The end of the civil war (2006)

This is an old essay I came across today. It was written in the summer of 2006 when the Maoists took their first steps to entering the political mainstream after years in hiding, and a decade-long civil war. A read through it even six years later clearly shows how little progress the country has made from then until now. 

My home is in Nepal’s terai, or lowland, region, a few hours drive south of Kathmandu. The Maoists have not been very active in the southern parts of the country until recently. I first heard of them in 1997 when I was a student in Darjeeling. To me then, they were a distant and small group of extremists in the steep, rugged hills that make up much of Nepal.

Now, nearly 10 years later, the Maoists are bringing major political change to the leadership of Nepal, a poor country where the repeated failure of governments to raise the standard of living has only deepened poverty. 

The rapid dismantling of the king's powers over the last few weeks were but the first steps leading to a dramatic shift in Nepalese politics that could forever alter the outlook of the state.

Sometimes when one reads news reports about Nepal, the picture presented is as though change is nearly completed and all problems are about to come to an end. It’s a black and white view. In fact, there are lots of major questions and issues still up in the air regarding the Maoists, their policies and the leadership of Nepal. A lot remains unanswered.

But not in doubt is that the Maoists – or the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) - will soon be part of the interim government that is to govern Nepal until a new constitution is framed. 

Despite appearances, the rapid rise of the Maoists and their arrival in Kathmandu this year is not directly behind the sudden decline of the monarchy. In fact, things have fallen in place for the Maoists and they have been the beneficiaries of a void in Nepal’s leadership which had long existed and had grown markedly since the massacre of King Birendra and his family in 2001. The appeal of the Maoists has stemmed from the apathy of Nepal’s leaders to the public. The squabbling and infighting over trivial affairs only exacerbated affairs.

It is unclear whether a government that includes the Maoists will produce their promised reforms for the people. “Once the war is over, we believe we can develop economically and otherwise at a very fast pace,” their chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal – known simply as Prachanda, or ‘the fierce one’ - told the BBC recently.

Since the Maoist army began seizing power in remote villages 10 years ago, more than 12,000 people have died in the conflict. At first local police chiefs were assassinated; then the quest for money to finance the rebellion led to extortion and the killings of citizens and raids on banks. This is not to suggest that the Maoists were the sole perpetrators of violence, for the atrocities committed by the state were also as numerous as they were ghastly.

How Maoist is the ideology? Nepal’s insurgent-based party appears to be more pragmatic than Maoists elsewhere - for instance, it says that it is not against private ownership. In its rural strongholds, it is said that women are no longer subordinated as happens elsewhere in this – until recently – officially Hindu kingdom, and the Maoists also claim to have done away with casteism. For now, however, the evidence is that the Maoists still use fear to control their areas. Anybody even suspected of informing the police or the army is killed.

A current big issue in Nepal is that the insurgents refuse to disarm before new elections – still not scheduled - to Nepal’s Constituent Assembly, which is to draft a new constitution. Prachanda says the Maoists will keep their arms until the people are given their rights. Many fear that as long as the Maoists refuse to give up their weapons, free and fair elections to a Constituent Assembly cannot be held.

There is an air of inevitability in Nepal: the current king and the traditional parties have been tried and failed and many believe that ordinary Nepalese think that now the Maoists have to be tested. Keeping in mind the Maoist history of violence and intimidation, the future of the country remains uncertain.

As direct rule imposed by King Gyanendra crumbled, even the governing parties seemed to accept the Maoists. In June, the Home Minister travelled to a rebel outpost in the west of Nepal to escort the Maoist leaders to Kathmandu. The government flew Prachanda and his deputy to Kathmandu in a chartered helicopter. In the capital, the two were driven to the Prime Minister's residence in an official car amid tight security. 

Barely three months earlier, they had been the most sought-after "terrorists" in Nepal. Now they were given a reception due only to heads of state. The script could not have panned out any better for rebel leader Prachanda and his deputy, the Maoists’ chief ideologue, Dr Baburam Bhattarai. 

