Polls & stability in Nepal
NEPAL held its long-delayed general elections in the second week of April for the 601-member national parliament that is expected to frame a new constitution. As Nepal has adopted a mixed electoral system, the vote tabulation has taken a long time.
Two hundred and forty seats are being filled under the simple majority first past-the-post system, 335 through proportional representation and 26 will have nominees of the government.
The results so far have shown an impressive performance by the Maoists (the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist) which is expected to become a formidable political force in the new parliament, followed by the Nepali Congress Party and the Unified Marxist-Leninist Party.
The election results will have far-reaching implications for the future direction of Nepali politics for three major reasons. First, these elections represent a major transformation for the Maoists from a violent guerrilla movement to a parliamentary party.
Second, the parliament will frame a new constitution to replace the 1990 constitution and the major political parties plan to abolish the monarchy and turn Nepal into a republic. The key question is how quickly they will evolve a consensus on the new constitution and what are the chances of the abolition of the monarchy.
Third, Nepal’s politics since the beginning of the parliamentary era under the 1990 constitution has been marked by weak political parties and ministerial instability, enabling the king to manipulate political forces and impose his choices on them. Will post-election politics be a repeat of the past or will political leaders make a new beginning?
The Maoist radical movement was launched in February 1996 in the mid-western mountain districts by the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, popularly known as Prachanda. Its military wing, the People’s Liberation Army, declared war against the local authorities and influential people, resulting in a bloody civil strife in several districts. It established revolutionary district governments in Rukum, Jajarkot, Sallyan and Rolpa districts. Their confrontation with state security forces resulted in over 13,000 deaths during 1996-2006.
When the political parties launched an agitation against King Gyanendra’s direct assumption of power in February 2005, the Maoists decided to join the agitation because they had advocated the abolition of the monarchy from the early days of their movement. This was the first instance of collaboration between the Maoists and other political parties.
The street agitation forced King Gyanendra to restore parliament and install Girija Prasad Koirala, leader of the Nepali Congress Party, as the prime minister in April 2006. His government opened negotiations with the Maoists who agreed to sign a peace agreement on Nov 21, 2006, whereby they abandoned their armed struggle and agreed to put away their weapons in special camps under United Nations supervision. The Maoists agreed to contest the elections and joined the government in 2007.
The framing of the new constitution will be quite problematic for the new parliament. The major political parties are in favour of a parliamentary system with or without the king but they differ on its details.
The most significant proposed change is the abolition of the monarchy, the oldest political institution whose roots can be traced to 1769 when Prithvi Narayan Shah founded the present family’s rule over what is today Nepal.
The current anti-monarchy sentiment goes back to the assumption of the throne by the present King Gyanendra in early June 2001 after the assassination of King Birendra and his family in the palace. The assassination shocked the nation and resulted in street agitation and many protesters accused Gyanendra of involvement in the killings, although there was no evidence to support this allegation.
Gyanendra could not develop working relations with the political forces. In October 2002, he dissolved parliament, replacing Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba with a loyalist. As the new prime minister could not win over the major political parties the king had to reappoint Deuba in June 2004 to pacify the political opposition. This did not defuse tension with the political parties and the Maoist movement virtually paralysed the local authorities in many districts.
On Feb 1, 2005, King Gyanendra dismissed the government and assumed all powers by declaring a state of emergency. This decision met with tough resistance from all political parties and civil society groups. Nepal witnessed a popular movement for the restoration of parliament and civil and political rights. Even the Maoists joined the agitation and worked closely with the political forces. There were repeated demands for the removal of King Gyanendra.
The movement forced the king to withdraw the state of emergency in April 2006 and restore parliament that was dissolved in October 2002. Later, Girija Prasad Koirala took over as prime minister and established peace with the Maoists and brought them in the government.
The restored parliament drastically reduced the powers of King Gyanendra. The Maoists demand for the abolition of monarchy caught on with other political forces. The major political parties agreed with the Maoists on December 23, 2007, to abolish the monarchy and convert Nepal into a republic with an elected head of state after the April 2008 elections. This decision was endorsed by parliament on Dec 28.
