Monday Backgrounder: Nepal’s Democracy Drama

Monday Backgrounder is a weekly feature that discusses a new topic every week giving the reader basic knowledge about the subject so that you can pretend to know things without reading a newspaper. With UN Mission in Nepal being kicked out this week, it seems an appropriate time to discuss what has been going on in the Himalayan country.

If you haven’t read my previous post on Nepal’s democratic crisis, one of the worst political dramas of the last decade in South Asia, shame on you. Anyways, I forgive you and just to be comprehensive here are the gory details of what has been going in the country.

#6 Nepal fails to elect a Prime Minister for 16 times

The beautiful country of Nepal has been under political turmoil for more than four years now, preceded by a decade-long civil war. However, no one was prepared for the comedy of 2010. In June, Nepalese Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal (seriously, who is better equipped to run the country than Mr. Nepal himself!) resigned in a dramatic televised speech after one-year tenure. Under constant pressure from Maoists and tired of internal squabbling of a 22-party coalition, PM Nepal simply called it a day. But little did he know that he won’t get off that easy. Now head of the caretaker government, he had to hand over reins to the new Prime Minister elected by the parliament, who never showed up. 

Over the next six months from July to December, Nepalese Parliament called for a vote 16 times but ran into deadlock every time. The parliament has called for another vote in the end of January but something tells me that we might not be seeing a replacement PM anytime soon. Meanwhile, the security situation in the country is worsening everyday and everyone is out to play the kingmaker including India. 

We would totally elect a PM this time

While Nepal has no government, another country has too many…

(Click here for the complete list)

Indian Maoists being trained in Nepal...and we are just making it worse.

The Ministry of Home Affairs has just warned the state governments that many Indian Maoists are being trained along with the People's Liberation Army of Nepal Maoists by Lashkar-e-Toiba in Nepal. Considering that the Indian Government has thrown all its weight (read below) against letting Nepalese Maoists build a democratically-elected coalition government in the country, what can you expect from them.

The Nepalese Maoists, after a decade of bloody civil war, laid down their arms in 2006 to join the Nepalese democracy. However since 2009, when the Maoists resigned from the government, the country has been a rudderless democracy. Yesterday Nepal failed to elect a new Prime Minister, for the twelfth time in the last two months! 

And to top it all off, the Indian Government is doing all it can to disallow the Maoists from making a coalition government. A month ago, an Indian intelligence operative actually threatened a member of Nepalese Parliament to have his daughter's admission revoked from the embassy-run Kendriya Vidyalaya if the MP does not vote a particular way. True story.

Of course with this attitude towards Maoists, it is no surprise that they are looking at us as their enemies. What does government expect to achieve even if it succeeds in ousting Maoists from the democratic process? Maoists with more than 8,000 troops and experience of fighting civil war for more than a decade. Won't their failure as a democratic party simply boost the extremist factions within them and lead to greater sponsorship to the Indian Maoists?