MCC has appeared at a moment when, ironically, democracy is fighting for its life in both Nepal and the United States. Both countries find themselves challenged by neo-fascist expressions of marginalized frustration. Beyond that, though, the two have little in common, since the American alienation springs from downward social mobility – a decline in racial privilege, in particular – while the main forces opposing MCC in Nepal, the communists, claim to be the vanguard for upward mobility. Just how opposition to MCC fits into that quest goes to the heart of our subject: Maoist miscue.
There is little need to speak on MCC specifics (see THT, 8 Feb 22). Nearly everything said politically by the opposition is false, a good bit, as Nepali media has uncovered, simply lies advanced for tactical purposes of coalition and electoral positioning. Dispensing with the subject, suffice to note that MCC is grant for which Nepal applied and in which all political parties, to include the Maoists, were involved and supported – until a new political football was required.
This has proved distressing, in particular, for the grant provider, the United States, but also for other supporters of development in Nepal, because the disingenuous nature of the opposition, and in particular of the Maoist position, has highlighted just how little thought is given to the needs of the country as opposed to the needs of the tactical moment.
What has happened, of course, is that the decline and near-fall of Nepali democracy has found its fig-leaf in opposition to MCC. To examine the situation:
All currently available evaluation on the state of the Nepalese polity is negative. The authoritative Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) annual democracy ratings, just released for 2021, place Nepal at 4.41 of 10 (metrics in report), or 101st of 167 countries – down from an already low 5.22. The country is categorized as a "hybrid regime" and located in the third tier of four, between "flawed democracy" and "authoritarian" on the scale, and just six slots above falling into "authoritarian."
The highly regarded Transparency International annual corruption perceptions index, in its report issued in January 2022 (for 2021), scored Nepal at just 33 on a 100-point scale (metrics in report), which placed it 117th of 167 countries.
Amnesty International, in its annual regional review of human rights, issued in early 2021, was equally negative in its assessment, including in its Nepal section (pp.260-62) the blunt charge: "Torture and other ill-treatment were widespread in pre-trial detention to extract 'confessions' and intimidate detainees. Although the 2017 Criminal Code criminalized torture and other ill-treatment, no one had been convicted under it by the end of 2020."
Human Rights Watch had just before, in November 2020, issued an equally scathing report, the title reflecting the contents: No Law, No Justice, No State for Victims: The Culture of Impunity in Post-Conflict Nepal.
Recently, the esteemed scholar of Nepali society and politics, Karl-Heinz Krämer, openly questioned whether Nepal could even be called a democracy.
And MCC somehow is jeopardizing this track record? To the contrary, it would seem there is much work to be done to move forward. This certainly seems to have been the intent of the elected government of Nepal when it its original proposal to the MCC was accepted and funded. The involved parties (all of them) acted at the time because they recognized a need could be met in the larger process of Nepali development.
Rather than celebrating this achievement, some have engaged in prevarication disguised as debate. The shrillest voices claim that providing development assistance to meet pressing national needs will somehow diminish sovereignty. This line of argument, too, should cause much puzzlement.
In the Nepali case, the challenge comes from half-baked communism still corrupted by extortion and violence in local spaces. For the Maoists remain a party of opposition, angrily against much but refusing to stand for something. And posturing is not being "for something." Is embrace of dictatorship the Nepali way forward or is implementation of liberal democracy?
There has been much talk in Nepali media of the role of China in all this. I have no idea whether China is involved one way or another with respect to MCC. I do know the country is a dictatorship which is intelligent enough to pose as a democracy even as it commits genocide. One can question U.S. "motives" in its efforts to assist Nepal over the past three-quarters of a century. A democracy such as the U.S. (or any other active in Nepal) may indeed "want something," but that "something" is that Nepal, too, be democratic and embrace the market. Ultimately, then, the challenge thrown up by MCC is simple: What do Nepalis believe in?
Certainly, in the case of many of your politicians, your media has provided a stark answer: not much. For, unfortunately, Nepal of late has created quite the track record of cozying up to some pretty odious sorts. This gives cause for concern.
In foreign policy, when the communists have been the ruling party, they've at times sounded like the marginalized, pro-Maoist Albanians of the Cold War, then Beijing's only ally in Europe, promising liberation for mankind and sponsoring international symposia (held in Nepal) attempting to pursue this line.
One of the more egregious such gatherings was the 30-31 May 2018 gathering in Kathmandu that was sponsored by the ruling communist party. All major party figures attended, to include the prime minister and the Maoist leadership. The Ambassador of Venezuela was a keynote speaker.
