LEADERSHIP OF LDC HANDED OVER BY NEPAL Kathamandu, 28 Sept.: Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign Affairs Narayan Kaji Shrestha, who has been in New York in course of attending 67th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, attended the Annual Ministerial meeting of the LDC Group of countries, RSS reports. Addressing the meeting in the capacity of the chair of the Global Coordination Bureau of the LDCs, Minister Shrestha further recalled Nepal’s relentless efforts to advance the shared interests and concerns of LDCs within and beyond the United Nations system and processes. Despite the adverse effect of the ongoing global crises, all members have worked hard and succeeded in forging consensus over a global framework of action for the LDCs in the 4th UN Conference on LDCs which adopted Istanbul Program of Action for 10 years (IPOA), he acknowledged. The Minister emphasized that it is a moral imperative of the global community to scale up support for the LDCs in achieving the overarching goals of sustainable development, said the Nepal´s Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. The need of the time is to ensure full and speedy implementation of the IPOA so as to lift-off half of the LDCs from their current status, he stressed. Nepal had taken over the responsibility of Chairmanship of LDCs Global Coordination Bureau from Bangladesh in September 2009. On the occasion, Shrestha handed over a gavel, as a symbol of Chair, to Prof. Nassirou Bako-Arifari, Foreign Minister of Benin. Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Shrestha held separate bilateral meetings with Jean Asselborn, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign affairs of Luxembourg and Bob Carr, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Australia. On the occasion, the leaders exchanged views on the ways and means of strengthening bilateral relations and agreed to work together in international forums including the United Nations for advancing mutual interests, said the Mission sources nnnn OPINION WIDER DIMENSIONS OF NATIONAL RECONCILIATION Kathmandu, 28 Sept.: His voice tends to be muffled in the cacophony that passes for serious deliberation in the Nepali Congress, but when he does speak, he forces you to sit up and listen. When Dr. Shashank Koirala, son of Nepal’s first elected prime minister B.P. Koirala, announced a few years ago that he was entering politics, many of us expected him to go far, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook/ How naïve we were. In a field already crowded by Koirala scions, the Nepali Congress also had no shortage of political parvenus that had hitched their wagons elsewhere. If B.P.’s legacy was what we expected to drive Shashank political trajectory, we should have known better. Today’s Nepali Congress remembers B.P. perfunctorily once a year. His brothers’ offspring have arrogated to themselves the Koirala mantle and want very little to do with the most illustrious member of the clan. Yet Shashank, like his father, persists in unconventional ways. A few years ago, he suggested publicly that a new constitution was being prepared outside Nepal. This time, Shashank has expostulated his views across a wider canvas, linking the issues of federalism and religion to our geopolitics. And he has done so by boldly comparing the politics of his father and his father’s ostensible arch-nemesis, King Mahendra with those of the present-day rulers. There was much more that united these two great men of a bygone generation than conventional wisdom would lead us to believe. King Mahendra’s seminal experience occurred during his months in exile in New Delhi with his father in 1950-1951, where he observed the maneuverings unfolding against Nepal in the name of change. Today, based on the limited declassified material available, we have a better understanding of how wide apart the Indian and British/American governments stood on matters unfolding in Nepal. It was fortunate for our independence and sovereignty that a toddler prince was left behind in Kathmandu bear the crown of a sovereign nation. A slight misstep here or there and who knows how Nepal would look on today’s political map. That Nepal succeeded in remaining outside the Indian union so riles one class of today’s Indians that they are still feverishly searching for ‘evidence’ to back the long-held canard that King Tribhuvan had offered to merge Nepal with India. The political compromise of 1950-1951 represented a turning point in B.P.’s political evolution. Although he led the Nepali Congress in the Rana-Congress coalition, he was acutely aware of New Delhi’s attempt to relegate the Nepali Congress to the junior-most status in the tripartite experiment. He found himself ‘tricked’ into pushing for the resignation of Prime Mohan Shamsher Rana only to find himself out of power for the next eight years. As prime minister in 1959, B.P. vision for Nepal was scarcely that different from King Mahendra’s, if you put aside the issue of democracy. With Tibet issue heating up, the Sino-Indian dispute flaring and the Soviet juggernaut rolling