Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Op-Ed «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

The explosion which left four journalists seriously wounded at the Khulna Press Club on Saturday adds to our distress. Even as we have all been trying to understand what has been hitting us, the most recent being the assassination of Shah AMS Kibria in Habiganj, we are now confronted with yet one more instance of things going badly wrong in the country. It now appears that certain coordinated efforts are under way to create a destabilising situation in Bangladesh. That clearly means that there are many ways which seem to have been adopted by many individuals and groups to create a bad law and order situation in the land. A glance at the details of the bomb explosions which have been going on since 1999 reflects a very stark reality in our times, which is that the two major political parties, each of which has alternately been in power and in opposition, are absolutely helpless about the murderous madness that has been going on. In other words, the nation’s political classes appear to be trapped in a situation out of which they have so far not been able to extricate themselves. The Awami League government was unable to get to the bottom of the explosions which rocked the country from 1999 to 2001. In similar fashion, the BNP-led four-party alliance has so far been unable to make any dent in its investigations of the explosions which have claimed so many lives.
   The explosion at the Khulna Press Club brings to the fore the very real possibility of the country coming under assault from diverse quarters. While it is too early to hazard any judgement on who might have been responsible for the Khulna situation, there are all the tales in recent times of extreme leftists targeting journalists in the region. Only last week these underground leftists, known as Janajuddha, revealed the names of eight journalists they said were on their list for death. Given that quite a number of media men have already been put to death in Khulna in the last three years, it stands to reason that the elements determined to silence the media will likely go on with their sinister activities as long as they are not dealt with harshly. And they can be handled only if the authorities gather the courage in themselves to strike back hard. But when the feeling in a lot of quarters is that a certain nexus prevails between the killers, their godfathers and some law enforcers, it becomes rather hard to imagine how criminality in the south-eastern region of the country can be curbed. But if conditions are allowed to slide, it will eventually be the state which will find itself in trouble. In the north-eastern part of Bangladesh, criminality has in the past year or two been symbolised by the likes of Bangla Bhai and his vigilantes. So what we have by and large is a situation where national politics is under a clear threat from both the extreme right and extreme left. Now add to that the failure of the administration in arriving at any clues to the crimes that have so far been committed and what you have is a very dark canvas of evil taking shape around you.
   For the authorities, the outrage that has been aroused by the Kibria murder and will now only be further worsened by what has happened in Khulna has to be handled deftly and without any attempt at a diversion of the issue at hand. Let the truth be faced: the nation’s image is today battered beyond anything we could ever imagine. There is yet a chance, though, that given the will and given too an absence of things partisan, the administration can roll some of the darkness back.

Corruption and foreign diplomats

Government officials in Kenya have been angered by what the British ambassador to the country has been saying about corruption in their country. One is here reminded of the way in which the British ambassador to Uzbekistan recently caused a good deal of commotion through publicly upbraiding the government of President Islam Karimov over its treatment of the opposition. The ambassador was initially summoned home last year, for his government was in little mood to upset the Tashkent authorities. Then the envoy went back, only to be recalled finally. These days he is without a job in London.
   And what is now happening in Kenya raises the very interesting question of how far foreign diplomats should go in pointing to iniquities and corruption in the countries where they are stationed. In the Kenyan instance, Edward Clay, London’s ambassador, has been hitting out at the government of President Mwai Kibaki over its failure to handle corruption. Now Mr. Kibaki’s vice president, Moody Awori, says it is none of Clay’s or anyone else’s business to lecture his country. Maybe he has a point. But there is surely the other side of the matter too, which is that in these times a frontal assault on wrongdoing in a country by the government of another, necessarily more developed country, has often helped. There is not much good these days suggesting that countries ought not to interfere in one another’s problems. If the principle of non-interference were strictly adhered to, Slobodan Milosevic would still be in office and pro-Aristide rioters would yet be running the show in Haiti. Viktor Yushchenko would not be Ukraine’s president today were it not for the hard attitude Europe adopted towards the electoral process in his country.
   But there is too the question of self-esteem. Even corrupt men think they have self-esteem and so they react when they think they are being unnecessarily hounded. That being their feeling, they ought to reinvent themselves, in the interest of their societies. Normally they do not, which is when diplomats from other nations step in. Should one be surprised? The answer depends on which side of the fence you happen to be.