Subsequently, the Maoists created considerable stir by releasing an official NCP letter supporting Venezuela and condemning U.S. actions against what objectively is one of the more loathsome Marxist dictatorships (albeit terming itself "Bolivarian") in the world. It ranks near the absolute bottom in the EIU league tables, behind even China (151st to China's 148th). The Caracas regime, to be clear, maintains its internal position only through the widespread, brutal use of paramilitary thugs and through support of dictatorships such as Cuba, Russia, China, and Iran. Latest estimates state that nearly 6 million Venezuelans are refugees as a consequence of national collapse resulting from the country's Marxist policies, and a special UN Human Rights Council investigation has reported there exist "reasonable grounds" to charge the country's dictatorship with crimes against humanity.
Not to be deterred by sobering reality, the Nepali Maoists, on 26 July 2019 at the "Ninth Asia-Pacific Regional Conference on Solidarity to Cuba," hosted in Kathmandu, lauded "socialism" and Cuba's efforts to achieve it, demanding an end to the U.S. embargo of the country, yet ignored Cuba's central role in facilitating the tragedy unfolding in Venezuela.
That Nepal is involved at all with such distant, lamentable regimes can only be explained in terms of imagined yearning for communist ideological solidarity even as the quality of Nepal's democratic governance has declined steadily.
In September 2019, several hundred senior NCP cadre of the government and party spent much of a week in an indoctrination session in "Xi Jinping Thought" (i.e., the thought of the present dictator of China), facilitated by 40 cadre from China (to include officials as high as the Chief of the International Liaison Department of the Communist Party of China). Subsequently, Mr. Xi himself, accompanied by a substantial party, visited Kathmandu and signed more than two dozen agreements designed to bind the two countries more closely. This was followed in June 2020 by a second indoctrination session, conducted via internet teleconferencing during the pandemic lockdown.
Seriously? The CCP, the brutal ruling party of a dictatorship, as a model? Small wonder, then, that a good bit of head-scratching goes on in the outside world. It's almost as if Nepalis have no knowledge of the astonishing crimes of those with whom they hang out – or worse, simply choose to ignore it. Why would they do that? Coming up with an answer makes trying to explain the MCC conundrum seem almost child's play by comparison.
The present fraught state of Nepali democracy highlights the challenge. It is not enough to vote, just as it is not enough to secure voting booths even as the most astonishing crimes occur just outside the perimeters of those voting premises.
Countries are not empty vessels. They have systems. A voice in the West who objects to policies or their manner of implementation has a chance to be heard.
Enough Nepalis have been there and lived there to know this. That is not true of dictatorial systems. That Nepalis representing certain parties claim the opposite rather highlights the point. I think Rocky said it best in the movie, "You hang out with bums, you become a bum." Nepali Maoism has gone down that road.
The background is plain. In any society, the structure implemented through politics enables or blocks opportunity. Mediation of grievances, support for hopes and aspirations, all exist in tension and generate both support and opposition. Maoism is but an attempt at finding a new way forward when, in the minds of those who generated the movement, the status quo was no longer working for the masses. Maoism, therefore, is a solution poorly chosen.
That communism is the ultimate obscenity in practice has been extensively documented, not least by its surviving victims, whether Chinese or Russian or any other. Leaders, produced by structural position and inclination, adopt ideologies, theory combined with a course of action. Followers simply want their needs addressed. They sign on to political projects, because they see the possibility that ultimately their concerns will matter, their lives will improve. Few actually embrace ideology in the first instance. They must be indoctrinated.
Marxism-Leninism, for reasons of availability in translated form, early on cornered the market in producing the vocabulary and concepts applied to your societal challenges. Thus, anything wrong is "capitalism," anything right is communism, one variant of which is Maoism, its most odious variant, one should note – even by Chinese scholarship – at least before Mr. Xi suppressed it.
In reality, Marxism as practiced in Nepal is quite flawed, and the insistence upon squeezing factual square pegs into round holes is universal. The height of obscenity is the continued denial, in Maoist inner circles, that the Khmer Rouge ever hurt anyone, that their atrocity in butchering a third of the Cambodian population in a matter of years, was a capitalist lie. Unfortunately, the facts of the atrocity that resulted from an effort to be über-Maoists are all too well documented, as are the crimes of the figure frequently lauded by the Maoists, the Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso). In Peru, the late Abimael Guzman aka Chairman Gonzalo of Shining Path, turned Peru into a charnel house before he was captured, and his movement crushed.
Lauding a model such as this (it has long been known Peru was a key exemplar for the Nepali Maoists), is there any surprise at what happened in Nepali local spaces during the conflict? The transitional justice files are apparently bad enough, but after years of compiling data, I am convinced that the sheer horror of 1996-2006 has not yet been grasped. Yet it must be dealt with if Nepali democracy is to survive.