The abolition of the monarchy will be the key issue in the formulation of the new constitution. Despite the pre-election agreement between the Maoists and the Nepali Congress and others on the abolition of the monarchy, it is difficult to say whether this issue will be settled easily.
Further, the Maoists may like to push their ideological agenda because of their numerical strength which will alienate other parties. The real test lies in how far the Maoists and others can work in harmony to frame the constitution and set up the new government. Some political parties complained about intimidation by the Maoists in the run-up to the elections in the districts under their domination. Other candidates could not campaign there.
Nepal faces the problem of establishing a stable government. Since 1991 when the first government was established under the 1990 constitution, Nepal had quick governmental changes which enabled King Birendra to retrieve the political initiative. His successor King Gyanendra also manipulated the weak and divided political parties.
Nepal may face internal problems if political leaders cannot develop a consensus on the new constitution soon, especially on the future of the monarchy.
They also have to create a stable government backed by coherent policies. The Maoists or some elements among them may return to violence in pursuance of their ideological agenda. This would be a major setback to the current efforts to move Nepal on the road to democracy.
The writer currently teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, Washington, DC.
When death is preferable
NO one can have a measure of the intensity of despair that drove Bushra Bibi on April 12 to stand in front of a speeding train in Lahore with her two children — one a boy of five and the other a girl of three. She compounded her own act of suicide with the more heart-searing crime of infanticide.
Mothers give life; they don’t take it away. In her final movements, Bushra Bibi, in an instinctive gesture of maternal concern, covered the eyes of her children with her hands, to spare them the terrifying sight of the approaching train.
For Bushra Bibi, anything — even death — was preferable to the poverty that had ground her life into the dust to which she had decided to return. For her, the only light at the end of the tunnel was the light of the oncoming train.
The new prime minister and the even newer chief minister of Punjab called on her anguished husband to give him some belated financial succour. Wherever Bushra Bibi may be at the moment, she can now rest in peace. By her death, her husband has been ensured the solvency he could not provide her or their children during their own brief lives.
If poverty was the reason that drove Bushra Bibi to such terminal despair, then the railway tracks of Pakistan should be cleared to receive up to 50 million more such Bushra Bibis, for there are at least that many citizens who are sliding inexorably into the abyss of domestic penury. Is the figure today 26 per cent of the population, as it was in 1993? Is it closer to 32 per cent, the number six years later? Or could it be even higher now?
In February 2000, Mr Shahid Javed Burki (one of Pakistan’s most respected economists and then working in the World Bank) predicted that by the year 2010 Pakistan’s population would reach 170 million of whom 80 million (47 per cent) would be living below the poverty line.
In 2006, his colleague John Wall (then World Bank chief in Pakistan) wrote: “Poverty is an ethical concept, not a statistical one,” and to support his assertion, he explained: “The incomes of a very large portion of the population are just above and just below the official poverty line.… This clustering of Pakistan’s population just above and just below the poverty line also implies that families are quite vulnerable to falling into poverty with the slightest run of bad luck. A drought or bad agricultural year, an illness of a breadwinner, rises in prices of basic commodities not compensated by rises in income — all these can cause families to fall into poverty.” In effect, poor families bob above and below the surface of life, like someone drowning, struggling to survive.
To some dollar-earning economists, poverty may be an ethical concept, to others, a moribund statistic. To our poor, however, it is neither. It is a daily reality. By opting to quit society, it is not they who have failed as citizens; it is their government that has failed them. To governments, poverty is an inconvenient social obstacle. They would prefer not to have to count the ribs of that sub-species of Pakistanis to whom official platitudes are indigestible fodder, and political promises something that taste of sawdust.
The Labour firebrand Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan once flailed a Conservative government during the 1950s with the taunt that it required mismanagement of a very high order for the UK — an island race, surrounded by the sea and resting on a bed of coal — to suffer a shortage both of fish to eat and coal to burn.
