South Asia's Right Royal Mess

The Dawn

May 1, 2006

Jawed Naqvi

IF INDIA got it wrong on Nepal, Pakistan wasn’t too far behind. First Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz during a visit to Kathmandu in November 2004 made avoidable military overtures to the government to contain the Maoists and then after the royal coup took place, Islamabad’s envoy followed suit to virtually assure the autocratic king how well he would be armed in Pakistan’s care. It’s time for everyone to feel small.

India of course has a habit of plunging headlong into these right royal blunders. Remember that Delhi ended up inviting the Shah of Iran on what was to be his last state visit anywhere, at a time when the writing on the wall was clear that that Aryameher’s days were numbered. In fact, beginning to be known as the autocratic quisling of the United States, the Shah was not welcome anywhere. So much so that President Carter, who tried hard to save him from imminent ruin, nudged Prime Minister Morarji Desai to bail him out with India’s symbolic show of support. The ploy worked but only briefly.

No one was inordinately surprised, barring perhaps then foreign minister Vajpayee, as Khomeini took power in Iran. India had to desperately find some way of saying sorry. In a hurried U-turn to make amends for the Shah’s ill-advised visit under his watch, the Vajpayee-led foreign ministry thought it useful to pick up a Shia maulvi from Lucknow who had been heard boasting of his proximity to Imam Khomeini. The damage control delegation, including the maulvi, was soon enough presented before the Ayatollah.

Eye-witnesses say Khomeini publicly berated and humiliated the maulvi in Farsi and used the services of an excellent interpreter to leave the Indian delegation in no doubt about the terse message. It turned out the cleric was someone the Ayatollah may have casually met in Paris but had never authorised to represent him in any capacity in India or elsewhere. The valiant Indian delegation had no choice but to turn tail. It took the fall of Morarji’s government for relations between Iran and India to begin to improve again.

In the brief vacuum that came between the Shah’s fall and the Khomeini consolidation, desperate attempts were made to instal a pro-West government headed by Shahpour Bakhtiar. His credentials included the fact that he had suffered at the hands of the Shah. In this way and more there is a similarity between the Girija Prasad Koirala experiment now under way in Nepal and the ill-fated Bakhtiar regime.

Both are or were the outcome of status quoist approaches, an attempt to deny the existence of popular upheaval at the base of the political change like the one we are witnessing in South Asia’s poorest country.

Newspapers and TV channels have described Gyanendra’s decision to revive the parliament a result of ‘weeks of popular protest’. The fact is that it has taken years of grassroots struggle, bordering on civil war for the turn of events to become so favourable earlier last month for democracy to get a chance in Nepal.

Of course the status quoists in the Indian foreign ministry would accept none of that. They picked two representatives, including one from the Indian opposition, to meet the king only too aware that both had reasons to prescribe remedies that would be far removed from the popular demand that the palace be made redundant in Nepal’s politics.

It was thus that New Delhi rushed to support the king’s offer of sharing some power with Nepal’s democratic parties. The offer was destined to be promptly rejected by everyone of any importance in Nepal today.

One of these critics was Kunwar Natwar Singh, India’s former foreign minister. He may be on the back foot of late because of allegations surrounding the Volker Committee’s claims of his culpability in the oil-for-food deal, but he has not allowed this to blur his views on India’s foreign policy.

In a terse response to his former colleagues’ rushed welcome to the king’s offer of sharing power in Nepal, Natwar Singh remarked: “We have let the people of Nepal down, lost the goodwill of the seven parties, earned the annoyance of the Maoists and received no kudos from King Gyanendra.”

Baburam Bhattarai is one of the leaders of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). He wrote a ‘letter to the editor’ to the Kantipur Newspaper on Tuesday, April 25, 2006. The Monthly Review published a translated version of the letter, which is available on website http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/bhattarai260406.html

Since the supposedly mainstream media are unlikely to find it of any use, analysts who are interested in knowing what lies ahead in Nepal, and therefore in South Asia, might want to read it. It contains a critique of the media too.

“Letters to the editor seem more interesting, lively and factual than the editorials, articles, and news in established newspapers. Perhaps this is the sign of political consciousness among the masses rising higher than that of the established political leadership and intelligentsia...I too feel it is more appropriate for me to share my views as a letter to the editor than by articles or statements,” wrote Bahattrai.

He compared the popular protests still under way with a ‘historic revolutionary tsunami’.

“The scene of people gallantly resisting the Royal Armed Forces with whatever they could get their hands on has raised all Nepali heads high, and has established our reputation as freedom fighters rather than as mercenaries for foreign armies. Since the revolution is still going strong, what will be its climax has eluded and worried many people.”

Then comes the warning to Koirala, India, the world: “In the last leg of this revolution, the danger has increased of polarisation between, on the one hand, the international power centres, the palace and the leadership of the established parliamentary forces, and, on the other, the revolutionary masses of common people, civil society and other political forces, leading to factionalism in the revolution.

“Especially the current situation in which the conscious revolutionary forces demand a democratic republic, and the established political leadership is unable to rise above their demand for the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament, has posed an immediate danger of factionalism in revolution...

“When the whole of Nepal has approved chanting slogans to end the monarchy and to establish a republic, there is no reason why the political leadership has to hesitate to formally endorse and move forward with the republican slogan. Even the international power centres, which, until yesterday, were unaware of the Nepali people’s actual consciousness and power, shall eventually have to understand the ground realities of this revolution. In this context, the failure to move forward with the slogan that incorporates the people’s aspirations and the nation’s need in order to bow to international pressure will be a huge mistake and highly ironic...

“If even today the political leadership only considers the slogans for a democratic republic to be a Maoist slogan, then they would be seen by history to have made the millions of people and their own political activists chanting this slogan in the streets, ‘Maoists’. The CPN-Maoist is flexible and responsible and, keeping in mind the international situation, has been proposing the elections for a constituent assembly as a meeting point for all. The path for that, which will prove correct, scientific and permanent, is not the merciful reinstatement of parliament by the king, but the parallel government declared and established by the revolutionary forces. That is crystal clear.”

History moves in a tight spiral and doesn’t always repeat itself. Nepal may not be Iran, but there are shades of similarities in our approaches to both.