on, Nepal had been caught in the vortex of the Cold War. That these regional and international machinations could not be pursued out in the open was well understood by those foreign governments who had advised King Mahendra not to hold the elections at all. If the Indians, Chinese, Americans and Soviets wanted to pursue their respective quests, they had to be able to do so in the dark, not in partnership with a dynamic elected prime minister. B.P.’s exasperation after his last meeting with Nehru and his seeming apathy in the midst of rumors of an impending royal coup bespeak a realization that he had lost out to regional and international forces. In his prison diaries and subsequent publications and pronouncements, B.P., contrary to his party colleagues and much of the royal opposition, was careful not to blame King Mahendra entirely for the subversion of the democratic process. The prevailing geopolitical dynamics, in B.P.’s view, were what they were. Still, he believed he could bring King Mahendra and his successors around to the intrinsic value of democracy to Nepal’s well being. (In terms of international powers, it was immensely significant that B.P. was the least critical of the Chinese.) King Mahendra, for his part, was always effusive in his praise of B.P., even while he ordered the former premier’s incarceration for eight long years. If Nepal ever had a prime minister the country could be proud of, the monarch often asserted, it was only B.P. The substance of King Mahendra’s geopolitics during the partyless Panchayat years was a virtual continuation of B.P.’s, be it on the urgency of maintaining equidistance between India and China or exercising Nepal’s independent international options by, among other things, building relations with Israel, a new nation shunned by both our giant neighbors. King Mahendra, Maila Baje feels, must have felt that keeping B.P. under royal lock and key would prevent India – as B.P.’s would-be host in exile – from deploying him as a tool of destabilization in the guise of democracy promotion. When B.P. was finally released from prison in 1968, it was Surya Bahadur Thapa, with his known pro-Indian proclivities, who intimidated the former premier into exile. Once across the southern border, B.P. was cold-shouldered by Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, and learned his lessons well. Although he continued to up the ante against the royal regime, India’s machinations in the chain of events that led to creation of Bangladesh spurred behind-the-scenes efforts toward reconciliation with King Mahendra. The monarch’s unexpected death in Bharatpur in 1972 shut the door on that prospect. While the Nepali Congress persisted with its anti-palace activities during King Birendra’s early reign, B.P. saw a repetition of India’s conspiratorial policies in the events leading up to its annexation of Sikkim. A virtual prisoner of the Indian state, B.P. chose to return to Nepal in 1979 having formally articulated his national reconciliation policy. It was scarcely accidental that people like Surya Bahadur Thapa would call for his execution. Instead, King Birendra permitted him go abroad for medical treatment and B.P., true to his word, returned home to answer the sedition charges awaiting him. To cut a long story short, B.P.’s national reconciliation policy was much more than a blueprint for compromise between the monarchy and the Nepali Congress. It represented a way in which Nepal could reconcile its perilous geographic position and with its ability to exercise its sovereign international option regardless of the changes in time or circumstance. Shashank can only be commended for articulating that reality so succinctly. Nnnn BURDENED BY WOES • Kathmandu, 28 Sept.:Flip-flop politics may be rare in functioning democracies; not so in countries barely managing to hold elections, with the representatives interpreting the mandate any which way they like. It is, therefore, no surprise that the so-called major political parties in Nepal make a statement today, only to announce a big amendment to the same the next day, and actually reject it altogether the following, day Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review. Two recent cases corroborate the above assessment yet once again, making it clear that the main problem is within us and not elsewhere outside the country’s borders. Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s Maoists had been pressing for a federal structure of the state on the basis of single ethnic identity. Dahal and his company rejected any argument that suggested such approach was a guarantee to future troubles. Last month, the Maoist leader dropped what should have been a bomb shell to his party members and supporters. He made an about-turn that would normally have made the announcer himself tottering. Dahal is a made of a different stuff. He says things he does not intend to accomplish and makes promises without the least intention of fulfilling them. His latest quick-change, therefore, made even his workers not surprised at all. Then what does Dahal’s party stand for? After all it was the single-largest party in the Constituent Assembly. At one stroke, Dahal took a diametrically opposite stand to what he had led his cadres to accept and press for in public. The same party members are now taking the contradictory words of their chief without even whispering, “Why the change in stance?” If people do not learn lessons even after six and a half years of political perfidy, not even Lord Pashupatinath might be willing to come to their rescue. The Mohan Baidya-led Maoists, who broke away to form a new party only after the dissolution of the CA and wasting four years and billions of rupees, remains too conspicuous by total silence on the issue. It is so far against multi-ethnicity based federal structure. It may be appropriate to recall here that after his visit to Beijing shortly after he parted company with his long time party boss Dahal’s group, Baidya had hinted that Beijing was not for the type of federal structure demanded by some ethnic groups in Nepal. Dahal is also believed to have been advised likewise by New Delhi. In other words, China and India seem to have shaken hands over the format of the impending federal structure in Nepal. This might not be an ideal situation for an independent, sovereign country. But this is how the political spectrum stands in Nepal today. Worse, members of the two Maoist parties have not shown any enthusiasm for explaining why Dahal changed his tune and why Baidya chose to keep mum over the development. In the Nepali Congress, embroiled in a vertical intra-organizational faction-fighting between party president Sushil Koirala and former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba, party cadres are locked in utter confusion because of a thick cloud of uncertainty over the Maoist plea that the much extended CA should be revived “for a brief period.” Koirala for weeks had been parroting that the nation must go for fresh elections. Three weeks ago, he took an abrupt turn saying that the CA could be revived. Less than 48 hours later, he retracted and again took the former stand that is there was “no question” of supporting the resuscitation of the CA. later, he said that the question of CA revival can be discussed only after Bhattarai’s resignation from government. Consumed by his desire to become the prime minister for a fourth time, Deuba calls for the revival of CA. He was the one who dissolved the previous House of Representatives during the constitutional monarchy days announcing elections to be held within six months. He pleaded he could not fulfill his commitment to conduct the elections as pledged to the nation. His effort at prolonging his stay in the prime minister’s chair even after shamelessly failing to fulfill his public pledge was no different from what Baburam Bhattarai is doing today. Bhattarai’s on-going bid is as correct or incorrect as Deuba’s stand ten years ago. In order to regain the confidence of the people, NC should demonstrate its political integrity, even if belatedly, to make public an honest statement on where it went wrong since November 2005. This is the only chance for the country’s oldest political party to realistically attract serious public attention, which might enable it to emerge as the biggest party from the next general elections. It is the last chance to avoid any staggering erosion in its support base at a time when voters are fed up by the mess the “major parties” have created. If the NC abandoned the Maoist agendas that it had adopted without taking cognizance of the implications, the party that happened to lead three major political movements since 1950 would have more than a fighting chance of bouncing back as the force it used to be prior to November 2005. What did B.P. Koirala, whose philosophy is given a ritualistic lip-service once a year, propagate even when faced with numerous challenges? Such are the ways Nepali politicians function while their party members generally opt for “being practical” in the prevailing situation. But who made the existing situation? It is these leaders themselves. Now even the so-called civil society leaders and NGO-wallahs who had called for a federal structure that Dahal has publicly abandoned, yet they have also chosen to be silent. Inconsistency makes an individual or group vulnerable to the manipulation of various forces. In the case of national politics, extraneous forces find such situations a fertile ground for more than an elbow room to have their agendas on target and direct their propaganda accordingly. History tells us all that political parties and leaders who have the courage to admit a misstep and a greater courage to correct it stand them in good stead eventually. Their place in history is also assured as a source of appreciation. For mistakes can happen. Changing the course for the right and better is what requires of any party or leader seeking eventual acknowledgement of their rightful place in history. Otherwise, they are doomed to downfall sooner or later. Voices might be stifled or people fooled for a short while but never so in the long run. (The writer can be reached at: trikalvastavik@yahoo.com) nnnn