Nepal’s Constituent Assembly elections, held on April 10, 2008, are yet to produce a final result, with counting for the Proportional Representation seats still to be completed, but there is little doubt, in a world of winners and losers, that the Maoists have emerged as unambiguous victors. Parties that have traditionally been wedded to democratic and constitutional politics in Nepal – and their vacillating international backers, including India – are unquestionable losers, as are those who had thrown in their lot with the monarchy.

Of the 240 seats determined by the First Past the Post (FPTP) system the Maoists had secured 120, just shy of a simple majority, with one result yet to be declared at the time of this Assessment. The Nepali Congress (NC), with 37 seats, the Communist Party of Nepal – Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), with 33, and the Madhesi People’s Rights Forum of Nepal (MPRFN), with a surprise 29, lagged far behind. The once-powerful royalist Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) was unable to secure even a single seat.

The Maoist ‘lead’, however, will shrink dramatically with the results of the Proportional Representation (PR) vote are finally tallied – something of an irony, since it was the Maoists who were most strongly insistent on the PR system, believing that they would fare better here, rather than under a purely FPTP vote. 335 seats in the 601 seat Constituent Assembly, which is to re-write Nepal’s Constitution over the coming 30 months, are defined by the PR vote, while the remaining 26 representatives are to be nominated by the Cabinet. With just over 9.7 million votes counted, out of the estimated 10.6 million votes cast, the Maoists account for just over 30.4 per cent of the present PR tally. [The NC follows with 21.45 per cent; the CPN-UML with 20.75 per cent; but the MPRFN, which did rather well with about 12 per cent of seats in the FPTP tally, with just 5.68 per cent.] By the time the vote settles, and the Cabinet nominees are defined, the CPN-M can be expected to end up with a final tally of around 230 seats – if the nominated seats are allocated on a proportional basis, or a few more, if the Maoists corner a lion’s share. They will, however, fall far short of the majority that they would need to railroad the Constitutional process according to their will.

The relative absence of overt violence during the elections, and the divided outcome, has given rise to many sanguine expectations on Nepal’s future. Some pundits in India have articulated the hope that India’s own rampaging Maoists will draw lessons from the ‘Nepal experience’ and join the democratic process (the Indian Maoists are certainly drawing lessons from their Nepalese comrades – but not this one). An overwhelming make-believe among commentators and international observers appears to be that the worst is now over, and Nepal is now firmly fixed on a trajectory of gradual – even if, possibly, slow – recovery and reconstruction, with the nightmare of the ‘people’s war’ left irrevocably behind.

What has been engineered in Nepal through the electoral process, however, is unambiguously a partial ‘seizure of power’. This seizure is no less a reality because it has not been effectively resisted by democratic forces. Nor, indeed, is the Maoist ideology any the less totalitarian because power is secured through a manipulation of democratic processes and institutions. The state may not have manifestly been captured through the ‘barrel of the gun’, but it has certainly been secured under the shadow of the gun. This is borne out by the wave of violence and intimidation that had preceded the elections, creating what the European Union’s election observers described as "a general atmosphere of fear and intimidation" under which the polls were eventually conducted. Domestic observers, including the Nepal Election Observation Committee (NEOC) and the Nepal Election Monitoring Alliance (NEMA), who had the deepest penetration, with thousands of observers positioned across the country, noted that the Maoists had systematically resorted to "threats, intimidation and violence to terrorise voters and political rivals."

More significantly, the Maoist leadership had, in the run-up to the elections, clearly and repeatedly stated that the election outcome would be rejected if the outcome did not favour their party, with Baburam Bhattarai, the CPN-M’s chief ideologue threatening a ‘new revolution’, and to ‘capture the state’ in ‘not… more than ten minutes". Ominously, Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda, the Chairman of the CPN-M, had spoken of an undefined "new method" to "capture the Constituent Assembly through elections" in February 2008. The effect of Maoist tactics was, no doubt, compounded by widespread disillusionment with the mainstream parties – but the eventual outcome certainly reflects a quantum secured through strong-arm measures across the country.

