MAOISTS, NC ACTIVISTS CLASH IN SINDHULI Kathmandu, 11 Oct.: Maoist and NC activists clashed in Sindhulimadi Thursday following abduction of five main opposition activists by workers of ruling Maoists Police fired in the air and lobbed a teargas shell to bring the crowd under control. Maoists attacked general committee member Navraj Shrestha nnnn OPINION Perils of pressing the Cambodia parallel Kathmandu, 11 Oct.: Cambodia has continued to fascinate Nepal’s political class ever since our Maoist rebels burst on to the scene in the mid-1990s. Over time, the South East Asian nation was increasingly cited as an example of how avowedly republican armed communists and the monarchy could coexist, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.. During the violent insurgency, Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Dr. Baburam Bhattarai regularly spoke of a Sihanouk-like role for the king in Nepal if the palace adopted pro-people policies. A Nepali national serving as a senior officer with the United Nations Children Fund soon began recounting his experiences in Cambodia early in his career as the Khmer Rouge had rolled into Phnom Penh. After retiring from the UN, the gentleman returned to Kathmandu as a peacebuilder – donning the title ‘former assistant secretary-general of the United Nations’. Our peace politics took a dramatic turn in the spring of 2006, sidelining and eventually abolishing the monarchy. Dr. Bhattarai still praised the Khmer Rouge and denounced all those allegations of crimes against humanity as nothing but western propaganda. Six years later, as talk persists of how the Maoists and the monarchy may yet coexist on a platform of nationalism (with the mediation of the Chinese), we were justified in wondering how Cambodians saw developments in Nepal. Well, Prime Minister Hun Sen gave us an inkling last week. Hitting out at UN human rights envoy Dr. Surya Subedi – without naming him – for writing ‘untrue’ reports about the Southeast Asian nation, Samdech Hun Sen said the envoy should worry about his homeland Nepal instead. The author of the untrue writings was a national of a country that “has already abolished the monarchy” and “at this hour... has no constitution”, the Cambodian prime minister reminded graduating students in Phnom Penh. In fairness, the UN assigned Dr. Subedi responsibility for Cambodia and he concluded, among other things, that Cambodian land disputes “indicate an increasingly desperate and unhappy population”. Moreover, Dr. Subedi’s predecessor had resigned in 2009 amid a war of words with Phnom Penh. Still the Oxford-educated legal scholar mounted a spirited defense of developments in Nepal. “Nepal has a liberal democracy where the judiciary is independent and people do not go to jail for criticizing the government,” Dr. Subedi said in a written response to Hun Sen’s comments. “Nepal has a democratic interim constitution at the moment and people have been trying to write a new constitution with a view to strengthening democracy, human rights and rule of law. Both Cambodia and Nepal have gone through similar experience in the past and have a great deal to learn from each other,” he added. Regardless of how the exchange plays out, Maila Baje thinks the episode suggests the wisdom of acknowledging the limits of the Cambodian parallel for Nepal. The Khmer Rouge waged war and rained devastation upon the Cambodians several times deadlier than what our Maoists did. Moreover, the Khmer Rouge did so while Mao Zedong was still alive and communism had not collapsed in the rest of the red world. Our Maoists, for their part, espoused a discredited ideology only to overthrow the established order by exploiting and exacerbating local – and often contradictory – faultlines in what seems to be a sideshow to a larger geopolitical game. Today, our Maoist luminaries are in power and enjoying pelf and privilege, while the Khmer Rouge leadership – at least the remnant that is still breathing – faces charges of genocide. (The UN acquitted its peace mission in Cambodia in the early 1990s impressively, while messing things up more in Nepal, but that is another story.) Hun Sen, a junior functionary of the Khmer Rouge who was later purged and joined the Vietnamese-backed administration, reinvented himself as a democrat in a way no Nepali Maoist could ever hope to. Our dethroned monarch, far from hopping between Pyongyang and Beijing, walks among the people. If anything, we would be served better by looking at our problems – and solutions – for what they are. nnnn Perfidious merchants of poverty Kathmandu, 11 Oct.: One of the 25 countries listed as least-developed country (LDC) when the category was formed in 1971, Nepal continues to be an LDC 40 years later, now among the 48 countries that make up the group. Prospects for graduation are extremely dim, and loktantra is not going to change that, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review.. For all the talk of poverty rate falling to 25 percent, the fact remains that the average poverty line used is an atrocious 20,000 rupees per person per year. Just raise the poverty line to 2 dollars a day (at purchasing power parity) and the poverty rate more than doubles. The majority of the people continue to live in sub-human conditions; many of those who are just above the official poverty line live a life of extreme privations no different from those counted as poor in official statistics. Whatever progress has been made on the poverty reduction front cannot be credited to loktantra or for that matter prajatantra that preceded it; credit goes in significant part to the at least two million Nepalis who toil on foreign shores and remit money back home. While remittances that have largely kept the economy afloat in the last one and a half decades or so, they also represent a false sense of prosperity -- something that can vanish in a jiffy the