CPN(M) - Worker #10
The Worker, #10, May 2006
Current Issues
NEPAL: DEMOCRACY CONTAINEDSaroj Giri
Independent leftist intellectual
Never before have elite attempts at managing democracy, containing democracy been as exposed as in Nepal today. That democracy is 'granted' by those in power as a way to save themselves, that democracy arrives as the perpetuation of their rule in a new and perhaps more veiled form is yet again proved by the specific manoeuvres of the King and the world's largest and oldest democracies. With the oft-repeated result that democracy is stillborn, born with its real irreducible emancipatory core compromised or dissipated to feed into the new regime of power which henceforth makes that democracy itself the basis and reproduction of its rule.
Power is parasitic on lot of things and, in its most vicious, on democracy itself. Innumerable times have such a democracy been born, still-born that is, providing fresh (democratic) legitimacy to power. 1990 marked one such moment in Nepal. But this time around it is proving difficult for the Nepalese ruling classes and their international friends to strengthen their hold by letting out a bit of pacificatory democratic gas. And when this does not or cannot happen, that is, when democracy confronts power, becomes a weapon in the hands of the people driving deep furrows into the machinations of the ruling classes, the arbiters of democracy suddenly see the need for dialogue, reconciliation and 'a way out of the crisis'.
One wonders what the crisis was when people turned out in lakhs [hundreds of thousands] in the streets of Kathmandu in support of democracy, for isn't that democracy? Thus precisely when democracy is in action, freely asserting itself with a long-withheld vehemence, putting its foot down on all who trampled it for so long, the brokers and contractors of democracy get active: democracy has to be saved! India and the US pressurise the King to talk to political parties and 'restore democracy'; the King announces 'restoration of democracy' (thanks to India). Time for a victory procession; the people united shall always be victorious. The only reason for which people should now come out in the streets is for defending this victory.
Reports of victory processions are flowing in from different parts of Nepal today. Such victory processions had taken place to celebrate the 'restoration of democracy' in 1990 itself. And it is precisely according to the provisions of the 1990 democratic Constitution that the King had overthrown Parliament in 2002 and which he now promises to restore. Hadn't the political parties also welcomed the same Constitution and under which they formed governments and became prime ministers? The King is indeed a constitutional monarch, he acted according to the Constitution. Or rather, he violates his supposed status as a constitutional monarch through the Constitution itself. Thus the King very constitutionally takes away democracy and restores it, acting according to the spirit and letter of the constitution. Every time he gets away with it; and he would have political parties also playing along or fighting along as they squabble among each other and cringe before the King to become ministers. Not this time however, with the Maoists around.
The political space in 1990 was so constructed that the contending forces and parties basically agreed that the conceding of democracy was also the moment for the internal reconstitution of their powers in a new idiom and form: the idiom of democracy and the form of constitutional monarchy. That was the case of the pro-democracy movement in 1990. Not this time however, with the Maoists around. What is therefore unique this time is that there is the danger of the irrelevancy of the entire exercise as there is a force which stands outside of the given paradigm and which represents the Other, the or-else factor. So it is time for all the forces of liberal democracy, constitutional monarchy and parliament to hold hands together and ward off not just the specters but the threat of the Other.
In fact, the Maoist outside has so reconfigured the balance of forces inside the mainstream democratic space in Nepal that democracy and republic do not carry their conventional positive charge today. Democracy and republic are the names of ideological moves made in order to protect the crown or ones geopolitical and strategic interests. For the policemen of democracy like India, US and European Commission, therefore, democracy in Nepal is worth it only as a step toward decimating Maoists. Thus the Republic of India, with no a priori penchant for monarchy as such, does not pitch itself for a republic today since it thinks that a republic in the present juncture imminently carries the Maoist virus. As recent moves of the US and India have shown, the King, his 'mischief' notwithstanding, is invariably kept on the side of liberal democracy.
What India and the US are saying is that if republic has today come to mean a liberal democratic order which is acceptable in Nepal today, that is not a problem in itself but, in that case, without the monarchy in place, wouldn't the Maoists take over the country? Political parties are decrepit, they are no good to hold their own against the Maoists. Normally, if there was no force outside, if all are co-opted within, with no Other which can overturn and sink the ship, India and the US might have backed a republic but given that the political parties wield neither great popular support among the people nor do they command the standing army, the RNA, going along with the political parties and abandoning the King might mean failing to see that any power vacuum at this moment would be filled in by the Maoists.