The divided electoral outcome will of course, constrain the Maoists from their graver excesses, even as their relative strength in the Assembly will tempt them to encourage or coerce ‘cooperation’ with their agenda. Many have hoped that the Maoist commitment to pluralism and parliamentary democracy is now real, and eventually will be total; others believe that the inherent dynamic of this system will soon make the CPN-M ‘just another party’, vulnerable to the endemic corruption and ineptitude that has afflicted Nepal’s other political formations.

However, the Maoists will find it impractical, if not impossible, to entirely renege on their ideological agenda – even if we are to believe that their commitment will be sufficiently diluted by the lures of the many vices of the parliamentary system. It can, of course, be hoped that the Maoist-led regime that will eventually be installed at Kathmandu, will have the sagacity to reject the excesses of Stalinist Russia, of the Communist Party of China under Mao and the ‘Gang of Four’, or of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. It is, however, difficult to imagine how it can carry its declared ideological agenda of national transformation forward without drastic attacks against those who currently control power, influence and wealth within the country’s long-stratified and stagnant order.

Crucially, the radical imperative is not only ideological, it is structural. Nepal ranks among the poorest countries of the world, with a per capita income of just USD 260 per annum, and 42 per cent of the population below the poverty line. Poor connectivity afflicts much of the country, with isolated and dispersed populations in the hill areas largely unconnected by roads. A large proportion of the cultivable land and of the rural population is engaged in subsistence agriculture. GDP growth has tended to lag behind population growth – with a consequent decline in per capita incomes, and a rising population in poverty. Worse, Nepal has one of the most rapid rates of population growth in the region, adding 11.25 million to its year 2000 population of 24.43 million by 2020, to realize a 46 per cent augmentation at 35.68 million (the current population is already estimated to have exceeded 29.5 million). This will push up population densities from 166 in 2000 to 242 in 2020, creating unbearable burdens on the country’s resources, which are already stretched to a limit.

The pressures on any regime at Kathmandu will, consequently, be acute, and on the Maoists, exceptionally so. While the party’s leadership now speaks of "10-15 years" to "reorganize the country", those who are denied the benefits of power within the party, the cadre who have been promised a Republican Utopia after the dismantling of the monarchy, and the larger populations who fail to secure at least some economic relief from a party that claims to have waged a ‘people’s war’ – and killed thousands – in their name, will have limited patience. The problems created by multiple demands of autonomy, as well as the limited (though enormously improved) representation to some ethnic groups in the CA (and in the new Government), will also create a significant conflict potential. With the strident Terai groupings securing a substantial representation in the CA (the two principal groupings have a combined total of 38 seats in the FPTP count, and 8.4 per cent in the PR vote, at the time of writing), there will be an inclination to vigorously push their own extreme autonomy agenda forward – something which will certainly be a thorn in the Maoist flesh.

The integration of the Maoist ‘people’s army’ with the Nepal Army, a necessary tactical objective and cherished goal for the Maoists, and a measure that has already been agreed to on principle by the Seven Party Alliance (SPA), is another source of potential friction. The Army leadership has expressed opposition to a politicised Force; the Maoists will never be secure without an ideologically committed Army. The imperatives of strategy and of the current distribution of power fairly clearly define the natural inclinations that will prevail.

The cumulative thrust of these tactical and structural factors is that the temptation to grand schemes of ‘social engineering’ will be inevitable and overwhelming. However, pushing such an agenda forward will be difficult, if at all possible, for the Maoists, within the framework of the present distribution of seats within the CA and whatever the contours are of the new coalition Government. A united opposition from the other parties could exercise an overriding veto on Maoist schemes, and, given the history of the fractious democratic polity in the country, spoilers are certainly expected to play a disruptive, if not defining, role.