Had he visited today’s Pakistan he might have been equally derisive. How, he would have wondered, as millions of us Pakistanis do, does a country with acres of arable land, some of the mightiest rivers in the word linked by a well-designed canal system, a sub-tropical climate, and a primarily rural population suffer from shortages of food? Had we been a communist state, our flaws would have been blamed on collective farming compounded by archaic distribution methods.
We have had eight years of uninterrupted mono-rail governance, in which every expert in the country has been available to the government. And to be fair to the government, each such expert — whether from the cogwheels of industry, from the laboratories of science and technology, from the classrooms of education, from the open fields of agriculture, or from the corridors of the civil service — has been allowed a say in the formulation of our public policies.
Has one forgotten the much-vaunted Economic Advisory Board? In December 1999, a fresh finance minister opened a four-day meeting of an economic advisory board comprising over 200 experts to draw up economic reforms in areas such as “foreign investment, trade and balance of payments, energy, privatisation, agriculture, domestic debt management, devolution of administrative power, and reforms of economic institutions”. Subcommittees were formed, recommendations refined, plans made, legislation passed, and then what?
Eight years on, foreign investment has been in the non-productive sector; with gushing oil prices our balance of trade is beyond our control; domestic debt is ballooning; devolution has failed and is being reversed; and institutions have been reformed without palpable improvement in service delivery. We stand at the precipice of another energy crisis, and our success in agriculture can be measured from the length of the queues for atta outside our utility stores.
Optimists say that much has been achieved, pessimists that much more remains to be done. It depends on whether you view the glass as half-full or half-empty. All the impoverished know is that, after years of waiting and hoping and now voting, the glass in their emaciated hands is still near empty.
Is there light at the end of the tunnel for them? Or are they condemned to forgo wheat because it is beyond their reach, abjure sugar and tea because they are too expensive, and walk because petrol is unaffordable?
As an employee who every month has to stretch his income to cover his sprawling expenses, complained recently: “Our leaders tell us that they have broken the begging bowl. Others boast that we have spread a web of roads across the country. Tell me, sahib, can I feed my children roads?”
Pre-agriculture stones
AS a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings.
Thirty years later, a member of the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important: a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet.
“This place is a supernova,” said Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey’s border with Syria. “Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here.”
Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-coloured sea, stretches south hundreds of miles. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.
Compared with Stonehenge in southern England, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) is more than 30 metres across. T-shaped pillars like the rest, two five-metre stones tower at least a metre above their peers. What makes them remarkable are their carved reliefs of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.
Never mind wheels or writing, the people who erected them did not even have pottery or domesticated wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.
“Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilisations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture”, said Ian Hodder, a Stanford University professor of anthropology who has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey’s best known neolithic site, since 1993.
“Gobekli changes everything. It’s elaborate, it’s complex and it is pre-agricultural. That alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time.”
With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavation, Gobekli Tepe’s significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think it was the centre of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the centre of each circle representing a man and woman. It is a theory the tourist board in nearby Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet; see Adam and Eve.
Schmidt is sceptical. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be “the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy”, and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tonnes of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.
But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols found at other neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless.
“I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods,” said Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. “They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers. In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all. What is this universe? Why are we here?”
With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hilltop was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles. The tallest stones all face south-east, as if scanning plains that are scattered with contemporary sites in many ways no less remarkable than Gobekli Tepe.
Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found. “Two square metres of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - like a Paul Klee painting”, said Eric Coqueugniot, of the University of Lyon, who is leading the excavation.
Coqueugniot describes Schmidt’s hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was a meeting point for rituals as “tempting”, given its spectacular position. But surveys of the region were still in their infancy. “Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic.”
Vecihi Ozkaya, the director of a dig at Kortiktepe, 120 miles east of Urfa, doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500-year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.
“Look at this”, he said, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. “It’s a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. South-eastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilisation.” n
—The Guardian, London