BY EVA CHENG
Anticipating he would not be able to get parliamentary approval for a six-month extension of the state of emergency in place since November 2001, on May 22 Nepalese Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba dissolved the parliament and called for a new election two years ahead of schedule.
In doing so, Deuba was manoeuvring against the decision of his ruling party, Nepali Congress, to oppose an extension of the state of emergency, which gives the government the power to curtail the press and restrict rights of assembly.
The main opposition party, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), had also made clear it wouldn't support any such extension.
Deuba's manoeuvre outraged Congress party president and former prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala who, in response, had Deuba's party membership suspended.
Koirala also ordered Congress cabinet members to resign from the government within three days. Thirty-three of the 39-member cabinet refused and on May 24 they issued a joint statement supporting Deuba. They also urged Koirala to drop disciplinary action against Deuba to avert a party split. Koirala didn't respond.
In a new defiant act, Deuba on May 27 told the BCC that it wasn't the business of the party central committee to expel anyone and revealed he would be calling an emergency party convention to settle the matter.
In reaction to the crisis in the Congress party, King Gyanendra announced on May 27 his assent to extending the state of emergency for another three months. The king also set November 13 as the date for the mid-term election.
Maoist insurgency
The bringing forward of the national election has attracted widespread criticism from leaders of the Nepali Congress as well as opposition parties. They argue that free and fair elections are not possible in the context of near civil war created by the six-year Maoist insurgency in the country.
Taking advantage of the new crisis in Nepal, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sent his chief of general staff, General Sir Michael Boyce, to the Nepali capital Kathmandu on May 24 to "assess" how best Britain could "help" the Nepali army. On May 13, immediately after meeting Deuba in London, Blair had promised to host an international meeting in June to galvanise more "international support" for the Nepalese government.
US President George Bush was a step ahead. Under the pretext of helping the Nepalese army's suppression of "Maoist terrorists", Bush on May 8 promised military aid worth US$20 million. This move followed the late April revelation that US military personnel were directly involved in "advising" the Nepalese army in its war against the guerrillas.
Military assistance from India had come even earlier. Last year India supplied Nepal with two combat helicopters. In March, India offered equipment, training and intelligence, to help the Nepalese army defeat the Maoist guerrilla movement and its alleged collaborators in India.
In the last two years, both the Indian and Nepalese governments have been stepping up their allegations about the "Naxalites" a faction of the communist movement based mainly in India's north and east which led peasant uprisings in the late '60s and have since then continued grassroots organising being collaborators with Nepal's Maoists.
In a bid to suppress these Indian communists, the chief ministers of five Indian states Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa and Maharashtra in April 2000 set up a generously funded "joint operational command" in the name of fighting "left-wing extremism" and "Naxalism".
Since Bush embarked on his "war on terrorism", the Indian and Nepalese governments have relabeled their "anti-Maoist", "anti-Naxalite" activities "anti-terrorist" actions.
Terrorist tactics
A small number of anti-capitalist groups in India and Nepal have employed terrorist tactics. The Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M), the organisation which since 1996 has staged armed attacks in Nepal, and the People's War Group (PWG) in India's east, are the most prominent examples.
The terrorist tactics used by these groups have been widely and strongly condemned by the rest of the communist movement in both countries as counterproductive to the anti-capitalist mobilisation of masses of workers and peasants.
The CPN-UML has repeatedly urged the CPN-M to give up its use of terrorist tactics. The Bihar-based Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist-Liberation) (CPI-MLL) describes the PWG as substituting pure militarism for a revolutionary political perspective based on mass struggle. The CPI-MLL argues that the PWG's methods marginalise the masses and provide the government with public justifications for unleashing indiscriminate "white terror".
According to a report issued on April 4 by Amnesty International, since the state of emergency was declared in November, the Nepalese police have "arrested more than 5000 people, and special counter-terrorism measures have undermined basic human rights."
The report states that: "The Maoists, who now control a sizable proportion of the country, have taken around 500 people hostage, tortured scores of people, sentenced people to death in 'people's courts', and recruited child soldiers. They have targetted not only the security forces but also socio-economic targets such as factories and telecommunications towers.
"At least 29 teachers have been deliberately killed by the Maoists, including two members of Amnesty International. The dead body of Lekhnath Gautam, a 34-year-old teacher and father of three, was found on 23 March 2002 in Panchthar district. Maoists abducted him from his home in the middle of the night two days earlier. Like many teachers before him, he was probably killed because of his membership of the Nepal Teachers' Association which is considered close to the ruling Nepali Congress party. Scores of teachers have also been maimed."
The Nepalese and Indian governments are trying to seize on the terrorist tactics of a small minority to restrict the legal avenues for political work of these governments' left-wing opponents.
Long struggle for democracy
The 104-year oligarchic rule of Nepal by the Rana family was only ended in 1950, after a popular democratic uprising. Only one parliamentary election was able to be held, in 1958, before the royal family regained power through a coup in 1960, banning all political parties.
Mass mobilisations in 1978-79 forced the king to call a referendum under which he offered the choice of a continuation of the Panchayat system of absolutist monarchy or a multi-party constitutional monarchy. The Panchayat option narrowly won. But another series of uprisings in 1990 resulted in its replacement with a new constitution establishing a multi-party parliamentary democracy.
The first post-Panchayat election was called in 1991. The CPN-UML won 69 out of 205 lower house seats and 16 out of 60 upper house seats. With the ruling Congress party in disarray, a mid-term election was called in 1994. The CPN-UML won 88 seats in the lower house, enabling it to form a minority government in November that year.
The CPN-UML government introduced a series of progressive measures, including more equitable land reform. This outraged the capitalist and big landowner ruling class which waged a campaign to unseat the CPN-UML government. The World Bank's sudden withdrawal in August 1995 of funding for a key power project, Arun III, which has been underway for 10 years, helped undermine the CPI-UML minority government further. It lost parliamentary support a month later.
Today the CPN-UML has 100,000 members and two million members in its mass organisations. The country has a population of 23 million. The mass strength of the CPN-UML makes it a powerful and credible alternative to the corrupt Congress government.
For both the Indian and Nepalese ruling classes, the rising popular movement in Nepal in recent years has been particularly worrying. For example, in 2000-01 huge popular mobilisations swept Nepal in protest against the corrupt practices of the country's ruling elite. In the context of mass poverty Nepal is one of the world's 10 poorest countries, with average annual income per person of a mere US$210 (half that of India) public anger towards corrupt officials is not hard to understand.
In early 2000, the Nepalese parliamentary public accounts committee established that there had been ministerial corruption in a case involving gross overpayments by Royal Nepal Airlines to Austria's Lauda Air in an aircraft leasing arrangement. When the Koirala government failed to take any action against corrupt ministers, the CPN-UML disrupted parliamentary sitting for 57 days.
In collaboration with five other parties, the CPN-UML also organised mass meetings, rallies and street protests.
The anti-corruption protests culminated in a general strike on May 27-29, 2001, carried out with great success despite widespread police violence unleashed on strikers and demonstrators. Thousands were arrested, scores were injured and some were killed.
Then came the June 1 massacre of 10 members of the royal family, attributed to Crown Prince Dipendra but which was suspected in some quarters to have been the handy work of US and Indian intelligence agencies. The incident gave the Nepalese government an excuse to push through new security regulations which seriously undermine the civil rights guaranteed by the constitution restrictions that have been further entrenched through the six-month state of emergency.
From Green Left Weekly, June 5, 2002.
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