In any event, fulfilling their promises to their cadres and to the people of Nepal at large is not an immediate or realistic option either under the emergent framework of governance, or, indeed, the demographic and resource profile of the country. Ironically, the real choice that confronts the Maoists today is to be spectacular failures as democrats, or to be spectacular failures as Stalinists or radical Maoists. With their engagement with democracy destined to yield rapid failures in the implementation of long-held promises, the temptation to totalitarianism – barely held in abeyance – will become overwhelming.

The world will do well not, too easily or too quickly, to forget that the party now ascendant in Kathmandu is still designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US Department of State, and that it has not, in a single statement, diluted its ideological commitment to its radical Maoist ideology, or renounced the option of a future resort to political violence.

[Source: South Asian Intelligence Review]

Rumblings of a Tectonic Shift

Prasanta Kumar Pradhan
Research Associate, Institute for Conflict Management

Belying predictions of widespread violence and disruption, Nepal’s landmark Constituent Assembly (CA) elections on April 10, passed off almost peacefully throughout the country. With 55 political parties contesting the polls for the 601-member CA, and around 10.5 million voters, almost 60 per cent of registered voters, turning out to cast their votes amidst threats from some disgruntled armed outfits, the initial anxiety was running high across the country.

While counting is expected to continue for some days to come, with ballot boxes being transported across tenuous roads and tracks from remote polling centres, initial results suggest a Communist Party of Nepal – Maoist (CPN-M) juggernaut building into at least a clear majority in the CA, and consequently a defining power in the hands of the former rebels in relation to the character and content of the new Constitution. At the time of writing, the Maoists had already won 97 of the 171 seats where counting was complete, and were leading in 16 of 40 seats were counting was ongoing. The Communist Party of Nepal – United Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), which had been tipped as the leader in pre-election predictions, was trailing in third place, with just 23 seats, and a lead in 9; while Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala’s Nepali Congress (NC) had secured 28 seats, and was leading in 5.

240 of the 601 CA members are being elected by the direct vote which is presently being counted, while 335 will be elected by the nationwide distribution of votes on a Proportional Representation (PR) basis. The remaining 26 members will be nominated by the new Cabinet. While there were 3,970 candidates in the fray for the First-Past-The-Post (FPTP) election, there were 5,701 candidates in the PR category, including one half of women candidates, nearly two thousand Madhesis, over 600 Dalits (lower caste Hindus), over 2,000 Janajatis (indigenous nationalities), nearly 200 from backward regions and over 1,700 from other groups.

The armed Terai groups and the Maoists [including the Young Communist League (YCL)] were thought to be the primary security threats to a free and fair conduct of the polls. However, apart from a few untoward incidents, the election remained largely peaceful. Immediately after the voting was over on April 10, Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Bhoj Raj Pokharel had announced that the polls were conducted peacefully and that repolling was only to be held at 33 polling stations. With some complaints trickling in later, this number was eventually raised to 60 polling booths in 16 constituencies across 10 Districts.

Defying prophecies of chaos and violence, the Government managed to conduct polls in the Terai region. While disruption by the Terai armed groups was almost entirely prevented, it was the Maoists who were reportedly involved in a number of incidents of booth capturing and other disruptive activities. Maoist disruptive activities were reported from Districts including Chitwan, Saptari, Siraha, Mahottari, Arghakhanchi, Lalitpur, Dolakha, Baglung, Sunsari, Bajhang, Rukum, Gorkha, Sindhupalchowk and Ramechhap.

