Politics has come full circle in Nepal. The televised wanton bloodletting – the national parliament in flames, the finance minister being beaten on streets, and the wife of a former Prime Minister set on fire by the ‘Gen Z’ protestors – relay images that veer between a Jacobin power capture and utter descent into chaos and anarchy.
From abolition of feudal hegemony, and the dawn of monarchical democracy in 1951, to a protracted civil war that claimed more than 20,000 lives and culminated with the Maoist power and parliamentary capture, this landlocked Himalayan nation has suffered as much from political disruption as from natural disasters.
The Maoist program of parliamentary reforms, devolution of state powers, push for localisation and federalism, and increased representation of the marginalized and tribal communities, failed to solve long-standing problems. The shocking lack of accountability and hubris following the transition after the abdication of King Gyanendra, left not just discontent in its wake, but a cauldron of seething rage that was a ticking time bomb waiting to explode anytime.
Nepal: Once The Hindu Lone State
Wedged between two giant civilizational states, India and China, and hobbled with its own social-political rifts, Nepal, once the world’s only officially Hindu state, qualifies to be what the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington termed a Lone State, a small country with a distinct civilization and pattern of socio-economic evolution. Huntington labels Japan and Haiti as two Lone States owing to their peculiar history and unique culture.
Through ancient ties of religion, culture, language, porous borders, Nepal falls within the Indic civilizational bloc and Hindu cosmos, yet there are divergences, amplified throughout the post colonial experience. Since the Treaty of Sugauli in 1816, when the Nepalese rulers ceded annexed territories in Kumaon and Garhwal and agreed to be an autonomous British protectorate, the patterns of statehood, development, and identity formation in Nepal has been quite different from India.
ALSO READ: Nepal GenZ protest wasn’t a ‘colour revolution’: Narendra Modi confirmed it
As an ethnic tinderbox and a traditional society with a quasi primitive, labour intensive structure of economy, the litany of Nepal’s travails arise as much from its geography, the wrath of nature, as from the missionary zeal of the malcontents, mimic men, and modernizers, who disrupted the fine balance in a society with a traditional coherence, deep community bonds, and continuity of robust identity and heritage despite material scarcity and poverty.
The misdiagnosed and mistaken modernity imposed by the Maoists on a fractious polity was bound to be tenuous, triggering its own unraveling. The ideologues and stormtroopers of the Maoists got their ideas from the Shining Path of Peru, and support from their disgruntled fellow travelers in India and the diaspora.
The Prachand Path of the Nepali Maoists was borrowed wholesale from the Guzman path of the Shining Path insurgents in the Andean country. The mayhem in Peru unleashed by them should have served as a cautionary tale, rather it served as an inspiration.
Structural Rifts
Nepali intellectual Dipak Gayawali has written about the staggering ignorance of Prachand and his cohort about the Nepali society, and not unsurprisingly, about their own cardinal tenets of Marx, Lenin, and Mao.
During the Khrushchev thaw in the USSR, Vladimir Dudintsev wrote a novel titled ‘Not by Bread Alone’, an allusion from the Bible that refers to something higher or self-actualisation once basic material needs are met. With its theme of a sclerotic bureaucracy and its innate tendency to stall creativity and innovation, the book became a Soviet bestseller in 1956.
Identity, affirmation, rootedness, and meaning are key social themes that resonate across all societies. The college educated, urban, internet savvy Gen Z, who spearheaded the violent uprising, are not poor or indebted peasants whose key concerns still remain the paltry bread, clothing, and a roof over one’s head.
Structural faultline in Nepal, widened by geography and connectivity, is between hill-plains and urban-rural, with the overlap of migration and remittances across all of these sections.
Although the Nepali economy has been growing at a snail’s pace of 3-5%, the inordinate skew towards just two sectors, agriculture and tourism, highly cyclical in nature, and constituting over 85% of the country’s economy, highlights the lack of opportunities and prospects.
None of these two sectors can absorb the teeming anxious youth population armed with diplomas and with an Instagrammed image of the ‘high life’, an adrift identity, and the influence of woke talking points. The chasm between reality and aspiration, and the usual Pavlovian response to it, leads to socio-cultural paralysis, paranoia, cynicism, and cycles of violence.
Hard Reckoning for Nepal
Nepal’s infrastructure is wobbly, her industrial and services sector, other than tourism, almost non-existent. Foreign investment too is negligible. Development aid, agro products, carpets, handicrafts and spa-resort-casino economy keeps the country afloat.
Regional chauvinist rabble rousers like the civil engineer-rapper turned Kathmandu mayor Bale Shah can garner supporters through anti-India rhetoric but the fact remains New Delhi remains the biggest trading partner( over 65% of Nepal’s global trade is conducted with India)as well as the top education destination for Nepali students. The top echelons of the aristocrats, communists, and the democrats have all been educated at premier institutions in India.
The Kathmandu Method appears enticing to those with fantasies of revolution and overthrow, but it remains just another chapter of ordeal in the troubled history of the Himalayan nation. Deeper integration with India, agro modernization, sustainable development and preservation of ecosphere, and diversification away from the tourism industry are the structural challenges that need to be fixed.
ALSO READ: The Sunk Cost Fallacy of UPSC Aspirants: Why having a Plan B is important
The politics of rage, rhetoric and unending grievance will keep the country locked in a circular loop, turning it into a fertile ground for the wannabe vanguards who want to displace the elites to usurp their position, while role-playing as the leaders of the poor. George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a fine illustration of this phenomenon.
The Peruvian imagination and Maoist fantasy has ended like a gruesome nightmare. What’s next can be even worse. Until and unless the country reaffirms its identity and the youth weans itself away from the modern day opium of the people – digitalized social mimicry and envy that breeds woke resentment, the future can be more macabre than the past. There’s a pattern to this causality between youthful aspiration, social anxiety, jaded revolutionary ardor, and quashed hopes.
“The revolution was a revolution of words. The words had appeared as an illumination, a short cut to dignity, to newly educated men who had nothing in the community to measure themselves against, and who, finally, valued little in their own community. They were too big; they didn’t fit; they remained words. The revolution blew away; and what was left in Grenada was a murder story”.
~ Heavy Manners in Grenada, VS Naipaul
