Nepali communists plan defeat for Congress
Nepal's communist movement is amongst the largest and most popular in Asia. A leading force in the 1990 people's power movement that ended the autocratic Panchayat system, the Communist Party of Nepal — Unified Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) is the main opposition to the capitalist Nepali Congress party.
Throughout Nepal, in the villages and in Kathmandu and other cities, the CPN-UML's symbol, the sun, can be seen everywhere. The party has around 1 million members. PRADIP NEPAL, from the party's politburo and its publicity chief, attended the January Marxism 2000 conference in Sydney. He spoke to Green Left Weekly's SEAN HEALY.
A national election in May gave the Nepali Congress a majority in parliament — the first time a party has been able to form government in its own right in Nepal since 1990. Before the election, Congress had ruled in a coalition with the Communist Party of Nepal (Marxist-Leninist) (CPN-ML), which split in 1998 from the CPN-UML.
Pradip Nepal said that his party had expected to win government in May on a wave of dissatisfaction with Congress's corrupt rule. The CPN-UML won close to 2.75 million votes (31%) and 71 seats, making it the second largest party in parliament. Congress won more than 3.2 million votes (36%) and 111 seats.
The CPN-UML's defeat was in part due to corruption and ballot-rigging. Pradip Nepal pointed out that 23 seats were lost by less than 1000 votes. He believes that the CPN-UML lost 24 seats as a direct result of rigging and physical intimidation. Three party members were killed during the election campaign.
"Congress was able to play on fears of 'instability', because all governments since 1990 have been minority or coalition governments. Congress claimed that if it was not able to form government, the country would be unstable, there would be no investment and poverty would become worse", Pradip Nepal said.
In 1994, a CPN-UML minority government was dismissed by the Supreme Court after it sought to implement its "pro-people", anti-World Bank policies. In 1997, the CPN-UML was again able to form a coalition government, but only for seven months.
Pradip Nepal also said that the death of CPN-UML chairperson and prime ministerial candidate Man Mohan Adhikari, 15 days before the first round of balloting, had a huge impact on the party's election campaign. The party stopped campaigning and went into mourning.
Nevertheless, the election helped the CPN-UML in other ways. It was able to maintain its position as the major force in the hill and mountain districts and in the crucial Kathmandu Valley, where the party won five of the seven seats. The party also made inroads in the Terai, the plain districts close to India, where Congress is strongest and where most of Nepal's small-scale, but economically important, industrialisation is taking place.
The CPN-UML was also able to overcome the 1998 split by the CPN-ML. Many of the cadres that split were won back to the party, dissatisfied with the opportunist, pro-Congress policy of the split leaders. The CPN-ML won no seats.
Poverty
In the nine months since the election, the Nepali Congress has failed to honour any of its promises to improve the position of the people. Nepal, with a population of 23 million, is desperately poor. Its people's life expectancy is only 54 years and has a per capita gross domestic product of only US$156 a year. The majority of the population eke out a living as subsistence farmers.
The Congress government of Krishna Prasad Bhattarai is following the economic policies prescribed by the World Bank, including privatisation, open slather foreign investment and the ending of price subsidies on basic goods. In November, Congress president Girija Prasad Koirala admitted: "The work of this government has been the work of doing nothing".
Pradip Nepal is especially critical of the Congress government's ending of subsidies on basic goods. As a result, diesel fuel has risen in price by 48%, electricity by 30% and kerosene, which the poor use for cooking fuel, has risen by 23%. The government has also targeted telephone services and drinking water for future price rises.
The Congress government has close links with organised crime, Pradip Nepal said. The country is a favoured staging post in South Asia for drug and gold smuggling, and money laundering. He believes that funds for Congress's election campaign came from such sources.
Before the election, PM Bhattarai promised that two corrupt ministers, transport minister Khumbahadur Khadka and tourism minister Bijayee Gachhedar, would not be appointed to his cabinet. Khadka had started his own transport business and funnelled government contracts to them. Gachhedar had taken bribes from an aircraft company for government contracts and then established his own airline company. Both were appointed.
Human rights disaster
Looming over Nepal politics is the Congress government's handling of Maoist groups' "people's war" in the west of the country. The Maoists' attacks and government repression have killed 1000 people in the last four years according to Amnesty International, which describes the situation as a "human rights disaster".
According to Amnesty, almost half of the 800 killed by the military were summarily executed, many while in custody. Reports of torture of prisoners are common. There are no mechanisms for investigating these abuses. The inspector-general of police remains in his post even though a judicial commission recommended his prosecution for disappearances during the 1990 people's power movement.
The CPN-UML is scathingly critical of the government's campaign, although it does not support the Maoists' terror tactics, which are sometimes also directed against CPN-UML members.
"This is a political problem", Nepal told Green Left Weekly. "The Maoists are based in the poorest parts of the country, where the people are the most desperate. Rather than using state terrorism, the government should bring the Maoists to the table and put forward development packages for those areas. It must stop its repression immediately."
Extra-parliamentary action
While the CPN-UML believes that, at present, "parliament is the main arena of struggle" and still hopes to win government in the next election, Pradip Nepal said the party recognises the importance of extra-parliamentary mass action by the people. "The militant mass movement is decisive to achieving the revolution", he said.
The CPN-UML has spent much of the last six months organising a massive public campaign against the subsidy cuts and price hikes. This has included marches and demonstrations in the villages and towns and the collection of 1 million signatures on a petition against the new policy.
The petition and a march by 25,000 people on the first day of the parliamentary session in November have created significant divisions within Congress and have resulted in a partial backdown by the prime minister. Bhattarai promised there would be no rises in the cost of telephone services or drinking water and that he would "try to reduce" the prices of the other items.
The CPN-UML's campaign is just starting, Pradip Nepal added, and the party plans several nationwide actions in the next month before an all-Nepal rally in Kathmandu, when the party hopes to bring 1 million people into the streets.
The KTM Jann ("Let's all go to Kathmandu" action) will not only oppose the price rises and economic policies of the Congress government, it will also highlight local village issues. The party's rural base is agitating for significant development projects in the villages, including an increase in the minimum wage for agricultural labourers (from 50-60 rupees to 125-150 rupees), the maintenance of subsidies on fertilisers and seeds, shelter for Nepal's 145,000 landless families, more health posts and clean drinking water facilities.
Trade unions (the CPN-UML leads the largest trade union confederation, GEFONT), women's organisations and students are also developing demands to be raised at the all-Nepal rally.
However, even such partial climb-downs by the prime minister will provoke the wrath of the World Bank and international lenders. In late January, pro-World Bank finance minister Mahesh Acharya resigned after differences with the prime minister over further economic "reforms". On February 9, the World Bank announced that it was reviewing its US$240 million aid package to Nepal because it was dissatisfied with Bhattarai's hesitancy in enforcing its policies.