If Gagan Thapa loses again in the National Convention likely to be held soon, the arrival of the Deuba faction on the scene will gravitate the party towards the right from the centre
Many old political parties of Nepal have suffered a debacle in the recent election at the hands of the Rastriya Swatantra Party, which has won 182 seats in the House of Representatives, only two short of a two-thirds majority. The Nepali Congress (NC), the largest party in the erstwhile Parliament with 89 seats, has been reduced to just 38 seats. The Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML), the second largest with 68 seats, have also slumped to 23 seats. Similar is the fate of the erstwhile Maoist Centre, plummeting to 17 from 32, despite taking a new form as the Nepali Communist Party that has cobbled together several other parties. The other parties fared even worse. The Madhes-based parties, for example, did not even win a single seat despite their stronghold.
The question now is, how will some of these parties move forward in the days to come? History has shown that they either maintain their stand or further harden or even mellow it down. It has been seen that some parties remain hooked to their pre-election positions, as glaringly in the aftermath of Israel's Labour Party's 1988 electoral defeat. Instead of the expected shift in the party's ideological positioning in any significant way, the party kept its earlier stance largely intact.
A similar phenomenon can be seen in the case of the UML, where its leader K P Oli appears to stick to the chair as evidenced by the chairing of the party meeting despite the mourning period, following the demise of his octagenarion father. In Nepal, people abstain from all other activities in such a period of grief. He could have handed over his rights to his deputy, which shows his insatiable lust for power. He appears to consider himself still deserving as he had won with a heavy majority in the General Convention held last December. He does not seem to realise that the situtaion has turned topsy turvy now after his heavy defeat to Balendra Shah, the former mayor of Kathmandu Metropolis, by more than 50,000 votes.
There are some other cases when parties appear to adopt substantially more extreme positions after losing office. In 1976, the United States Republican Party lost the presidency to Democrat Jimmy Carter after the incumbent Gerald Ford suffered defeat. Ford had overcome the primary challenge from former California Governor Ronald Reagan and ran as a moderate candidate with executive experience. His loss in the presidential elections created an intense primary competition between factions of the Republican party in the run-up to the 1980 elections.
Against the more centrist candidate, former CIA director and UN ambassador George H.W. Bush, Reagan ran on a distinctly conservative agenda that advocated supply-side economic policies, a promise to balance the budget (for the first time since 1969), and a muscular foreign policy that included a substantial increase in defense spending. Although Bush won several early primaries, including Pennsylvania and Michigan, Reagan was able to overcome his challenger and claim the party's nomination. This victory sparked a dramatic rightward shift away from the centre.
Such a case may be with respect to the NC. It is most likely that Gagan Kumar Thapa will resign and dissolve the present central committee, duly announcing a General Convention in view of the defeat faced by him as well as by all the contesting office bearers. The two other General Secretaries Pradeep Paudel and Guru Prasad Ghimire both lost heavily in the recent election.
Thapa has been held responsible for the present debacle by NC members like Meen Biswakarma, ignoring the reality that the NC might have fared worse than the UML, if it had gone to the polls under the leadership of Sher Bahadur Deuba. At least the NC has been a distant second as the RSP's victory was a foregone conclusion in view of its national craze generated by Shah. If Thapa loses again in the National Convention likely to be held soon, the arrival of the Deuba faction on the scene will gravitate the party towards a rightward shift from the centre. If Thapa wins, it will abandon the conservative stand and enter the liberal fold.
Some parties move to the centre after loss of power. The Australian Labour Party was defeated by the Liberal-National Party in 1996 after being at the helm for three years. Soon after the election, Labour Party leader Paul Keating stepped aside and, in his place, Kim Beazley was elected by the parliamentary coalition. In the following election marked by economic concerns over the Goods and Service Tax introduced by the new government, the Labour platform shifted further right, towards the centre of the political spectrum.
Such a tendency was observed in the Nepali Communist Party even before the election, which was formed by dumping the more ultra left Maoist Centre. It had waged a People's War for a decade by rebelling against the parliamentary parties and catapulted to power after signing a peace accord with them, including the NC, UML, and the likes. It is likely that Prachanda, mercurial as he is, will even abandon communism to be nearer to the democratic RSP. It is in view of this, though a bit hilarious, that he has expressed his earnest wish to provide mentorship to the lesser experienced RSP.
The country has thus entered an interesting phase with the future likely to unfold several surprises in addition to this recent one of the landslide victory by the RSP. One of them is certainly Prachanda's continuity in the political scene.