For the US, India and the so-called international community as a whole, given the looming threat of the Maoist take-over, the choice is between a monarch who has an army with him, physical force but no support at all and political parties that have neither an army, physical strength nor great credibility and legitimacy among the people. If not democracy, the King at least has force, the army with him. So actually from the viewpoint of democracy as ideology, of defending the ruling classes, it is not the King but the political parties that are playing the bad boys, traitors to global democracy. So the 1990 message from the then radicals and Maoists can now be reformulated for the political parties: we told you then, that this is not real (liberal) democracy, don't compromise, have the army under your (the Parliament's) control; if you had heeded us then, with both army and democracy with you, today India and the US would have backed you up in order to fight us.
Choosing between the King and political parties might not have been a serious matter if there had been no third force, the big Other, with both mass support and force at their command, rattling the entire machinery, the ruling class dispensation. Imagine, yes imagine, that when Nehru and the Congress were all ready for the transfer of power in 1947, the entire country were to be reverberating with popular support for Bhagat Singh and his Republican Socialist Army, in a position to soon take power, capture the Red Fort.... Do you think, then, the British would have left India creating a power vacuum, however temporary? Would that have been in the interests of global capitalism? Perhaps Nehru and the Bombay Plan wallahs would have themselves pleaded [for] the British to stay on for some time to ward off the evil. Such is the situation in Nepal today: the King has to stay on in the interests of the global capitalist order and the systems of states political structures backing it. Unlike India the US, particularly its Ambassador to Nepal, James Moriarty, has clearly argued in favour of the King against the Maoists.
In rejecting the King's offer backed by two great democracies of the world, the political parties are sending a deeper message to liberal democrats: that they cannot, in Nepal today, survive by treating democracy as a means through which a new division of power is effected among the elites. A brokered democracy is possible so long as there is no force which will pull off the rug and not just expose but overturn the entire show, the orchestration and management of democracy; so long, that is, as there is no danger of the rejection of the entire paradigm. The tide has however turned in Nepal today. The deeper message of the political parties is therefore that democracy as a compromise, even as a pretext for war might be in abundant supply in the world but it is not possible in Nepal today.
Apart from the vigilance of the Nepalese people, the one factor which has so reconfigured the political space in Nepal that the dominant paradigm of the global capitalism is not so easily imposed, indeed rejected, is definitely the presence of the Maoists. Not a positively given, co-opted, ossified presence but presence as absence. As noted above, the Maoists are around, not in; they are outside the framework of liberal democratic politics, in fact they are the outside. Thus when the King sidelined the political parties, left them out in the cold, there was no neutral outside space they could occupy. They had to negotiate with the outside, and learn a few lessons on democracy and the character of the Nepalese state and theirs: the 12-point agreement with the Maoists was the result. This changed the entire course of the pro-democracy movement and had its repercussions in the very core policies and designs of global capitalist order.
This assertion of the outside, of the force from the distant margin shaking the very foundations of mainstream politics is what is feared by the votaries of global democracy today. Indeed, democracy has so often worked as ideology, working to mask the real state of things from the masses. This is the sham of democracy in most countries, like India and the US. If democracy could be foisted or initiated in Nepal today for this purpose that was no real problem. This is what is happening in Iraq today. But if democracy is needed not to mask the current reality, as an escape from this reality but to protect reality from the outside, from the not-yet, the or-else, then reality itself is under danger of undergoing an rupture. There is no given reality which people would henceforth resign themselves to, with the ruling classes just having to make it appear fine and palatable. Instead, reality appears as itself subject to change, that it is not given and ossified so that no amount of democratic veneer can save it.
With no positively given reality, social relations, and political forces?that is global capitalist order?to save, that is, with revolution at the very base of society, the ideology of democracy cannot work. If ideology means false consciousness, creating a false consciousness of social reality in order to justify it in the eyes of the people, then global capitalism has half-realised that this is not needed in Nepal today simply because there is no positively given social reality there, that actual ground reality is going out of their hands and is reconstituting itself outside of the global capitalist fold. What is therefore needed is force to keep things together. The King in his proclamation during the pro-democracy movement thanked the Army for keeping order; it was the same army whose chief was in active negotiation with the Indian foreign secretary.