The insurgency began only in 1996. On February 4 of that year, Bhattarai, then the chairman of the parliamentary wing of the United People's Front (UPF), put a 40-point letter to the Prime Minister, which said that if steps were not taken to meet their demands by February 17, “we will be forced to adopt the path of armed struggle against the existing state power”. Soon after, the UPF pulled out of electoral politics and Bhattarai and the little-known Prachanda, who headed the clandestine wing of the UPF, formed the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) with Prachanda as its chairman.

Few Nepalese took serious note of the Maoists in the first few years. The political parties, the late King Birendra and the people by and large failed to comprehend the effectiveness of the insurgency. All of them thought that the Maoists' grand designs to overthrow the monarchy and establish a republic were little more than ridiculous.

With leaders who are ruthless and pragmatic, the Maoist force – armed mostly with weapons seized from defeated army units - has grown into a cohesive political unit. It’s estimated that one-third of the insurgents are female and recruits are as young as 14.

Today, the Maoists call the shots in the capital. For few, the rise of the Maoist insurgency from its humble beginnings ten years ago has been somewhat unprecedented. For many others, however, the rise of the Maoists in Nepalese politics was but an eventuality.

The mid-western districts in which the insurgency took root are among the poorest in the country, plagued with class and gender differences, very little arable land and the lowest rates of literacy. These districts had seen hardly any development as the proceeds of Nepal’s paltry economic growth were spent in or near the capital. The mid-west is also among Nepal’s most inaccessible countryside, suiting the Maoists’ guerrilla-style warfare.

In the areas they control, the Maoists have declared war on alcohol and gambling. Prachanda says that he sees Nepal in future as “free from caste, class, regional and gender exploitation”. 

The Maoists have been helped by the complete failure of the political parties and ironically, even by King Gyanendra who curbed basic freedoms on February 1, 2005, to meet the insurgent threat. The politically astute Maoists declared a ceasefire and claimed that they wanted to hold talks with the king, but he refused to speak with "terrorists". 

The Maoists and the traditional political parties then entered into an uneasy marriage aimed at King Gyanendra. Following King Gyanendra’s failure to do anything significant to counter the insurgency, the Nepali people went on to the streets. Protests forced the King to abandon political power in April and Nepal’s leadership went back to the political parties. 

In this manner, with the king complete sidelined, and the political parties already squabbling amongst themselves, the Maoists are the only political entity to have made gains. The Nepali political party leaders are still not trusted by the people and in a sense, there is a crisis of leadership in Nepalese politics. The current Prime Minister, Girija Prasad Koirala is 84 and nobody is even being talked about as his successor. 

Over the last few weeks, the Maoists have been determined in pushing their ideas. The king's powers have been taken away; the country is no longer a Hindu Kingdom – it’s a secular state; an interim constitution is being drafted; an interim government will soon be formed; and an agreement has been reached to elect a constituent assembly.

Long on promises, the Maoists pose many questions. Will they seek to establish a totalitarian state, in spite of their commitment to democracy? Will they abolish private ownership? Will they curb political freedoms? It is not possible for the Nepalese to trust the Maoists and forget all about their chequered past, but Nepal now has no choice.

Reverting to type

After an unusual month of May in which Nepal’s ministers were uncharacteristically busy and active, an air of normalcy seems to have returned over the country. This normalcy is chracterised by policy paralysis and political infighting. Hardly is a minister even talking about the constitution, and nor has there been any attempt to rectify the differences between the four key parties – the Maoists, the Nepali Congress, the UML and the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum – on the tricky issues of ethnicity-based federalism and the form of government to be adopted.


The Constituent Assembly had a truly historic opportunity to set the country on the path to stability and progress, and they blew it. With perfunctory admissions of failure, they seem to have already moved on, while the nation is still reeling from the (non-) constitutional crisis. 

On the one hand, Baburam Bhattarai speaks of a consensus government comprising of all key parties. On the other, he couldn't maintain unity even within his own party with Mohan Baidhya’s split. The Koiralas and Sher Bahadur Deuba are at loggerheads in the Nepali Congress and perfectly happy to tear the party apart, while it is difficult to keep track of how many Madhesi parties there now are. With such levels of infighting within parties, it is rather naive to expect that Nepal can have a national unity government, or one for too long anyway.


