POLITICS-NEPAL: Lopsided Struggles for Power Portend Uncertainty

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Surendra Phuyal

KATHMANDU, Feb 27 2004 (IPS) - Nepal’s royally appointed Prime Minister Surya Bahadur Thapa is in a hurry to hold elections, but is being ignored by political parties intent on keeping the monarchy in check even as Maoist rebels step up their violent insurgency.

With compromise ever evasive in lopsided power tussles between constitutional monarch King Gyanendra, the underground Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and the parliamentary parties, spring in Nepal appears to be burgeoning with uncertainty.

In the past week, the Maoist ”people’s war” uprising entered its ninth year amid gunfights in the countryside, the country of 23 million observed Democracy Day, and political activists took to the streets to demand democracy in the face of a newly assertive monarch.

At the same time, King Gyanendra wrapped up a two-week trip to the conflict-wracked mid-western region and Thapa, his handpicked prime minister, announced that the government was preparing to hold general elections soon.

”We have to sort out a few issues first, thereafter we will announce the dates for the elections to the House of Representatives,” or lower house of parliament, Thapa said at a Feb. 21 gathering of his Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP).

”Now no force, be it Maoists or otherwise, can stop us from organising polls,” he said, adding that early polls would be in keeping with a Feb. 8 pledge by King Gyanendra to organise general elections.

Gyanendra became king after his brother, the late King Birendra, was killed with all his family members in a palace massacre on Jun. 1, 2001. On Oct. 4, 2002, he sacked a democratically elected government headed by Sher Bahadur Deuba, branding him unfit and incompetent.

Since then, political parties including the Nepali Congress, Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist), Nepal Workers and Peasants Party, United People’s Front Nepal and Nepal Sadbhavana Party have been jittery.

Launching a series of agitation programmes, they have called on the monarch to ”correct his mistakes”.

But Gyanendra has said his intervention was needed to tackle widespread corruption, bad governance and the bloody Maoist insurgency, which has claimed more than 10,000 lives since it started in February 1996. More than 7,500 people have been killed in the past two years alone.

”The days of the monarchy being seen and not heard are over,” Gyanendra said in a Feb. 8 speech. He added, however, that he was committed to democracy and free and fair polls that would end the continuing face-off between the king and the parties.

For their part, the party leaders maintain the Thapa government is illegitimate and must be replaced by an all-party government, which in turn would hold elections and begin the process of dialogue with the rebels.

”Thapa can’t decide, he has no right to hold elections, his government is illegitimate,” said Krishna Prasad Sitaula, central working committee member of the Nepali Congress and a member of the People’s Movement Co-ordination Committee that is spearheading an agitation against what they as regressive moves by the king. ”Only an all-party government can do all this.”

Ignoring the prime minister’s calls for elections and even calls for rapprochement from the monarch, the movement has announced another phase of agitation, beginning on Mar. 6.

As part of the effort, the five-party alliance is working to invite all former parliamentarians and other popularly elected representatives, like mayors and chiefs of district and village development committees, to the capital to take part in the protests.

Past agitation since Gyanendra took over 16 months ago appears to have had little impact, however. One reason is that the parties, some of their leaders the targets of official investigations into corruption, lack sufficient popular support.

People also seem to blame the Maoist insurgency on the politicians.

“What more can you expect from these leaders who are responsible for all the ills of the past 14 years?” said Purushottan Dhakal, of Gokarna village on the capital’s outskirts. ”Their under-performance has bred so many Maoists and caused so much bloodshed. What more are they looking for now?”

Disenchantment with the parties that have ruled since democracy was restored in 1990 is pronounced in the countryside, where the Maoists have been most active in pursuing their motto that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

Meanwhile, Gyanendra appears to have tapped a seam of hope that the monarchy can intervene to set things right. His two-week trip to the countryside, denounced by politicians as orchestrated, took him and his escort of heavily armed troops to remote villages in the Maoist hinterland.

Television footage showed the monarch, dressed in military fatigues, shaking hands with people, receiving flowers, and talking to them. This took place against the backdrop of nearby clashes between government forces and the rebels.

Amid the political turmoil, analysts said the best way forward would be to hold elections after first creating an interim government drawn from all the parties.

”That’s the best way the parties can win back the executive powers from the king and retain it,” said political analyst Gunaraj Luitel.

Others said that before polls are held, the interim government must restart peace talks with the rebels.

”Sooner or later, the nation will have to go to the polls. But not before peace negotiations are held with the rebels,” said Gopal Siwakoti Chintan, director of the Centre for Human Rights at Tribhuvan University.

Top leaders of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) have said that they would accept peace negotiations so long as a U.N.-type body mediated.

”Nothing is impossible, Chintan added. ”We have civil society, and we have the diplomatic and the donor communities that can play a role in crucial peace negotiations.”