If Nepal today seems to be on the verge of a social implosion with underlying social contradictions seeking their unfettered resolution, any political form of the state and government seeking to withhold this process will surely be challenged. After all, it is in the teeth of the moribund feudal forces protected by the King and his army that the Maoist movement has so far initiated radical changes in the internal relations and structure of Nepalese society at all levels, from the social and economic to the cultural. Nepal today is a society steadily reconstituting itself in the most radical ways possible, smashing the old order and the feudal-monarchical state and repressive apparatus in the rural areas and replacing it with new revolutionary ones. And with the political parties too having agreed on some key points with the Maoists the process of revolutionizing society has attained a wide base and unprecedented popular support. It is in the path of this free, autonomous self-reconstitution of Nepalese society that the present Nepalese state backed by the other powers like India and US, has come to stand as absolute dead weight, trying to crush this process with reactionary state violence.
Thus the question of constitutional monarchy versus republic is not simply one of formal political structures of rule and governance. It is not just a question of good or bad governance nor simply of the wish of the people. Nor is it, theoretically speaking, just a question of the forms of political representation. In fact the present Nepalese state has no popular social basis at all, represents no popular classes (or even a section of it). It is a pure structure of violence, an outpost and feudal-monarchical representative of global capitalism. The question therefore is one of carrying forward the very reconstitution of Nepalese society, economy and polity which is already happening in a big and unprecedented manner, of consolidating some of its gains by striking at the very crown, the head of the old order.
It is precisely in order to prevent the kind of radical changes that Nepal is undergoing that India, US and other powers are backing this structure of violence which is the Nepalese state today. But it is precisely for that reason that the people in Nepal want it to go. But then, since it is not just a question of formal political representation, since it has to do with deep changes that society is undergoing, merely dressing up the present structure of violence as a constitutional monarchy is not going to work. Since the King today no longer derives his legitimacy from the people, no longer represents, the only relation he can have with a constitution is one of scuttling it, using it to veil his true character.
The 1990 Constitution whose 'twin-pillars' are constitutional monarchy and multi-party democracy is, therefore, a cloak, a veil to hide the dagger beneath. The seven-party alliance has therefore committed a major blunder in accepting the King's offer to revive the 2002 Parliament under the 1990 Constitution. By seeking to end the pro-democracy movement at the altars of that Constitution, the political parties have not only violated their own 12-point agreement with the Maoists but have prolonged the labour pains of transition to a new political order. Far from providing the framework for the democratic reconstitution of political institutions if not society as a whole, the present Constitution is merely the dead weight of a moribund society and, worst still, a weapon for the defenders of that society to scuttle the democratic process.
It is in this context of a highly politicised society, with major emancipatory energies released, a country whose map can be drawn in terms of liberated zones that the present movement for democracy and a republic has to be seen. The demand for a republic with a new constitution through an elected constituent assembly is therefore an expression of this radical restructuring of society, social relations and polity. Thus the demand for a republic cannot be viewed merely in terms of working out a better form of political representation, of a formal change of political structures of representation and legislation. As the 12-point agreement pointed out, the process of democratisation would be incomplete without restructuring the state and political power and particularly the role of the Royal Nepalese Army.
Given such a situation the new constitution cannot be the work of some elite nominated members forming the constituent assembly, who would be the architects and would craft the constitution with their superior foresight and vision. Rather, in the case of Nepal today the demand is to have an elected constituent assembly so that the republican constitution would be an expression of the revolutionary transformation of society, a document which would facilitate and provide a dynamic enabling framework for the passing of the old oppressive society and state and the birth of the new. Such a Nepal would also show the path towards weakening the chain of global capitalism and imperialism, a path which countries like India direly needs. The King's proclamation of the restoration of the old Parliament is therefore a ploy to stifle the process of free and autonomous self-reconstitution of Nepalese society. The political parties should reject this proclamation and embrace and carry forward the republican spirit of the pro-democracy movement.
(Courtesy: EPW)
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