--By Achyut Wagle

 

Mohan Baidya alias 'Kiran' never had the political face of his own despite the fact that he has spent some four decades as  hardliner in Nepal's Left politics. He has throughout been a meek, less articulate,  purely bookish ideologue of so called 'Marxist Aesthetics', as one wonders what so aesthetic could there be in the genre of Marxism practiced by the likes of Baidya, where class elimination by killing everyone possible who has any opinion of his or her own, is the modus operandi. He was with the Nepal Communist Party-Fourth Convention as the middle-row supporter of Mohan Bikram Singh, when the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) had had the first major break-up in mid-1970s. Then he was mere disgruntling shadow of Nirmal Lama when the latter was the General Secretary of that outfit. Until the Mashal was formed in late 1980's he was undecided whether to follow Singh or Lama. Later came the decision by the Maoists to initiate the armed jungle war and they needed some faces who were senior communist figures for reasons of credibility yet these figures were expected to blindly support the 'strategies' of the war managers. Baidya perfectly fitted in that band  and became part of the ten year-long killing spree by the CPN (Maoist), led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal, alias Comrade Prachanda. He spent fifteen years since insurgency that began in 1996 as the senior deputy of Dahal. He has, however, a permanent trait of personality as the opposition within. Whoever might have been his boss in different points of time in history, he begged to disagree.

 

Even the present face of Mohan Baidya is not of his own but borrowed one from none other than Prachanda,  in a sense that he is identified more as a man who  dared to challenge Prachanda and now a likely trouble-maker to the latter, than a leader in himself. This is though not to mean that Dahal is better, or worse, than Baidya. Baidya as a person certainly has some better qualities than Dahal. He is a learned, soft-spoken, financially clean and nationalist persona,  claim cadres who worked with both.

 

At this juncture of time, the character-sketch of Baidya is important here because, he is 'the' single-most difficult obstacle, as officially declared by the country's security administration, to the Constituent Assembly (CA) polls scheduled (not deferred as of writing of these lines) for the 19th of November, 2013. Will he with the support of his thirty-three parties' alliance be able to foil the CA polls? He may not be able to,  but he will surely spoil them. 

 

Baidya's facelessness is also manifested even in his strategy to boycott the polls. His main strength seems to be acrimony and vengeance targeted mainly to Dahal. He is apparently unplanned, directionless and confused. Above all, he carries an outdated dogma of 'Maoism' as his political principle, which brews full of contradictions in his word and deeds. His announced policy is of 'boycott polls', but some of his cadres have filed candidatures, clearly with his consent. He has circulated directives to resort to vandalism to disrupt the campaign and voting and, at the same time, ordered the cadres to indulge in strategic voting to defeat, allegedly, UCPN (Maoist) candidates, mainly those close to Dahal.

 

Will Baidya's operation have a serious ramifications in Nepal's politics ? 'Yes' in the short and 'no' in the long run. In fact, if Baidya determinedly acted with plans, he still has the capacity to foil the present polls. But his plans so far have proved to be half-hearted and spineless, thus not effective enough to deter the government from holding polls. This neither created a situation of defering the poll dates nor would they go as normal to get validated, in true political sense, as inclusive. Some programmes like a ten-day long Nepal banda, (general strike) called for from 10th to 19th of November is in fact supportive to carry-out the polls. This is because, the period of the strike call is so long that people on their own will start to disobey it after a couple of days. They are likely to do so more aggressively this time as the security presence will be  perhaps thickest in history of such protest programme. By the date of the polls,  the effect is expected to completely wear-out. At least, the security apparatus hopes to be so, which is a very likely prognosis.

