NO AGREMENT ON A FEDERAL STRUCTURE

CONSTITUTION DRAFTING COMMITTEE MEET INCOCLUSIVE

Kathmandu, 24 March: A sub-committee on constitution drafting that discussed a state a federal state was inconclusive Thursday in Dhulikhel.
Coordinator Maoist leader Prachanda chaired the meet.
NC opposed a Maoist proposal to carve out14 provinces on ethnic and regional basis.
NC demanded formation of a state restructuring commission opposed by Maoists.
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Baburam’s fallible Bhimsen fetish
Kathmandu, 24 March: Six months after a visiting senior Chinese official described him as Nepal’s equivalent of Deng Xiaoping, UCPN (Maoist) vice-chairman Dr. Baburam Bhattarai says he is working on a model for a new Nepal. We are a far way from knowing the number, nature or navigability of the modernizations he envisages.
His inspiration, too, remains elusive. Yet Maila Baje feels Dr. Bhattarai has made a curious start of sorts. For someone who has identified Nepal’s long-running malady as stemming from the injustice of the 1816 Sugauli Treaty that ended our war with British India, Dr. Bhattarai has demonstrated an odd reverence for the man most responsible for the catastrophe, Maila Maje writes in Nepali Netbook..
After losing one-third of the national territory in a war he pushed over the objections of key commanders and courtiers, you would have expected Bhimsen Thapa’s career to end there. Instead he used the national debacle to consolidate his power, aided through a succession of minors on the throne and a willful patron in Regent Lalita Tripurasundari.
How the assassin of ex-king and regent Rana Bahadur Shah managed to strike precisely moments after Bhimsen excused himself from the fateful meeting and how he succeeded in decimating all of his rivals but stop Tripura Sundari from customarily stepping on to her late husband’s funeral pyre, remain other intriguing aspects of that period.
In likening his current stance to Bhimsen’s dedication to the national cause, Dr. Bhattarai has reopened another can of worms. What exactly did Bhimsen do to help Nepal recover from the Sugauli disaster? To be fair, he preserved Nepal’s current shape and size by shrewdly balancing off the Chinese and the British against each other. But, then, Dr. Bhattarai has no such admiration for the Ranas or the Shahs who did much the same perhaps with greater effect and élan.
As to Dr. Bhattarai’s implication that Bhimsen paid with his life for his patriotism, history’s judgment is more tentative. The seeds of Bhimsen’s downfall were laid in the mayhem through which he rose to power. The rival Pande clan, an assertive monarchy, a resurgent British India and a tepid China, combined with his own refusal to doubt his invincibility ultimately precipitated Bhimsen’s tragic death in prison. We may not know whether Bhimsen actually slit his throat or was murdered – or even hung himself as Dr. Bhattarai suggested – we do know it had little to do with patriotism.
In hyping such counterfactual historical continuities, Dr. Bhattarai may have been impelled by his traditional links to his native Gorkha, where Bhimsen’s family also came from. Admittedly, if they had succeeded in disrupting his activities on his home turf, Dr. Bhattarai’s rivals would have scored a major symbolic triumph. Further, in rooting himself in the region most closely identified with the growth of the modern Nepalese state, Dr. Bhattarai may have hoped to deflect criticism of purported ‘special relations’ with India.
But the visionary he sees himself as must be able to move beyond the comfort zone of extrapolating contradictions. Dr. Bhattarai will always be remembered as having given the intellectual firepower for republicanism in Nepal. Yet many will also continue to recall him as the man who overreached by averring how history would positively evaluate the contributions of King Birendra’s and all of his ancestors, just to delegitimize King Gyanendra in the aftermath of the Narayanhity carnage. And seven years later, he became the principal advocate of a cultural monarchy when King Gyanendra himself had pretty much made up his mind to pack his bags.
As chief propagandist for an organization that oversaw Nepal’s worst spree of destruction, Dr. Bhattarai used equivocation, evasion and prevarication to demolish rivals. Dissenting and discombobulating cannot burnish the credentials of a builder. Of course, Dr. Bhattarai, like the rest of us, sees everyday how his boss, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, gets away with gaffes and gaps. One reason Dahal does so is because he lacks – and does not seem to miss – the high-brow heft of Bhattarai’s honorific
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10 REASONS WHY MAOISTS WON’T GO TO JUNGLE


Kathmandu, 24 March: Every time they are not appeased on some crucial issues by most other political parties, UCPN (Maoist) leaders threaten to return to "people's rebellion". Me says, the Maoists will never return to arms not because their highest priority is peace but because they cannot afford to, Trikal Vastavis writes in People’s Review. .

