Frustrated by an unbiddable general, the Maoists quit the government, and Nepal’s hopes for peace recede
IF NEPAL’S mainstream politicians, army and Big Brother, India did not like Maoists in government, it is hard to imagine how the scrubbed-up guerrillas will be improved out of it. The resignation of the Maoist prime minister, Pushpa Kamal Dahal, or Prachanda (“fierce”), on May 4th offers a chance to find out. Mr Dahal was protesting against a move by the president, egged on by the aforementioned critics, to reverse his sacking of the country’s army chief, General Rookmangud Katawal. Unless President Ram Baran Yadav relents, the Maoists say they will not rejoin the government. The debacle has jeopardised an already flagging peace process.
General Katawal deserved the boot. A devotee of Nepal’s deposed king, Gyanendra, whose office was abolished last year to draw the Maoists into Nepal’s first post-war election, he has never hidden his hatred for his former foes in a decade-long conflict. In December, he refused to curtail a recruitment drive, which the UN called a violation of the 2006 peace agreement. When the government then refused his request to extend the service of eight brigadier-generals, he again resisted. After he forbade the army to take part in an athletics contest last month because the Maoists’ former army, currently corralled under UN supervision, was also to take part, the government asked General Katawal to explain himself on all three issues. His haughty response prompted Mr Dahal’s action.
The general’s insubordination conceals a more serious disagreement: over how to dispose of the Maoists’ former fighters. Under the terms of the peace agreement, negotiated between the Maoists and their political opponents under India’s aegis, some of the 23,000-odd corralled must be recruited into the army. The instrument of a power grab by Gyanendra in 2005, the army must meanwhile be made less elitist and more accountable. But General Katawal, with India’s blessing, has resisted these reforms. Pointing to the Maoists’ continuing revolutionary rhetoric, his backers argue that only an unreformed army can defend Nepal from its elected government. Kumar Madhav Nepal, a leader of a mainstream leftist party known as the UML, and touted as the next prime minister, says they “clearly want to capture power”.
The Maoists’ rhetoric is certainly worrying. So is the thuggery of their storm-trooping youth wing. Yet Maoist leaders also hint that their virulent rhetoric is to placate their frustrated rank-and-file. On May 6th, Mr Dahal said he would not join a national-unity government, as his opponents say they want, unless Mr Yadav reversed his decision; but the Maoists’ democratic commitment was unchanged.
No doubt, he has given reason to doubt this. Yet worries about how easily the army might be corrupted by Maoist recruitment may be overblown. And the peace process, which should also entail accounting for the war’s atrocities, is on hold. So is work on a drafting a new constitution, with which Nepal’s elected assembly is primarily entrusted. With almost half its two-year term gone, little progress has been made, and, needing a two-thirds majority, is unlikely while the Maoists, who control 38% of the house, are in opposition.
Even with more goodwill, this exercise would be contested. The Maoists, in a draft constitution released in March, demand an executive presidency and extreme devolution of powers from the centre to 13 ethnically-based provinces. The UML wants a ceremonial president, a directly elected prime minister and a similar devolution, but to less ethnically-tinged states. The Nepali Congress, the third main party, advocates a Westminster-style parliamentary system, and less devolution.
While squabbling continues in Kathmandu, organic devolution is taking place in many mutinous places. It is most extreme in the southern Terai region, where a 2006 insurrection by ethnic Madhesis has sparked agitations by their neighbours. A militant group of Tharus, who claim to be the region’s original inhabitants and 42% of its population (or double the government’s estimate), rose up this year in protest against their official classification as Madhesis, and to demand Tharu control of an autonomous Terai.
This week, in response to Mr Dahal’s resignation, the group ended its second two-week blockade of Kathmandu, which has worsened the capital’s existing fuel shortage. Asked when this agitation might resume, the group’s leader, a 34-year-old former Maoist fighter called Laxmi Tharu, replies cheerily: “As soon as the next government is formed."
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