would emerge victorious if they jointly contested the constituent assembly elections.It would indeed be better for Left or non-left parties to make ideology-based common formations. Unity may be of two types — working unity or the formation of a single party out of two or more. The parties should not be unified unless there is common ground on fundamental goals and policy issues. Secondly, if non-ideological differences are so sharp, for instance, personality clashes or selfish interests of top leaders, that the cobbled unity might break up at any time over petty individual interests, then, too, it would be unwise to hasten unification.

It would merely create unnecessary problems for the parties concerned, and, certainly, it would do no good to national politics and good governance. Take for instance the various communist parties that have different goals or conflicting strategies and some of them have split up in the past on the slightest of pretexts. Some of the top leaders of communist parties, particularly of the smaller ones, are known to form separate parties if they are relegated from the dominant party positions. But, to achieve common goals, such as republicanism, it should be enough for them to forge working unity, say through a United Left Front. The rightists and centrists could do likewise.

Source: The Himalayan Times, April 24, 2007