Look at the lifestyles of hundreds of their leaders. Are we to believe that they have been well-funded by the grassroots that form their core support base in this poverty-ridden and world's second youngest republic (the youngest status being accorded to southern Sudan that split from the North through a January referendum)? Do allegations by Nepali Congress and UML leaders that they have been resorting to massive extortions even after the end of the civil war supposed to have closed five years ago?

Traveling in expensive cars and living in lavishly furnished homes and "volunteers" to do the household chores make life easier. The real estate value in Kathmandu Valley and other urban centers did not soar astronomically in the last 4 and 1/2 years without a reason. Maoist activists are believed to have acquired a lot of property through the cash whose origin no one can ascertain. (The spurt in the size of population and dubious manner in which citizenship was distributed amidst persistent claims of massive migrations from the southern side of the border might also partly explain the soaring real estate prices.)

Among the other reasons why the erstwhile rebels will not return to the jungles are the following:

1) Recent rapid denudation of the forest coverage because of merciless felling of trees by leftist and other underground groups has reduced the jungle coverage.

2) Many former rebels or would-be-rebels have witnessed the way the vast majority of lower rank insurgents suffered in the post-conflict period ("transition") while a few appropriated rich dividends.

3) Even if a splinter group takes to arms, it is likely to be nothing more than an adventurer team, constantly on the hunt by the state, shunned by the general populations and ostracized by the international community, giving it an image of vagabonds.

4) Foreign governments and agencies that had helped them directly or indirectly during the decade-long war would not want to lose what they have achieved: secularism and federalism after the overthrow of monarchy. The Vatican theocracy, it may be recalled, was the first to send a congratulatory note to the new Nepali dispensation for declaring Nepal secular. (Wonder if the Pope would lobby for allowing conversion to Catholic faith among British Protestants so that the British monarch could also potentially be a Catholic as the head of British church. I recall raising this point in Uzbekistan, with the vodka-serving hosts appreciating it so much that they mentioned it to others on several occasions. Similar was an experience in Kyoto where the hosts served their delicacy sushi accompanied a highly impressive spread.)

5) Maoists' top-shot Pushpa Kamal Dahal 'Prachanda' disclosed at a public function in India during his official visit to that country that he and some of his colleagues had spent 8 and 1/2 years in Noida, just outside New Delhi, during the insurgency days. The Indian government will not choose to turn their eyes in such way any longer if the Nepali Maoists were to go underground. The shoes that greeted its ambassador Sood in Solu have infuriated South Block no end. Regular diatribe against Indian interference in Nepali politics has also been noted and thickly underlined in red marks by the government that drafted the Delhi Pact of 2006. The Nepali Congress saw the opportunity for returning to power at the head of government; the UML saw it as an opportunity to avenge the way their general secretary was refused nomination for prime minister by the king; and the UML saw it as a route to having a strong presence in a parliament that was duly dissolved at the recommendation of a duly elected prime minister. Most Congressites found the Maoists deeply undercutting their voter base through a variety of threatening tactics and it would be next to impossible for them to ever again win parliamentary majority.

6) Nepali security agencies have a fairly comprehensive roaster on the general sketch of many Maoists, including their family members and relatives. This is not a relishing prospect for former rebels to return to arms and bid farewell to the security and safety they have found after so many years. Also, with senior local and national leaders staying over ground and cruising in comfortable cars in comfort, safety and security, neither their junior cadres nor potentially new members would risk to fight a proxy war for the petty politics of leaders who no longer stomach the prospect of any serious fighting on their own.

7) Madheshi parties have spoken strongly against the Maoists. The relatively reticent group among them is proxy for any fallback position for its patrons. It is always safe to have support on all camps, whose advantages no one can deny.

8) The Americans and the British are regretting deeply that their analyses of the political situation three years ago went out of gear, as they had depended heavily on Indian notes and some of the so-called civil society leaders and journalists working in English newspapers in Kathmandu. The Americans want to lure the Maoists by dangling small mercies such as handshakea by American ambassador, meetings with some of their leaders or a few trips to the land rediscovered by Columbus more 500 years ago.

9) Since the US is serious about reining in the Maoists, the Scandinavian countries and Switzerland bent on "religious freedom" cannot be active in supporting Maoist groups and the latter's front organizations working as NGOs.

10) The West, including the Scandinavians who find no space elsewhere but got a huge role in Nepal because of the funds provided so liberally to party-based NGOs in Kathmandu, wants to consolidate the gains made in implementing their agendas. Growth of the far Left in Nepal could inspire the Leftist movements in other South Asian countries. All communist groups put together have a majority in Nepali parliament. In fact, communists in Nepal are the strongest in the whole of South Asia. This was something the late Jyoti Basu, senior communist leader in India, admired against the background of the Indian communist movement having a longer history but holding less than 12 per cent of the total seats in parliament.
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