The antipathy of Girija Prasad Koirala towards the communists may just be a political myth, but Sher Bahadur Deuba's aversion to any shade of red is for real, and could have been the reason for his rapid rise and fall. During his second innings at Singha Darbar, Deuba successfully sold the red scare to George W Bush and Tony Blair. He hitched our wagon to the global 'war on terror' and hoped the two would help prop him up in his seat. He forgot that he needed to be strong internally.
Deuba committed political hara kiri by allowing himself to be goaded by people more militantly rightist than he is. He dissolved parliament, called for mid-term elections, and then broke away from his party. In practical terms, this was tantamount to simply delivering the country to the UML. By backing out from his earlier promise of forcing a showdown between the conservatives and the communists of all shades at the earliest, Deuba undermined his own utility.
After these moves, Deuba was a political liability-instead of proving that he was a true blue soldier of the right, he turned out to be just another shade of pink. After that, his exit from Baluwatar was merely a question of legal detail that could be left to creative constitutional experts to work out. Meanwhile, the desired effect of the charade over corruption control was not too different from that of public floggings-to provide amusement to those people too insignificant to be anything other than innocent bystanders.
4 October has forced mainstream political parties out of the political centre, and the forces of the entrenched right and the extreme left are now face to face. In the next phase of the "grand design", all non-communist parties will have to come together around the king to precipitate a direct confrontation with the left. This strategy is based on the interpretation that all the UML's hardcore activists have either already joined the Maoists, or are on the verge of doing so. Rightist ideologues seem to think, perhaps rightly, that the leaders of Balkhu Palace are now a spent force. By recklessly trying to cut Koirala down to size, Madhav Nepal and his comrades may have dealt themselves a mortal blow.
Even a rump Nepali Congress could be a nuisance if it is not brought on board in the global fight against dormant socialism. Hence the ingenuous formulation of US Ambassador Michael Malinowski in this paper (#117), "... the house is on fire and people are still worrying about who is going to sleep in the master bedroom." This is a politically correct way of insulting our political leadership, but it is.
There's a more proper way of framing the predicament of the political class, which centres on appropriate ways of fighting the fire. A capitalist class familiar with the conveniences of the master bedroom wants to douse the fire with more intense firepower, and limited authoritarianism is its favoured model.
The underclasses have been terrorised to such an extent, they cower behind apparent apathy. The middle class, the old bastion of democracy, is largely disillusioned, having witnessed its leaders capitulate to postmodern imperialism. It is a tragedy of our times that almost every swears by socialism when contesting elections, and swears at it as soon as it comes to power. People of the centre are easily transformed into worthless hypocrites by conservative manipulators.
There's no single factor such a drastic situation cam be pinned on, but there is no doubt that the political economy of resurgent capitalism is one of the main factors behind both the rise of leftist insurgency and centrist corruption in this country.
The leadership of Girija Prasad Koirala has spectacularly failed to face the rightist challenge. Madhav Nepal hasn't succeeded in nudging the Maoists to the mainstream. By vacating the political centrestage, mainstream parties have ended up inviting extreme adventurism of the most insidious kind. Since the main reason behind their failures is the economic policies they were forced to follow, most varieties of capitalism will pose a problem. So that's not a solution. And a coalition of "briefcase" parties led by leaders with egos bigger than their capabilities can't be a substitute for real politics. As long as glorified clerks sitting in a luxury hotel-cum-casino complex keep preaching free-market fundamentalism to Singha Darbar, there will be no end in sight to our present nightmare. The failures of the last twelve years are the failures of a fundamentally flawed doctrine of political economy. Democratic politics and its leaders have been mere victims of circumstances over which they had little or no control.
There's still no alternative to democratic socialism in a country like Nepal. Here hope, like the heart, inevitably lies a little left of centre. To bring democratic politics back on track, the economic agenda must once more be to reduce the gap between the poor and the rich.
