The four-party agreement on the eight-province model late Monday night came as a pleasant surprise to Nepalis. After two massive earthquakes, 8,778 deaths, more than 22,000 injured and half a million homes destroyed, the last six weeks have clearly been one of the m
ost harrowing periods in Nepal’s modern history.
But the disaster has also brought us together in ways unknown. The sense of national duty that young Nepalis have shown is perhaps the biggest story of the Great Earthquake . They were the last ones to complain about the non-performing political class and the first ones to respond to the national crisis.
The political class must have taken some cues from that. The groundswell of driven Nepalis--students, soldiers, policemen, doctors, civil servants, women’s groups--can be humbling to anyone. The Nepal Army was seen as the most organised force in terms of being prepared to conduct relief and rescue works.
The dominant narrative the last one month in these highly-charged times has been mostly non-political. The everyday conversations now are not about bashing politicians but worrying about the next Big One, about when and if it will occur. (The most frequently asked question at our newspaper office every morning is: Did you feel the tremors last night?)
Against this backdrop, the political parties and individual politicians pulled themselves together in the last few days to make the eight-province deal possible.
Prime Minister and Nepali Congress (NC) President Sushil Koirala chaired perhaps the longest (it lasted for six hours), and certainly the most important, political gathering of his tenure last night, two days after he ran around like a young man in a charity football match organised to raise funds for the earthquake victims.
Did the reluctant PM finally crack the whip and make use of his bully pulpit? His deputy in the NC, Ram Chandra Poudel, has been averse to political flexibility, rigidly sticking to a six-province model. Poudel did so again during and after the four-party deal. So did CPN-UML leader and former PM Madhav Kumar Nepal, though he led us to believe that he is willing to change his position if that makes the new constitution possible.
Should the new constitution materialise, Koirala will leave behind a great political legacy. Nepalis will forgive him for his lacklustre showing in office, in the constitution -making process and, not least, for the lack of statesmanship at a time of the most devastating natural disaster in the country’s living memory.
Other major actors
Like it or not, CPN-UML Chairman KP Oli has emerged as a key political player after the 2013 elections. He said last night after the deal: “I didn’t take a position. I wanted the constitution.” The NC might have emerged as the largest party, but the UML is not too far behind, and this has left the once-powerful UCPN (Maoist) struggling for its political existence and in doubt of its direction.
Oli most certainly has also been motivated by his own personal ambitions. If Sushil Koirala will get to lay claim to the lasting legacy of a successful constitution al project, Oli is strongly driven to occupy Baluwatar, not least because of his failing health.
As for UCPN (Maoist) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal, another signatory to the four-party deal, his party has been in deep introspection since its loss in the 2013 elections, which pushed it to a distant third place from the pole position. The NC-UML coalition has hurt the Maoists on two fronts. One, the Koirala-led government has increasingly sidelined the once-dominant party from the patronage networks at the disposal of the state; two, and unsurprisingly, politics has moved back to the centre-right, squeezing the political space the Maoist party had controlled before the elections.
As for the fourth signatory to the agreement last night, MJF-Loktantrik’s Bijaya Gachhadar has found that it was more important for him to adopt the politics of compromise to ensure political longevity, than to project himself as the champion of the Madhesi cause. He now remains, in all probability, isolated from all other Madhesi and Janajati parties who have kept out of the four-party deal and who had insisted that both the names of the eight provinces and their delineation be finalised as a precondition to the political deal. With the UCPN (Maoist) and Gachhadar supporting the deal, the 30-party opposition alliance has now become one of 28 parties.
That brings us to the biggest political question about the16-point agreement.
Yes, the NC-UML-Maoist-MJF (Lokantrik) alliance has a clear two-thirds majority required to promulgate the constitution , but anyone who stands in favour of the constitution would not want the Madhesi/Janajati constituency to spiral out of control.
If anything, the monsoon historically has hardly been the time for big unrests in Nepal, and the four-party alliance have time on their side to ‘sell’ the deal. But it is very important that the 28 parties that are left out in the cold are treated with the sensitivity they deserve.
Earthquake as political watershed
This scribe was asked by at least half a dozen top political leaders after the April 25 earthquake: “Why has the media decided to banish us from coverage?”
Indeed, in the early days after the Great Earthquake , the newspapers, TV and radio programmes did evict the party leaders from their news. The politicians were also at the receiving end from an increasingly vociferous social media, where ordinary Nepalis vented their ire and disappointment at the political class, not least the government--a message that was not lost on the parties.
In an interview with this correspondent last week, Maoist leader and former Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai said, “The political parties risk irrelevance if we continue to fail to embody the aspirations of the young and the educated.” He was commenting on the public response to the political class after the Great Earthquake .
What next?
With the agreement on Monday night, the parties have rekindled some lost hope and have deservingly taken back the centre stage. But will they go all the way and deliver a constitution, an enduring one at that? Only time will tell. Monday night’s developments have made Nepalis more hopeful: even though the constitution remains a work in progress, the parties do seem keen to deliver on the unfinished project.
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