Nevertheless, the Terai region did not witness any large scale election-related violence, primarily owing to the Government’s antecedent Eight Point Agreement with the United Democratic Madhesi Front (UDMF), the biggest political alliance in the region, on February 28, 2008. All important leaders of the UMDF including, Hridayesh Tripathy, Mahanta Thakur and Upendra Yadav contested the polls. Other disgruntled armed groups were successfully contained by the Security Forces (SFs) during the elections, with the exception of two booths of the Trikaul VDC in the Saptari District, which is the birthplace of Jaya Krishna Goit, the leader of the All Terai Liberation Front (ATLF), earlier known as Janatantrik Terai Mukti Morcha – Goit (JTMM-G). Election officer Yogendra Prasad Shah disclosed that no political agents and voters came to the booth as a result of threats and fear.

Pre-poll electioneering had, however, witnessed large scale violence among the supporters, principally, of the three major political parties: the NC, the CPN-UML and the CPN-Maoist. The Maoists had, clearly, been at the forefront of such confrontations. Such incidents included barring candidates and supporters from visiting constituencies or addressing rallies, targeting the candidates and clashes between supporters. Worried about the deteriorating law and order situation, CEC Bhoj Raj Pokharel, on March 31, 2008, had summoned the top leaders of three major political parties in the Government and exhorted them to adhere strictly to the Election Code of Conduct.

On the day of the polls, a tight security blanket was thrown over the entire country. The Government began air patrols by helicopters from April 5 and deployed thousands of SF personnel nationwide, ahead of the polls. Around 56,000 Nepal Police personnel, 25,000 Armed Police Force (APF) personnel and 54,000 ‘temporary Police’ were deployed to oversee security during the polls, but, as Inspector General of Police, Om Bikram Rana, clarified, it was not necessary to call out the Army to help with the arrangements. The border with India was sealed on April 10 to prevent the movement of criminals and other disruptive elements. As a preventive measure the Home Ministry also directed local Police administrations to prohibit the entry of people from other constituencies on polling day, apart from those carrying permits approved by the Election Commission, the Returning Officer or security agencies.

The election was conducted under the supervision of the United Nations and several other national and international observers. Ian Martin, the Chief of the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) noted, "This has been Nepal’s most observed election." Apart from 28 international organisations, there were 148 national level observer groups and 95 District level organisations accredited by the Government to observe the polls. UNMIN and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in Nepal (OHCHR) deployed teams across the country to assist in ‘creating a free and fair atmosphere for the election’. In addition to the technical assistance provided to the Election Commission in all 75 Districts, UNMIN civil affairs teams and OHCHR human rights officers operated in mobile teams across 45 Districts. UNMIN arms monitors were present at all 28 Maoist Army Cantonment sites and operated mobile patrols from the five regional headquarters, visiting Nepal Army locations, and in Joint Monitoring Teams in communities near Cantonment sites.

The election was also observed by the media throughout the country. The Federation of Nepalese Journalists (FNJ) began nationwide monitoring through national and international missions, and local branches on the state of access to information, travel of media persons and security of media institutions and media persons. The International Mission comprised representatives from the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), International Media Support, Internews Network, International Safety Institute, Open Society Institute and Nepali representatives. The purpose of the missions was to carry out field based media monitoring of the pre-poll, polling and vote counting processes in Kathmandu valley, Biratnagar, Nepalgunj and adjoining areas.

Commentators, however, insist that the absence of manifest violence masked an insidious mix of "propaganda and street muscle" employed by the Maoists. Kanak Mani Dixit, editor of Himal, noted, "The Maoists promised the Earth to poor, marginalised people and also ran a country-wide campaign of fear and intimidation to win the elections."

Despite the tremendous achievement of a poll relatively free of overt violence, the elections raise some troubling questions on the reaction of the Maoists as results trickle in. Senior Maoist leader Baburam Bhattarai had, of course, announced that the Maoists would launch a ‘new revolution’ if the Party lost the CA. Elsewhere, at an interaction with media persons in Kathmandu on March 14, Bhattarai had stated, "I think the decade-long conflict will not find its justification if we are defeated in the Constituent Assembly poll." At an election meeting in Kaski District on April 5, 2008, Bhattarai said that the Maoists would go in for "State Capture" if the results for the upcoming Constituent Assembly election did not favour his Party, adding "It will not take us more than ten minutes to capture the State." Such an eventuality has, of course, now receded in view of the early Maoist successes.