moment external conditions turn sour. Few countries in the world have developed solely on the back of remittances. The structural impediments to growth and development that characterize LDCs have Nepal in their vice-like grip. The domestic output and employment growth engine, never at full throttle, shows no sign of being kick-started in loktantra which Nepalis were hoodwinked by political crooks, civil society opportunists, fifth columnists and foreign messiahs into believing to be a system of milk and honey but which turned out to be a recipe for bad governance, corruption, organized violence and terror, anarchy, and naked foreign intervention. At least in the days of Old Nepal one could get some comfort in the fact that the country, though poor, was one of the rare LDCs never having been colonized. New Nepal, however, is buffeted by foreign intervention so intense and all-pervasive that this once-proud nation’s fate is decided in foreign capitals. This is something being admitted, paradoxically and shamelessly, by even those catapulted to power under foreign aegis, including the current prime minister of JNU mint. King Birendra had addressed an LDC conference in Paris on behalf of some LDCs during the Panchayat days. Nepal’s international stature is in tatters now. Take, for instance, its drubbing in the elections to the General Assembly when it had fielded ex-UN bureaucrat Kul Chandra Gautam when it was clear as daylight that he stood no chance against the Qatari candidate. The structural impediments to growth and development are compounded by perennial lack of cooperation and, worse, continuous inimical interventions from a neighbour which surrounds the country on three sides and on which this country is dependent for transit. It is an open secret that it was only reluctantly and grudgingly that India conceded to the separation of trade and transit treaties with Nepal in 1978. Never quite reconciled to the idea of a sovereign and independent Nepal, Indian authorities exploited Nepal’s vulnerability as a landlocked country to effect a regime change in 1990, in the process earning the dubious distinction of being the first and only country after World War II to impose a blockade on a landlocked neighbour without a declaration of war. Nepal’s transit travails at the hands of India continued, even during India-friendly multiparty prajatantra years and now loktantra. Despite the granting of duty-free access to the Indian market to virtually all Nepali products on paper, a formidable array of barriers, ranging from para-tariff barriers to non-tariff barriers, is in place that makes the Indian market almost as impenetrable as Karna’s armour at least for Nepal’s exportable goods. The result is there for everyone to notice: an ever-ballooning trade deficit, to be financed by sending youths overseas, and to India to work as “durbans”. India’s large market has become an apt illustration of the saying “lasha ma soon chha, mero kan buchhai” [goldin Lhasa,my ears bare]. Indian authorities inherited a colonialist mentality from their British masters and attempted to make small neighbouring nations India’s satellite states by fomenting instability there. Just a couple of years after its independence from Britain, India imposed an unequal treaty on Bhutan and then on Nepal. In 1975, it gobbled up Sikkim, incidentally an LDC until then. Not satisfied with the offerings of pro-Indian governments produced by the multiparty politics of the 1990s that saw Nepal’s age-old foreign policy based on the Panchasheel being discarded and hard-won gains in sovereignty despite the 1950 treaty eroded, the world’s largest electoral democracy went on to provide succor to the Maoists in a baleful game of hunting with the hound and running with the hare. The regime change of 2006 under critical Indian midwifery led to the abolition of the monarchy, long a thorn in India’s design dating from Pundit Nehru to make Nepal a vassal state. But Nepal is no Sikkim or Bhutan; it is too big to be gobbled up or turned into a total poodle. It is now stuck in India’s throat. Even after having succeeded in seeing to it that millions of Indians obtain Nepali citizenship, choice hydropower projects in Nepal are decided to be developed as export-oriented projects even as the country reels under acute power cuts and Nepal is pushed to the brink of disintegration along ethnic lines, Indian officialdom knows that everything is not going as per its script. If India had almost an effective monopoly over foreign intervention in Nepal in the pre-loktantra period, the West (Europeans and Americans) is now having a field day in pushing its insidious agendas here. The Europeans and Americans, mainly under the influence of the Christian lobby, showed their true colors in abetting the regime change of 2006. While India’s animosity towards the monarchy arose from the latter’s indefatigable assertion of Nepal’s sovereignty and independence, the Christian West seized the moment to their advantage for a different reason. The Hindu monarchy presented the greatest hurdle to proselytism in this poor country whose “pagan” souls the religious fundamentalists at heart masquerading as secularists in Washington and European capitals were keen on emancipating with the soothing balm of the Gospel. Be that as it may, the ultimate blame for all this mess lies squarely in the midst of us Nepalis, who have allowed our nation to be sabotaged by assorted foreign interests. It is the collective we who have produced the likes of Baral and Hatechhu who might even argue without batting an eyelid that Sikkim’s annexation by India was good for the former Himalayan kingdom because it then ceased to be an LDC and became a “developing” country at the stroke of Lhendup Dorje’s acquiescence. With civil society activists like these, who needs enemies? (The writer can be reached at: trikalvastavik@yahoo.com) nnnn