asianaffairs-May 2008

                                            Editorial

                              Avalanche in the Himalayas

  Nepal has jumped from medieval rule to Maoist-inspired democracy in a single bound. The country’s new ruler will be guided by the sayings and wisdom of the Chairman and the world’s only Hindu monarchy will be no more. Power will truly have sprung from the barrel of the gun.
Because, let us be under no illusions, the message from the communists, no matter how reformed they appear to have become, was clear: vote us into power or we will revert to our old ways, bombing and shooting our way to influence and power.
   Some, however, will have voted for them for the best of reasons when faced with a royal household that has proved inward looking, out of touch with the modern world and certainly long out of step with its own people. King Gyanendra’s coup in 2005 proved that the royals were putting more of their energy into palace politics than was appropriate and must have signalled to many Nepalese that they certainly could not rely on them to understand their needs or help to meet their requirements.
  ‘We have achieved more than we anticipated’, said senior Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai in what must be the understatement of the year. But if Bhattarai is celebrating a triumph, regional diplomats and strategists ought to be licking their wounds for having got their analysis so disastrously wrong. Even the vaunted Indian intelligence service had put its money on the return to power of the Nepali Congress, according to M.K. Narayanan, the National Security Adviser.
   It is ironic that even the Chinese can draw only limited comfort from this outcome though they have been sponsors of the Maoists all along. They may well have some reservations about the Nepalese Maoists’ positions on self-determination and autonomous regions based on ethnicity, often with the right of self-determination. That hardly squares with Beijing’s attitude to the Tibetans, though on the broader strategic front it is another pin with which to prick the Indians in their never-ending ping-pong battle over their mutual borders.
   But those with the most egg on their faces must surely be the British and Americans – the British for continuing to supply the royalist army with the hardware to fight the communist insurgency while Washington still lists the Nepalese communists as a terrorist organisation. For the Brits it is doubly ironic that some of the strongest showing for the communists has been in areas where British intelligence should be the best – the Gorkha hill district, the original homeland of the Gurkha soldiers who have served the British crown with such phenomenal success and loyalty.
   But whatever the embarrassments being suffered by governments and spooks alike, now is not the moment to try and take revenge just because the original notion of seeing a communist dispensation waltzing into the palace seemed just too far fetched for words.
   The world is full of lessons about democratic developments which the West found inconvenient – and then tried to reverse – at great cost not only to itself but, more importantly, to the people on the ground. The most recent and terrible is the experience of Hamas in Gaza. Here was an organisation which won power through the ballot box, not always playing by the rules of the Marquis of Queensbury. But then, following the US presidential elections that brought George W. Bush to power there is no government on the planet that can now claim to be without fault at the polls.
   The Maoists must now be allowed to show whether they can cut it as a national government without let or hindrance from any quarter. Their inspiration has been derived from the notorious Sendoro Luminoso in Peru, a brutal organisation that brought terror on the disadvantaged people of that country. If the Nepalese communists can, indeed, create a shining path to the future of their nation they must now be allowed to prove it. To thwart them at this juncture would only be to create more frustration and further excuses for violence. The ballot boxes have spoken; let the politicians create a new reality for the Nepalese.

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