The burning question of our incendiary times

By Maila Baje

With the political climate so vitiated by individual values, attitudes, needs and expectations, it is perhaps understandable that key drivers of Nepal’s post-2006 journey today are resorting to puerile Twitter brawls.
Far from illustrating the erosion of great minds, the latest ‘Dollar Mani-Bharu Ram’ exchange serves to enhance understanding of our malady.
Even before the country could appraise whether or why the old order needed to be abolished, the moderate mainstream recognized it could not complete that job alone. It resolved to join hands with unabashed votaries of left-wing totalitarianism and succeeded.
Yet the mainstream simply couldn’t let go of the fiction that it was the senior partner all along. (Seven mainstream parties allied with a single Maoist party on foreign soil. Do the math.)
While each claims most – if not sole – credit, both groups continue to hail the abolition of the monarchy and the centralized state system as a glorious and enduring achievement. They just don’t understand why the people don’t see things that way.
They did once. Now they have their own questions, since the very forces that claim to have empowered the people’s voices have also secured their right not to hear them. Cruel and crude events of a decade and a half have helped to morph the underlying question into what it has become today.
What is so unnatural about this ostensibly pro-people alliance between the totalitarian left and moderate mainstream that they cannot maintain it without external props? Of course, we search in vain for the obvious.
Excuses abound. Maybe the leadership is not up to the task. Perhaps the people are too impatient. It must be those pesky external powers’ fixation with Nepal’s geostrategic importance but conflicting approaches. After all, when returns on investment are calculated in American and Indian currency, much can go wrong on the aspirations-achievements equation.
Yet neither the left nor the mainstream is ready to concede that their ‘success’ may have in fact been doomed from the start.
We can split hairs eternally over who is a nationalist and who a patriot, the virtues of an executive president over a titular one, and whether structural federalism is really better than genuine decentralization. The pros and cons of secularism versus Hindu statehood and ceremonial monarchy over a constitutional one still provide us an escape from the stark imperatives of daily life.
The fact remains that Nepal’s own peculiar circumstances – call them historical, geographic, cultural, social or any combination of the like – will always require a polity capable of addressing and advancing them carefully balancing domestic and external dynamics.
This does not mean a restoration of the monarchy would solve most of our problems. In fact, it may even exacerbate them, if carried out haphazardly. Nor does this preclude honest and meaningful deliberations on alternatives.
Still, we must start by asking ourselves why the successors to the monarchy have failed so miserably on almost all of the areas in which the palace can justifiably claim a ringing record of success.

People’s Review Print Edition