Upendra Nath Sharma
Dispelling fears generated by his predecessor and party chief Prachanda’s anti-India rhetoric, Nepal’s Maoist Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai has made it clear that ties with India are his main priority. This is not because he spent more than a decade of his academic life in New Delhi, nor because he met his wife here. It is also not because Bhattarai and several other leaders spent eight years coordinating Nepal’s decade-long Maoist insurgency from hideouts scattered over India. It is because he needs India’s helping hand in handling the vexed issues that have eluded a consensus among the major parties back home.
Ever since the fall of the first iteration of Maoist-led rule in Nepal after the Constituent Assembly elections, every effort had been made to isolate the Maoists from the political mainstream. Bhattarai was elected as prime minister by members of the Constituent Assembly on August 28, 2011, after the Maoists-United Democratic Madhesi Front alliance managed to stave off the challenge led by the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified-Marxist-Leninist) known as the UML. Bhattarai is widely seen as a committed Left intellectual and is identified with a series of the progressive steps taken in the processes that led up to formation of the republic and indeed ‘Naya Nepal’.
The necessity to complete the constitution-making process had earlier forced the Maoists to enter into a coalition with the UML and supporting and participating in the government led by Jhalanath Khanal. The ‘Left bloc’, however, could not take the peace process forward, as neither Khanal nor Prachanda could convince their respective parties on a common strategy. The Nepali Congress had refused to take part in a national consensus government and had earlier pitched a candidate of its own during a prolonged and near farcical sequence of elections for the post of prime minister.
The successful alliance with the Madhesi front is another case of unity of thought on the issue of state restructuring and identity recognition. The Maoists were the only major political party that was willing to shift away from the past and found the Madhesis the only force that agreed to take up the issue of state restructuring—a cause that had coincided with the social upsurge of long marginalised identities during the republican movement in the mid-2000s. The Madhesis were no longer swayed by the rhetoric of the ‘democratic alliance’, which included the NC and the UML.
Having secured the alliance with the Madhesis by signing a four-point deal, which calls for the inclusion of Madhesi people in the Nepali security apparatus as well, Bhattarai has set out to reach out to the Opposition. The handing over of the keys of the arms’ containers of the Peoples’ Liberation Army to a special committee set up to work out the process of army integration was the first such step.
India has played a positive role on evolution of the
Comprehensive Peace Agreement by helping the seven-party alliance forge an agreement with the ex-rebels. While still suspicious of the Maoists, the Indian establishment has realised that a stable, democratic and prosperous Nepal is in its neighbour’s best interests. India also realises that a truly stable Nepal is possible only if the interests of marginalised communities are accommodated through a progressive constitution.
Among the Maoists, a lengthy debate has raged over the means to achieve a people’s federal democratic republic of Nepal, especially after they grew out of the people’s war stage an enter into an accord with the parliamentary parties representing diverse class interests. Though differences within them persist, there seems to be a unanimous agreement among the Maoists that the process of constitution making should be taken to its logical conclusion.
The next few months of rule by the Bhattarai government, therefore, promise to herald a change from the status quo even as challenges persist.
The writer is a sociologist, formerly professor at IIT, Kanpur
Courtesy : The New Indian Express
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