The fate of King Gyanendra and the 240-year old institution of monarchy, in any event, now appears to be sealed. In the past few months, the King has been stripped of all his powers and property by the Government. Even as hopes of conciliation diminished, the King had called for free and fair elections: "We call upon all adult citizens to exercise their democratic right in a free and fair environment." Earlier on April 5, Prachanda had warned the monarch of "strong punishment" if "he (the King) wants to resist the verdict of the masses". He added, however, "If he respects the wishes of the masses in the election then our masses will forgive him and he can live as a common citizen." The future of the monarchy is the first issue to be decided by the new CA.

The Maoist intent remains fraught with menace. Maoist supreme, Pushpa Kamal Dahal aka Prachanda had clearly declared, on February 29, 2008: "We will capture the Constituent Assembly through elections in a new method and witness a miracle in one-and-a-half months." He did not elaborate what the "new method" was, but it is evident that it has succeeded in sufficient measure. If initial trends are sustained, the elections will have transferred the power to define the new Constitutions into the Maoist fold. With a significant – if not absolute – majority in the CA, and clear control of the Government, pushing through a radical, possibly totalitarian, agenda could quickly become a question of mere tactic and timing. The total seizure of state power, the long-held and unambiguous objective of the Maoists through war and ‘peace’, is tantalizingly close.

[Source: South Asian Intelligence Review]

News Briefs

No change yet in CPN-Maoist status as terrorist outfit, says US official: The US State Department's Deputy spokesman Tom Casey has said that there has been no change yet in the status of Maoists as a terrorist outfit despite their winning the election. "We have an organization being placed on the list of designated foreign terrorists organizations. (It) has legal requirements that are placed on us. We have to honour those legal requirements and we'll certainly do so in the case of Nepal," he stated, and hinting of a possible review, said, "You have an organization that moves away from violence and terror and participates in a political process and engages in those kinds of legitimate activities, that would certainly, I think, give people an opportunity to at least look again at that situation and that organisation." "But at this point, you know there's no change in their status and we'll follow the law as appropriate," he added further. Nepal News, April 22, 2008.

Prachanda to head new Government in Nepal: CPN-Maoist chief Prachanda on April 20, 2008, declared that he will lead the next Government in Nepal. "I will soon become the head of the first republican government," Prachanda said during a victory rally in Kirtipur Municipality of Kathmandu. The CPN-Maoist has emerged as the single largest party by securing 119 seats out of a total of 240 for which polls were held under the first-past-the-post voting system. Ahead of the April 10 polls, Prachanda was projected by the CPN-Moist as a future President. But as the interim constitution does not have the provision for electing a President, he is expected to head the Government as Prime Minister, party sources said. He also assured the voters that Nepal would be declared a republic through the first meeting of the Constituent Assembly, which will be held within three weeks of the announcement of all the results. Hindu, April 20, 2008.

Maoists to seize power if defeated in elections: Babu Ram Bhattarai, second in command of the CPN-Maoist, said at an election meeting in Kaski District on April 5, 2008, that the Maoists would go in for "State Capture" if the results for the upcoming Constituent Assembly election do not go in favour of his party. "It will not take us more than ten minutes to capture the State", he stated. "The National and International reactionary forces are hatching conspiracies to ensure the Maoists defeat… the Maoists with the peoples’ support in such a case would eventually capture the State", he said. "If the elections were held in a free and fair environment, no force on earth can defeat us", Bhattarai said, adding, "We were the first to forward the demand for the election to the Constituent Assembly, the UML and the NC are the "political monkeys" who are trying to reap the benefits of the CA election." Telegraph Nepal, April 6, 2008.

[Source: South Asian Intelligence Review]