Power tussle in NCP Oligarchy

Power tussle in NCP Oligarchy

Voters remain helpless prisoners to the permanence of this farcical democracy

By Bihari Krishna Shrestha

Oligarchy reborn

According to thesaurus, oligarchy occurs when a small group of people together govern a nation or control an organization, often for their own purposes. Presently, what we witness in the name of democratic politics in Nepal clearly fits this bill, and certainly no pun to PM Oli even as he remains part of just such a clique. What is happening in the PM Oli’s own party, the NCP, is also reminiscent of the century-long Rana regime of yore under which an ambitious Rana immediately below the ruling “Maharaja prime minister” would conspire with other similarly ruthless cousins in the hierarchy to generate sufficient pressure to force the former into abdication. The distinguishing hallmark of the regime itself had been the continued oppression and suppression of the people even as the Maharaja and his coterie exert maximum pressure to extract as much resources for themselves from these very hapless people. While individual rulers thus change at regular intervals, and some of them even make some superficial pro-people utterances, they were simply irrelevant for the people in general who were expected to bear all these in silent submission.

While the Rana regime formally ended in 1951, its vestiges have continued to thrive due to the fact that Nepal continues to remain predominantly rural and feudal. While such “court conspiracies’ have always been the hallmark of Nepal’s democracy, it has now resurfaced with vengeance in the attempted ouster of Khadga Prasad Oli both as PM and president of the NCP by his own fellow politicians in the party. True to Nepal’s sustained “democratic” tradition of almost all politicians being corrupt to the core, PM Oli has been no different, except that he seems to have outdistanced his predecessors by a very wide margin both in the diversity of areas and magnitude of corruption and in the audacity with which he has engaged in them. For instance, just recently when there was nationwide clamour against the kickback scandal in the procurement of Covid-19 supplies, PM Oli himself came to the defense of those alleged culprits unabashedly claiming that “there has been no corruption in those deals because I said it so”.

While the Covid-19 pandemic has affected almost all the countries in the world, it is probably only in Oli’s Nepal that the responsible authorities would be using such unprecedented national crisis as a possible opportunity for making vast sums of money in ill-gotten kickbacks with the head of the government himself providing the cover.

One of Nepal’s” democratic” tragedies has been that just about every single politician in post-1990 Nepal have found to be involved in corruption and Olijee too seems to have accomplished this feat in a grand manner. At least, one digitally published source has accused Oli government of 39 different items of corruption during his two and half years’ time in office and they include massive kickbacks from a vast range of sources such as the purchase of wide body and narrow body aircrafts for national carrier, handover of Nepal Trust property to the Yeti Holdings, a private company, purchase of computers by the federal government for educational institutions all across the country, undue tax relief for a private telecom company, Ncell, failure to nab the smugglers of 33 KG gold, and so on and on. One of his closest ministers had to step down a few months ago due to the botched attempt at massively inflating the cost of the proposed security printing press so that some 70 crore rupees could be generated in kickbacks from the proposed procurement. But it has to be mentioned that this de javu has been a bit too disappointing for the people, because Olijee himself had created the image of being a truly nationalist politician and had won massively in the last election.

The paradox of Nepal’s democracy: Attempted ouster of Oli for other than corruption

However, as things stand, an overwhelming majority of members both in the nine-member Secretariat of the NCP and its larger 44-member governing body called the Standing Committee, are now arrayed against Oli. While Olijee has barely 3 members to support him in the Secretariat, in the 44-member Standing Committee, Oli is reported to have only 14 members on his side with most of the rest divided in the two factions led by former PMs, Prachanda and Madhav Nepal. But the paradox is that the reason why such a large majority of politicians are opposed to their own PM, Oli is not for his widely criticized corruption and misrule. The stated reason is that Olijee has been “swechhachaari” in his conduct of office that means he has acted unilaterally and dictatorially and in a self-serving manner paying no heed to wishes of fellow members in the party. PM Oli, who himself is an old hand in Nepali politics is quick to read between the lines of that allegation and has publicly concluded that the lament of these fellow politicians, now trying to tighten the noose around him, has been their perceived lack of their own share in the material benefits that the party being in power should have accrued to them. After all, at the hands of these feudal politicians, Nepal’s rule of politics had degenerated into being one of “bhagbanda” (booty sharing) under which, like in a robbery, every single politician get a share in the power and pelf that the party in power enjoys according to the circumstance of the individual politicians in the party.

