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Nepal shifts rightwards after the revolution

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Protesters take part in a rally organised by the Sister organisations of Nepali Congress Party, the main opposition party to the government, in support of a doctor who is staging a hunger strike to press for better medical education in the country and government decision to ban public protest in some areas in Kathmandu, Nepal, 21 July 2018 (Reuters/Navesh Chitrakar).

In Brief

Ten years ago Nepal became a federal democratic republic when the Maoists gave up armed struggle and signed a comprehensive peace agreement. The subsequent overthrow of the monarch was hailed worldwide as an exemplary case of successful democratic transition.

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Recovering from the debilitating 2015 earthquake is widely recognised as the new republic’s biggest challenge. But politically Nepal faces other barriers, one of them being the integration of a Maoist party into the country’s multi-party system.

With the exception of hardline factions that have denounced electoral politics, there is no Maoist party left in Nepal. The 2018 unification of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist Centre) and the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist Leninist or UML) amounts to a political earthquake, and one that went almost unnoticed.

The media interpreted the Maoists’ electoral debacle in 2013 as a signal of widespread popular disillusionment with all shades of establishment communists and the subsequent landslide victory of the left alliance in 2017 as a sign of their comeback. The left alliance won nearly two-thirds of the seats in the 275-member House of Representatives and formed governments in six out of seven provincial assemblies in 2017.

But this development should not be taken as a sign of a leftist resurgence. It actually marks a definite rightward shift in Nepali politics.

Nepal’s communists are broadly divided into two camps based on whether they approve of electoral participation. Those in the UML, which abandoned Maoist goals in the early 1980s and declared its support for multi-party democracy in 1993, are the ‘right revisionist’ liberal communists. The Maoists, until they mainstreamed themselves, represented the radical left tradition that wanted to capture state power through a protracted peoples’ war.

The Maoists modified this goal back in 2006 and agreed to seek power through electoral competition to resolve politically an armed conflict that they could not win militarily. They did well initially and emerged as the largest party in the first constituent assembly. In return they were able to forge a broad domestic consensus and obtain international support for ending the monarchy and writing a new constitution. That the Maoists called the 2006 agreement the ‘victory document’ is a good indicator of their early ambitious optimism.

Internally the Maoists had prepared for this transition since their ‘Democracy in the Twenty First Century’ proposal in 2003, which culminated in the ‘Prachanda Path’ — a blending of armed revolution, mass movement, peace negotiation and diplomacy. But this election-adjusted political program became increasingly indistinguishable from the UML program. Paradoxically perhaps, they also did worse in successive elections and were reduced to the third largest party by the time the constitution was adopted in 2015.

As they haggled with the UML for seats, power and visibility, the Maoists looked more and more like their liberal comrades, only less experienced in the vagaries of parliamentary politics. The overarching ideological consensus within Nepal’s establishment left also moved rightward towards the UML, which has abandoned even the social democratic scepticism of free markets and foreign investment or the explicit preference for redistributive economic policy and public services targeted to a base made up of working-class groups and social justice movements. Instead the UML wins elections as a nationalist, right-wing force, both socially and economically.

The Maoist-UML merger is also likely to impact the recurring debate on federalism and inclusiveness in Nepal. Of the four main political forces in Nepal, the Maoists, the Madhesi parties and some indigenous ethnic parties support identity-based federalism, while the Nepali Congress and the UML are ‘reluctant federalists’ that support administrative federalism. It remains to be seen whether the Maoists can influence policies on this issue that was once the hallmark of Maoist politics. With their subordinate status compared to the UML, it is unlikely.

The deep, far-reaching nexus in Nepal between foreign funded-NGO activists and civil society groups, political parties and the judiciary also has an overriding impact on the political course of Nepal. The World Bank sees Nepal as poised to become a middle-income country by 2030 if it embraces a new development model. In his Republic Day message in May 2018, Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli emphasised that Nepal has now embarked on this journey of prosperity and development. Shortly afterwards, he launched a social security scheme targeting formal private sector workers, which is proclaimed as ‘a dawn of a new era’.

Where does the Maoist revolutionary politics fit in this grand scheme of things? During a July 2018 interview with the author, former prime minister Dr Baburam Bhattarai highlighted the Hobson’s choice that the Maoists faced in Nepal: if they did not settle for multiparty politics, international powers would brand them terrorists and end their political relevance. But when they embraced it, like social democrats in office everywhere else they had to compromise on socialism. This at least in the short run looks more like improving capitalism than delivering any real change. Nepal’s politics is still in flux. Through all their trials and tribulations, the fighting spirit of the Nepali people will eventually find their own way.

Rumela Sen is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.

This article is part of an EAF special feature series on 2018 in review and the year ahead.

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