A World to Win News Service.
With the indefinite postponement of the elections for a Constituent Assembly, the political crisis that began when the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) walked out of the interim government in September has sharply intensified.
The election of a Constituent Assembly to decide the country’s form of government and the future of the monarchy was the centrepiece of the November 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. That agreement brought a ceasefire in the people’s war and eventually took CPN(M) into an interim government in early 2007. Originally the election was expected shortly after that. Eventually it was scheduled for last June and then postponed until 22 November. This date, too, fell by the wayside in early October when the CPN(M) put forward two demands: that the monarchy be abolished immediately, before the election of the Constituent Assembly, and that elections to that Assembly be held on a proportional basis to ensure the representation of the country’s oppressed nationalities and others. While the party expressed its wish that the CA be held on time, it said unless a “special session of parliament takes a decision on the declaration of a republic and a fully proportional election procedure,” holding an election on 22 November would be impossible.
The party’s decision to take this path came at its Fifth Expanded Central Committee meeting in August. In September its ministers resigned from the government. At a mass rally held in Kathmandu, a CPN(M) leader declared, “We will struggle for the purpose of having a real election, not this hypocritical drama.” “We will not accept the code of conduct announced by the election commission and we will disrupt all ongoing election plans,” Baburam Bhattarai told the mass demonstration. “We will launch peaceful protests, but we have the right to counter those who try to suppress our peaceful programme.”
Most political figures in Nepal recognized that the elections – at least thoroughly nationwide elections widely seen as legitimate – could not be held in the face of this kind of opposition. On 5 October, the CPN(M) and the parties active in the former parliament under the monarchy jointly asked the Prime Minister to put off the election until an as-yet unspecified date.
Then Nepal’s House of Parliament convened a special session to consider the CPN(M)’s two demands. The Nepali Congress Party, the dominant political party in recent Nepali history, its two rival wings now reunited, said it would agree to the abolition of the monarchy, but only after the CA election, and that it would not accept proportional representation. The UML (Communist Party of Nepal United Marxist-Leninist), the other leading parliamentary party, called for a compromise: declaring a republic (and therefore the end of the monarchy) immediately, but leaving the declaration’s implementation until the election of the CA. The session was suspended for several days for negotiations. They evidently ended in an impasse, because when parliament reconvened, after only three minutes it again adjourned until 29 October, after the end of Nepal’s religious festival season.
In other words, with the country “at the frontier of a big revolutionary possibility and an awful accident”, as CPN(M) Chairman Prachanda said in his report on the August meeting (www.cpnm.org), a parliament that has done very little in its existence thought it best to do absolutely nothing, because any decisive decisions and changes in the basic political scenario are going to be made elsewhere.
Some observers conclude that one way out is an army coup – either openly in favour of the king or in the more neutral guise of restoring “stability”. BBC, for instance, opines, “The king’s standing, from a position of rock-bottom unpopularity, is beginning to pick up… Many people [presumably this includes important members of the British ruling class BBC executives represent] have begun to talk about Nepal entering an era of either ultra-right (military or military-backed) or ultraleftist (Maoist) dictatorship. They are not ruling out bloodshed between the army and the Maoists, who have concentrated a large number of their members in Kathmandu… [A] final showdown between the army and the Maoists in Kathmandu is more likely than ever.” ………… Read the rest of this entry »