 

But, as the Nepali political history has it, in the long run, the break-away factions of the so called hardliners or the 'principled' ones in due course of time have either gone out of existence, reduced to a party of a mere few or ultimately 'united' to some bigger outfits, sometimes the mother one. When the Nepali Congress was formed in 1949, the group of  'principled ones' led by Dilli Raman Regmi, not satisfied with the leadership of BP Koirala, had formed the Nepali National Congress  but in about a decade's time got dusted to history. In early 1960s, Bharat Shumsher Rana formed a 'nationalist' Gorkha Parishad, which too didn't exit for long. Even during the panchyat period, there were true 'panchas'  who were often alleged to have operated by ‘bhoomigat giroh’ (underground gang) and 'liberal' panchas who prevailed in far larger part of three decade long history of the panchayat.

 

In the left movement, people like Tulsi Lal Amatya couldn't accommodate himself in the mainstream Nepal Communist Party led by Pushpa Lal, but after restoration of democracy in 1990, it got united to the present day CPN-UML. Even after 1990, the UML got divided as Bamdev Gautam took away a powerful chunk and later got united with UML itself. Same fate was of Nepali Congress as Sher Bahadur Deuba led the division and later unified with the mother party. There was a time the then powerful CPN-ML was led by CP Mainali as General Secretary. Still, after a series of vicissitudes, he heads the same party for namesake, but effectively just a small group of family friends. This is to suggest that who believed in breaking the parties than reforming it through democratic process and claimed to have possessed a real 'idealist' force couldn't shine in history. Baidya is unlikely to have a much different story. Moreover, Baidya faction even lacks the doctrinal basis of retaining a separate party. Whatever ideals it cherishes, like taking up the  arms again, is obsolete and undemocratic, which puts him to the further risk of extinction.

 

There is another school of thought in Nepali politics which considers that such break-away factions have done a great disservice to the cause of institutionalization of democracy and political stability. If we look through the examples of factionalism given above, the logic seems to hold a lot of water. Baidya is again going to be another stumbling block to take the course of Nepali politics a step ahead through successful completion of the CA elections at this crucial turning point in Nepali history. If that fails, country will surely loose in a great deal.

 

Will the CA elections held by deploying the security forces in excess serve our purpose of giving 'very inclusive' constitution ? Surely not. As situation is developing, the other poll-opposing outfits at local levels appear more aggressive than Baidya faction in obstructing the election process and the arrests of their cadres en masse have already begun. In the days to come, they might leave Baidya and his group behind in taking-up violence to just to prove that they too do exist. In the manner the government has decided to mobilize the army is an unnecessary exercise if we were to believe that comprehensive peace agreement (CPA) of 2006 still holds. As such, which has been said umpteen times even in this column, the new constitution is impossible to be implemented, thus makes the entire exercise of CA elections ultimately futile.

 

Who is to blame for this? It is none other than Dahal, who claims himself as the solely responsible person to end Nepal's political instability; as the only surviving party among two signatories of the CPA after the death of GP Koirala. But, he failed to show the kind of magnanimity to accommodate Baidya in the mainstream of the transitional political process. To borrow words from Nepali Congress ideologue Pradeep Giri, Dahal didn't even learn from Koirala to be pragmatic when situation demanded. His argument is that, though Koirala was considered highly uncompromising even within the Party, but he bent extra to pick Dahal's party directly from the jungle warfare to bring them in mainstream politics and, give larger share in government than perhaps it deserved. But, this time around, Dahal didn't even honestly want to take Baidya and his group onboard the political process.

 

The country is for now set to pay a very big cost of this inflexibility of Dahal, even if the elections are held by using the force. Building on the issue of generosity, the closed lists of proportional representation candidates of the Parties submitted in the Election Commission in fact prove that cronyism is so rampant that the very rationale of the 'representation' got defeated in trying to serve the petty, family interests of the powerful leaders of every party. 

 

As an old saying goes, it is the responsibility of a wiser and powerful to accommodate the weak and the foolish, which in turn serves the purpose of the wiser. Dahal probably forgot it. Baidya might go in oblivion soon as expected by Dahal, but for now he is indeed a real danger to the democratic process.

 

(The writer is former editor of Aarthik Abhiyan National Daily.)