A SEASON OF POLITICAL CHANGE IN SOUTH ASIA
Focus: Nepal
[April 10, 2005]

2005 did not enter South Asia quietly. Preceded just slightly by the tsunami, a season of change seems to have been ushered in, sometimes in a shocking fashion and sometimes as the culmination of many events. Indians, in India and elsewhere, tend to look at these changes from their point of view, much as the US regards

by Swarna Rajagopalan

the rest of the world through the lens of its interests (and experiences). However, each of India’s neighbours has its own historical trajectory and its own geopolitical constraints. Starting this week with Nepal, this column will consider the storm seasons and spring blossoms that South Asians are experiencing in the region’s smaller states, each from their point of view.

Part 1: Nepal

On February 1, 2005, King Gyanendra Shah dismissed the Nepalese cabinet, declared a state of emergency and assumed direct control of the state. Political leaders, activists and public intellectuals faced house arrest and all contact with the outside world—travel, phone, satellite—were blockaded.

This rupture came almost fifteen years after Nepal’s democratic revolution. The Panchayat system—a form of non-party, guild democracy—was replaced by a multi-party, parliamentary system with a constitutional monarchy. There is no perfect democracy, however democratic practice hones the good habits of free association and free speech. The last one and a half decades have seen a growth in the number and activities of civil society organizations as well as print media that reflect a wide range of political opinion. That Nepalese democracy has survived two recent traumas—the multiple murders of the Nepalese royal family and the Maobadi (Maoist) insurgency—suggests that it is a hardy plant.

The kingdom of Nepal, in the geopolitical in which we know it, came into being as a result of twenty-five years of campaigns by Prithvi Narayan Shah from 1744-1769 that unified the principalities of the Kathmandu valley and its surrounding hills. The new kingdom was a monarchy, whose monarchs were engaged in a multi-generational power struggle with their prime ministers (not unlike the chhatrapati-peshwa struggle in Maharashtra). The Ranas, as the prime ministers and their clans called themselves, kept Nepal in relative isolation of the modernizing consequences of colonialism in other parts of South Asia. In the years after the restoration of the monarchy in 1951, when Kathmandu began to see some changes, the difficult terrain of Nepal’s hill district continued to be cut off from whatever development was taking place.

The consolidated kingdom lies between Tibet, China and India, landlocked. Its southern reaches are both most densely populous and most easily accessible, making India the best transit route to the sea. If matrimonial alliances and temple patronage kept the Nepalese aristocracy networked with the Indian elite and the orthodox Hindu establishment earlier, ease of transit assures that today, political activists of all hues, traffickers and ordinary Indians and Nepalese in search of a livelihood are also well-networked across the border. Along with the cultural affinity between Gangetic India and Nepal, this gives India a disproportionate influence in Nepalese affairs. India is conscious of this, and has through omission and commission exercised its leverage in the past. India’s patronage of pro-democracy activism in the past and its delayed renewal the transit arrangement with Nepal and consequent closure of Nepal’s road access to the outside world in 1990 are important recent examples.

A political platform raising three issues that resonate with the everyday concerns of ordinary Nepalese was bound to appeal and in the post-1990 atmosphere, find open adherents. Uneven development, even negligence of Nepal’s rural hinterland, was the first. Secondly, the stranglehold of the old political elite was resented and even articulated as an end to monarchy seemed a better guarantee of real democracy. (How real democracy is understood of course is a different matter.) Finally, any call for ending Indian influence—real and perceived—in Nepalese affairs was bound to find supporters. The Maoists of Nepal have had no problem recruiting supporters, male and female.

The result has been an all-out confrontation between the insurgents—whose numbers reportedly continue to swell—and the security forces since 1996. Caught in the crossfire, Nepalese are also paying a price in that the remote areas are now even more cut off, so that essential supplies as well as communications with the centre are even more tenuous. Insurgencies and civil wars also allow governments to place ever-greater limits on free speech, movement and association, to the point that King Gyanendra’s February takeover was the culmination of this process. The king pointed to the failure of the elected government’s efforts to end the insurgency as the rationale for his action.

What can Nepal expect in the immediate future? The King’s lack of noticeable success in ending the insurgency or talking with the Maoists, indeed, his apparent lack of a plan for the same, the growing instances of violent abuse by the security forces, the shock of democratic reversal, are unlikely to contribute to a groundswell of support for King Gyanendra. Given the war-weariness of the public, this sentiment is hardly likely however to favour the Maoists. The third party to the crisis—the political parties—have been the least effective in asserting themselves.

Indeed, there is no doubt that an end to the conflict that is tearing Nepal apart and a restoration of real democracy are what will benefit Nepal most. How the Nepalese people get from here to there depends on how firmly the habits of democracy have taken root within them. It is harder to sustain an authoritarian regime in 2005 than it was in any previous historical age; however, resistance is neither for the faint-hearted nor the short-sighted. Despatches from Nepal’s media and activist communities and the resilience one encounters in writers and scholars who have since managed to visit India for meetings suggest that there is no shortage of courage. Vision is a harder issue for a civil society where political opinion ranges from the Maoist to the royalist and back again. Hard as it is, the one requirement for its success is that the vision should be homegrown: exotic transplants seldom work.

If you would like to follow events in Nepal further:
Nepali Times (English weekly), The Kathmandu Post (English daily), Kantipur Online.

Avantika Regmi, Will history repeat itself in Nepal? International Nepal Solidarity Network, April 3, 2005.

Somini Sengupta, Fear, Ennui and Doubt Underlie Calm in Nepal’s Capital, New York Times, April 3, 2005.

Kanak Mani Dixit, Struggling for Nepal's Future—Absolute Monarchy to Absolute Democracy, Foreign Policy in Focus Report, March 2005.

Meenakshi Ganguly, Between the King and the Maoists, Asian Age, March 15, 2005, available here.

Madhushree Thapa, Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy, Penguin India, 2005.

In the next article in this series, we will consider Bhutan.

Swarna Rajagopalan is a scholar of South Asian politics whose work, among other writings, includes State and Nation in South Asia (Lynne Rienner, 2001).

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