From people’s perspective, nothing could be more disappointing and frustrating. To his credit, Olijee as a short-time PM earlier had successfully resisted India in its hegemonic blockade of Nepal in 2015 and had thus cultivated the widely shared image of being a true nationalist who was soon counted as being only next to King Mahendra who had made history in the Sixties by successfully evicting India from its hegemonic and overwhelming stranglehold over Nepal. Thus, with his reemergence as the PM again in the last election in 2017, he was hailed as the proverbial “Knight in the shining armor” who finally arrived at the political scene of Nepal to rescue the country from the ever-deepening morass of corruption and put it on a growth path that the people expected from a democratic dispensation all along. And his declarations in the immediate aftermath of his ascendancy assuring people of his “zero tolerance” for corruption, and his slogan of Prosperous Nepal Happy Nepalese only reinforced their love for the new leader at the helm. But that evaporated far too soon. During short period of two plus years at the helm, very few of his predecessors were so badly tainted. What has been even more disconcerting in this regard has been his capacity for foolhardiness to come to the defense of the actual perpetrators of corruption, mainly his front line ministers, making no bone of the fact that the PM himself may have been the enabler of these sins.

But in the current scuffle in the party for Oli’s ouster, none of the accusers, Prachada, Madhav Nepal, Jhalanath Khanal and Bamdev Gautam in particular and their henchmen in the lower ranks have said even one single word about Mr. Oli’s culpability in corruption, the reason being that none of them have been above reproach themselves during their days in power. After all, the NCP — a hybrid organization of the then UML and Maoists coming together– has been an exercise in ruthless opportunism. The UML wallas know that their hundreds and hundreds of their own cadres had been slaughtered by these Maoists and the relatives of those victims continue to languish in neglect by these politicians who found it to their mundane benefit to shelter these Maoists by bring them under their umbrella and shelter them from transitional justice for their own benefit. This alone is sufficient to indict the then UML politicos as being unprincipled opportunists who are willing to go to any extent for their own selfish end, in the same manner as the feudal elites always behaved in their own communities.

Besides, Prachanda also has an outstanding case in the CIAA that has to do with his defrauding of government of billions of rupees in payment for non-existent Maoist combatants during the days of their demobilization. Similarly, Madhav Nepal as PM earlier has apparently colluded in the defrauding of government property known as Lalita Nivas land grab that too is under CIAA’s scanner. As occasionally reported, PM Oli often threatened them with activating these cases to keep them under his leash.

Voters remain helpless prisoners to unchanging corrupt oligarchy that masquerades as democracy in Nepal

Thus, this game of throne that is currently being played out in the oligarchic circle of NCP politicians leaves little for the people in democratic Nepal to cheer about irrespective of who wins or who loses. They only know that once this settles down, the winners will go after illicit wealth with renewed vigour.

In other genuinely democratic countries, the voters have a fallback position on the opposition bench, in that the opposition parties would not only hound out these corrupt politicians from power but also provide a non-corrupt alternative to the nation. But in Nepal, just about every single politician remains a corrupt man or woman as argued above. While the Nepali Congress remains the main opposition in the parliament, every single Congressite too is known to be corrupt including its president himself who, having presided over the debacle of his party in the last general election has successfully resisted the pressure for him to step down. Given their inane feudal character, there are still politicians in sufficient number in that party who found it opportunistic in their favour to continue to prop up the chief architect of that debacle as its president. Thus, NC too remains as much of an oligarchy. True to their feudal behavior, one of the publicly-disseminated major rationale for NC president Sher Bahadur Deuba to stick to that chair has been that his astrologer has told him that he would be PM in Nepal for six times. So far he has made only four.

But the question remains, in a supposed democracy, where is the respite for the people of Nepal?

The writer can be reached at: biharishrestha@gmail.com

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