NEPAL IN CRISIS

Kathmandu, 7 May 2010

Today is the seventh day of nationwide shutdown here, the result of

an ‘indefinite strike’ begun by the Maoists, the largest party in
parliament, on 1 May. Their intention is to topple the current
‘puppet’ government, a coalition of the Congress and Communist
parties under prime minister Madhav Kumar Nepal, and install a
new government with the Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal
(Prachanda) as leader.

I have never witnessed a more comprehensive strike. All shops,

businesses, restaurants and schools are closed and there is no
transport other than a few cycle rickshaws, push carts, the usual
UN, embassy and aid elites in their white Landcruisers, as well as
licenced tourist buses. The Maoists have permitted some shops to
open between 6 and 10pm and allowed the delivery of rice,
vegetables and milk after farmers mounted their own protests.

The ‘stir’ is being maintained by hundreds of thousand of Maoist

‘cadres’, mostly young men, bused in from the country. They are
assembled in strategic places around the city, and seem to spend
their days listening to speeches, walking about in raggedy groups,
some armed with sticks, and sleeping in exhausted heaps. They are
being housed, quite improbably, in the cavernous casinos at five
star hotels.

The residents of Kathmandu have until today been remarkably

tolerant of this massive disruption to their lives. Their usually
congested and polluted streets and lanes have been given back to
them, and they have been strolling about as if on holidays. Children
seem even more carefree than usual, and there are games of
cricket and football on streets everywhere. In some ways it reminds
me of my first ever visit here in 1973; there were few cars then and
no pollution. Pedestrians and cyclists owned the roads.

However there have been signs of growing tension, with Maoist

cadres reportedly ‘thrashing’ shopkeepers, journalists and others
who dared to oppose them in Kathmandu and elsewhere, and today
a huge peace rally has assembled in Basantapur in the centre of the
city. Most commentators are predicting violence if this does not end
soon as people’s livelihoods are in peril. But it is hard to predict how
it will end without capitulation of one side, and there is no indication
of that in the language of the protagonists.

The situation facing Nepal is that no party is strong enough to form

government, but all have a propensity to make governing the
country impossible if they are not included. The Nepali people
deserve far better than this and expected much more when the
peace accords of 2006 ended a ruinous, tragic decade of civil war.
Then the Maoists, emerging from the wilderness, seemed to adapt
to mainstream politics, and offer a refreshing change from the
corrupt, caste-obsessed, self-serving politicians who had dominated
politics until then.

Two important failures have tarnished all sides since then, and the
Maoists are as responsible as their political opponents. Firstly, the
Constituent Assembly, where all the major parties are represented,
is supposed to produce a new constitution by 28 May, but bickering
and working at cross-purposes, or not working at all, has meant that
the participants, charged with this most profound task, have made
no progress whatsoever.

The Maoist response to this was to pull up stumps, walk away and
then return with the strategy of shutting down the country.

The second issue has been the failure to resolve the matter of the
integration of former Maoist combatants, now languishing in UN
supervised cantonments, into the Nepali security forces, as
required by the peace accords. In this, the intransigence of senior
army leadership is evident, and indeed, this was the trigger that
caused the resignation of Prachanda when he was briefly serving PM
a year ago. No progress has been made since then.

There is no doubt that India is playing a significant role behind the

scenes to weaken the position of the Maoists and strengthen that of
the current government.

It is true that Nepal has made progress since the war ended. The
monarchy with its archaic ways and undemocratic political allies
has gone; the nation is a secular republic whose many ethnic
groups, long excluded by the ruling classes, are finding their voices.
Women, children and the most underprivileged minorities are now
not routinely excluded from consideration. But these gains are, in a
way, intangible. In everyday life Nepalis struggle; all the standard
infrastructure of modern life is failing or simply not there. Water,
sewage and sanitation, power and transport are in a deplorable
state. Health and education services are overwhelmed by
demographics. And all the economic indicators are disastrous.

If, as is just possible, the country drifts or is propelled backwards to

a state of armed conflict, human rights violations and economic
collapse, does it matter other than to hapless Nepalis?

Nepal matters for two very distinct reasons. Firstly it is of strategic

importance to its two huge neighbours, India and China. A failed
state or a hostile Maoist regime on its northern border would add
greatly to India’s many woes, and would not be tolerated. Equally,
chaotic conditions here might be seen as threatening to China’s
grip on Tibet. It seems unlikely that China is anything but grimly
bemused by the use of ‘Maoist’ labels and rhetoric in this era, but it
does not want a Nepal that is a client state of India.

The second reason is symbolic. Nepal is a country with a very high

world-wide recognition factor. Everyone knows about the Himalayas,
Mt Everest and the Ghurkhas; many know that Buddha was born
here. This has helped make tourism Nepal’s most important export
industry. Huge numbers of visitors have transformed life in the
villages along numerous trekking routes. They have also created a
cottage industry of volunteer activity, augmenting the work of donor
agencies and contributing to development, but at the same time
giving the visitors the unparalleled experience of working amidst
remarkable people in a remarkable landscape.

Murray Laurence