Bhattarai has said Nepal will go to the polls in November. Now Nepal’s Acting Chief Election Commissioner Neelkantha Upreti has said on record that if elections cannot be conducted in November, then they could potentially be postponed till 13 April, 2013. In a country where nothing happens on time if it involves political leadership, this is an open invitation to the political parties to care even less than they already do. This statement by Upreti could not have come at a worse time. The earlier the country heads to the polls, the less will be the damage the democratic set up, which has been made into some kind of a joke by the four big political parties.


This is the time for Nepal to get its act together. The political parties need to look within before pointing fingers at one another for their failure to write the constitution on time. There are no clear lines being taken by the political parties. While no stone is being left unturned to tear apart the points of views of other parties, no concrete attempts are being made to provide solutions either. Each party is stuck upon its own idea of federalism (whether Nepal should have single ethnicity-based, or multiple ethnicity-based states). The discussions around the federal structure are based on rigid party positions as opposed to the requirements of the country and its people.


At no point in any of these discussions are the prospects of the citizens of the country important. That these politicians are the “representatives” of the Nepalese people escapes them completely.


Post dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Nepal has returned to normalcy with quite astonishing speed. It has reverted to type. 

We’re gonna make them a promise we can’t keep

Make that several promises. We will bring you federalism. We will bring about social inclusion. We will write you a constitution. We will deliver you the right to elect a government. There were other promises too – those pertaining to greater economic growth or an improvement in infrastructure for instance, but let’s leave those for another day.

Four years ago on 28 May 2008, Nepal’s Constituent Assembly met for the first time and promptly abolished the Monarchy and declared Nepal a Republic. Its mandate was to finish writing a new constitution in two years. It did not come close.

Writing a constitution for Nepal was never going to be an easy task, particularly considering a populace split along ethnic, linguistic, geographic, social and economic lines, among others. Cleavages in Nepali society have always run deep, but traditional power structures have only been challenged in recent years, owing primarily to the Maoists and the political parties of the Madhes which have picked up the cause of several marginalised groups of people. As a result, pretty much for the first time, the various divides in Nepalese society came to the fore in the corridors of power. The Congress and the UML, on the other hand, have sought to preserve traditional power structures which are largely beneficial to their interests.

That the political parties did not come to an agreement on the restructuring of the state is not very surprising. However, had they begun discussing federalism three years ago instead of three months ago, could they have reached an agreement? Perhaps.

But did they have the urgency to do so? Perhaps not.

This is why I think, not. The elected Constituent Assembly was also to act as an interim legislature for two years. What this meant was that the same people who were to write the constitution were also to govern the country. This meant a) too much responsibility on the shoulders of one organ of the state, and b) too much authority vested in one body. The former ensured very little good came out of the Assembly in terms of real policy and the latter directly led to a struggle to control the Assembly.

It is the latter which ultimately led to a failure of this magnitude. The leading political figures in the country (across the political spectrum), who had been elected and given a mandate to write a constitution for the country were more interested in controlling the Assembly, and by extension the government. That no political party had a clear majority in the assembly only exacerbated the problem.

The leaders of the key political parties, instead of striving to write a constitution in the best interests of the country, were attempting to write a constitution that would play to the gallery and appease their vote banks. The result was a politically charged Constituent Assembly, members of which were not willing to work together towards a common cause. There was no common goal and each party had its own objectives. Essentially, what should have been the task of technocrats was left to the politicians, while the technocrats themselves were reduced to sitting on toothless constitutional advisory committees.

Moreover, even the failure to write a constitution within the stipulated timeframe was not much of a concern for the key leaders of the political parties. Since the constituent assembly was also acting as the interim legislature, an extension of the assembly’s term meant an automatic extension of the terms of the elected politicians. It did not just stop at that – through various power sharing agreements, supposed “unity” governments, or just as a result of a leadership vacuum, the Constituent Assembly managed to give us five prime ministers from three key political parties over four years. Even as months passed by and common Nepali folk grew increasingly impatient, key political leaders continued bickering. Unfortunately, they bickered only over ministerial portfolios and not the constitution. At least not until it was too late.

Either advertently or otherwise, the whole exercise of having the same 601-strong body serve as a Constituent Assembly as well as an interim legislature backfired spectacularly. By the end of the four years, the Constituent Assembly had been reduced to an exclusive club, one which had blackballed the remainder of the Nepali population.