Politics stands still

Yubaraj Ghimire

As hopes fade of an early election that is free and fair, Nepal’s crisis shows no signs of abating. What can India do?

External recognition, it seems, is a much more important factor in Nepal’s politics than internal legitimacy. In October 2002, the international community including India, endorsed King Gyanendra when he sacked an elected prime minister for his failure to hold elections to Parliament on schedule. But in April 2006, the international community decisively rejected King Gyanendra’s complete takeover bid.

In fact, this turned into a major morale booster for the demoralised political parties that came together and mobilised people against the king. G.P. Koirala, who became prime minister after April 2006 following the success of that mass movement, is now fast losing crucial international support as he has missed two deadlines to hold elections to the Constituent Assembly (CA). Besides, the country’s law and order situation is in a shambles.

In the absence of an election in the near future, international support has become all the more crucial for Koirala’s survival. So long as key international players — India, US, China, European Union and United Nations — were agreed about assisting in charting out Nepal’s future political course (through the CA elections), things seemed to be moving in the right direction. But there are visible differences in the approach of international players towards Koirala’s failure to hold elections, though they are all clear that a fair and fearless election is urgent.

In the last few days, Koirala has intensified his meetings with diplomats, following Shyam Saran’s visit as Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s special envoy, soon after the CA polls were postponed indefinitely. His advice was simple enough -- an early election, as early as December. But given Nepal’s poor law and order situation, it is hard to swallow. It also implies that the prime minister should be prepared to go for polls without the Maoists if they continued to insist on their ‘unreasonable demands’. Their new demand for abolition of the monarchy immediately and a complete switch to the proportional representation system of elections for the CA polls, barely a fortnight before the nomination process, was clearly intended to derail the entire election process.

Yet, going to the polls without the Maoists will minimise, to a large extent, the prospect of a foreseeable end to the 12-year old Maoist-led insurgency that has taken a toll of 13,000 lives. It’s equally challenging to hold them to their earlier pledge in Delhi, under a government initiative (in which Saran played the key role), that they would renounce the politics of violence and partake in competitive parliamentary politics. In the current context, however, it was as much a failure on the part of Indian government to not be able to assess that elections were not going to take place on November 22.

India’s Nepal policy seems to have failed. Similarly, there is a debate going on about whether the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN), headed by the Secretary General’s Special Representative Ian Martin, should be allowed to stay (with an enlarged mandate) beyond January 22, when its current tenure ends. While the government of Nepal is likely to write to the security council to have its tenure extended by another year, it is unlikely this will happen. UNMIN has been involving itself in Terai problems, where apart from peacefully agitating groups, more than a dozen armed groups, most of them based across the border, are demanding more political rights and inclusion in the decision making process.

India has backed the demands of the Terai groups, but the lack of consensus among the political parties in Nepal has delayed any action by the government. At the same time, China has been warning Nepal that the threat to the country’s stability because of the failure of the peace process will be a matter of special concern in the northern neighbourhood.

A delicate imbalance in the approach of the key international players, coupled with total domestic failure, has the potential to point Nepal in a new direction. But its destination is more confused than ever before.

Source: The Indian Express, October 30, 2007