The end of conflict, when it came, was not a selection of "peace" over violence. What was understood at Chunwang in September 2005 was that the struggle would enter a new phase. As published and disseminated, the course of action was to give up military and guerrilla action in favor of continued terrorism (the term is that of academia, not the Maoists) and violent mass action in the streets. That events took the course they did stemmed not from design but from strategic miscue and tactical error. Radicals claimed betrayal, the mainstream muddled on.
This trajectory continues to unfold. The level of Maoist violence in local space, especially that connected with fundraising by all factions, continues to be very high. One part of the Biplav group returned to the Maoist fold and now practices its violence quite openly. The other part of that group stayed out. As local violence has reached levels not seen in years, the police have been noticeable for their nonaction. Their orders to avoid involvement in "political matters" results in the Maoists being given full scope for action.
There is no need to go on at length. The Maoists are a political party but one, like Hezbollah, that sees violence as integral to its political project. The inability to confront their mis-steps and to end the continued depredations in local space prevents them from being a positive force in moving the country forward. They do have some bright lights, yet it's remarkable how quickly even normal conversation with them turns to menace and, in the shadows, actual violence.
In examining the way forward, several outlets have highlighted Hisila Yami's recent memoirs (e.g. THT, 17 Jan 22), which I plan to review academically. They are a contribution not for the sales pitch on the cover ("from revolutionary to first lady") but for the context and details provided on the Maoist political project. Further, what she leaves out speaks as eloquently as what she includes.
The omissions center on just what has been said here: what does Nepali Maoism believe in beyond platitudes that have been used to justify unspeakable violence? Hisila grapples with neither the sheer level of atrocity unleashed in local space nor with the inspiration for that course of action. At the time it was attacked, Nepal was a clumsy but not particularly predatory state on its way to democratic advance. The unleashing of violence was by design responding to an ideological approach which directs that blood be shed as a societal rite of passage. The implications of that mental strait-jacket are not discussed in the volume. As she writes from the perspective of activism spent largely in India, Hisila seems to have quite missed the resulting horror.
It is a brave book, which makes a contribution, but one hopes to see a second edition that probes more deeply. This is central, because she makes much of the leadership of Dahal aka Prachanda without ever discussing why or how. Yet MCC has thrust forward a "back to the future" moment where Maoist leadership is concerned.
As made clear in his antics (what other word is appropriate?), Dahal is a politician who embraced as vision a regressive ideology which inflicted on his country not liberation but boundless suffering from which it has yet to recover. Academic consideration of the change this violence ostensibly brought about – the claim that it broke through obstacles or inadequacies in the old-order – finds little advance beyond tactical advances. The present state of Nepali politics cannot be considered a substantial improvement over what existed in 1996.
In addressing social change, certainly a woman who has served as a battalion commander in combat has experienced a reality she would not otherwise have known. That she has been personally empowered is axiomatic. Structurally, however, empowerment has advanced little. Patriarchy maintains its iron grip. So what to make of the combat experience beyond the personal? One need only look at the Maoists as a political party to observe the point made real: it is a party of the male oligarchy.
And at the apex of that same party are Mr. Dahal and those he has empowered. That he should have turned leadership over long ago to younger successors is clear. Yet consideration of the matter is dependent upon whether nation-building was the object or simply personal aggrandizement. Did Dahal at Chunwung intend to embrace politics? I interpret the evidence to say that he never did.
That is not what the documents and the witnesses to the key meetings say. He was opting for a classic united front approach which foundered as a result of unforeseen circumstances. Both the original plan and a return to the high end of revolutionary violence (as desired by both Baidya and Biplav) became non-starters.
This left him scrambling, and that led straight to the odd union with Mr. Oli. Now, Dahal is caught in a trap of his own making, because the Stalinist basis of classic Maoism was recognized by even the post-Mao cabal in China as a dead-end. China thus found its way to neo-fascism. Dahal has yet to find his alternative. It is unlikely he will.
There is irony here, since theorizing of the way forward is what I understand led the Maoist second, Dr. Bhattarai, to leave the party. Still, he also has been unable to break free of the straight-jacket in which Maoism put his mind. The creative approaches of Gramsci and the Frankfurt school have not surfaced in Nepali communism, much less the swirl of theory that one associates with more recent Marxist figures in the West.
Thus we are left with opposition to MCC as the linchpin of the moment. If that's all Nepali Maoism has come to mean, it is but a short time before the edifice comes crashing down.
Dr Thomas A Marks is a Distinguished Professor at the College of International Security Affairs (CISA) of the National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, DC. He has been extensively involved in Nepal since 1975 and has published much thereon. The opinions expressed in this interview are his own and do not purport to represent those of the U.S. government, the Department of Defense, or NDU.