King Gyanendra has made it obvious all over again why Nepal should be turning away from its monarchy. There is the incontrovertible truth that the monarchy, any monarchy, is an aberration in terms of existing global realities. You cannot, simply cannot, have a system of politics where the fate of millions of people is decided through the whims of a single individual, one who has little comprehension of the reality outside the gates of the palace he lives in. When he sent Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s government packing last week, for the second time in two years, Gyanendra was giving out the loud message to the rest of the world that he had seen and heard — and that he had learnt nothing. And the result of that colossal misjudgement, the sacking of the government that is, is that Nepal has been pulled rudely back into a feudalism which is elsewhere a thing of the past. 
   And yet there is reason to think that the precipitate action of the king in dismissing the government has only compounded the crisis Nepal has faced since 1996, when the Maoists decided to unleash a guerrilla war to unseat the monarchy and, with that, the parliamentary system of government then in vogue. That takes you back to the question of why the politicians too came under attack by Prachanda (he is the fierce one, the man providing leadership to the guerrillas). The answer is simple enough, which is that since forcing King Birendra into a beleaguered state in 1990 and having him agree to a constitutional monarchy, Nepal’s politicians simply could not prove capable of promoting the way democracy should have been promoted. In the fourteen years which have gone by since then, politics in Nepal has largely been a matter of unending squabbling between the politicians, with the all too predictable consequence of no strong foundations of democracy being developed. Politics in these years has been a wobbly affair at best, a cacophony at worst. But, of course, many nations which have gone happily into a democratic era, if you would like to put it that way, have had similar problems. The difficulty with Nepal is that its king (and he has been there since the palace murder of his brother Birendra and his family in 2001) has regularly demonstrated a clear, unashamed willingness to take advantage of the politicians’ bickering. This time he has done it. He knows the world’s opprobrium is on him, but there is something about politically ambitious men which renders them immune to shame of any kind. 
   That is fine with us. If the king thinks he can restore Nepal to what it once used to be, a land of serenity, a place where people from all over the world went in search of natural beauty, he is welcome to it. The bigger truth is that he cannot do that. Indeed, he is in little position to transform the country in a way that his people as well as people elsewhere can appreciate. A very credible reason why Gyanendra cannot do Nepal any good by staying on as monarch or using the sweeping powers he has taken upon himself has to do with his conviction that the monarchy knows best. All his actions since he ascended to the throne in tragic circumstances nearly four years ago have demonstrated a readiness on his part to undermine the gains Nepal’s people and politicians made in 1990 when together they led a movement for democratic opening in the kingdom. If the first dismissal of Deuba was necessitated by the government’s inability to administer, this second dismissal has the very unmistakable ring of unabashed ambition about it. Gyanendra has imposed a state of emergency, banned newspapers, kept communications within the country and with the outside world suspended. Nepalese soldiers have been going around, as soldiers in such conditions are wont to do, picking up young men on suspicion that they are leftists or communist sympathisers or are in a position to know where the Maoists happen to be operating. Once the picking up is done, these young are beaten and bruised and — who knows? — some of them may already have died. As for the country’s politicians, they remain confined either at their homes or in prison. The king tries to rule through a government which is absolutely loyal to him. It is like going back to the Middle Ages. 
   King Gyanendra would like the world to know that he had no choice other than dismissing the Deuba administration because it had failed to tackle the Maoist revolt and because it had been unable to create the conditions for general elections scheduled for March this year. Ignore the thought of elections, at this stage, and move on to the matter of the Maoists. In the last couple of days the monarch and his loyalists have come forth with a programme of governance clearly aimed at telling Nepal’s people that they need not go to the communist rebels for succour. How so? It is now the king who will take moves to bring about social reforms in the countryside, exactly the kind of problems which led to the rise of the Maoist insurgency in the first place. The difference between the Maoists’ commitment to social reforms and the king’s talk of governance is not too hard to understand: the monarch cannot be trusted to do the things that he and his royal lineage have not done thus far. Nepal has been a perennially poor country; its peasants still wallow in the kind of poverty that was noticeable in the 1950s and 1960s; and its modernity has remained trapped in a straitjacket of compulsions. Of course, that can hardly be any reason to suppose that the Maoists will be able to do the country any good on their own. If anything, their methods are crude, a fallback to times past, and their politics still has little to offer anything in terms of the humane. The Maoists have proved absolutely unwilling to be accommodative of other people’s points of view (but is that any surprise?) and have been on record doing away with people who have dared to dissent with them. By far the biggest problem with the Maoists’ approach is that they happen to be operating with their methods at a time when even the politics of Mao Zedong has gone through a series of transformations in China itself. A Maoist military victory in Kathmandu will therefore produce the kind of turmoil that none of us can at present predict with any reasonable certainty. It may not be the kind of beginning the Khmer Rouge made in Cambodia in 1975, but it will raise fears all the same. 
   But there are some very good, appreciable demands the communists have been making. The demand that the monarchy be abolished is one of those points over which no one can disagree. You cannot have a king, and that too with absolute powers, at this point in history. The world cannot be measured in terms of Swaziland. And Swaziland, if you must know, moves around the whims of its king, who has developed a strange kind of penchant for marrying in season and out of it. Now, Nepal’s monarch does not have that marrying habit, sure. But observe the similarity of tribalism here. By deciding to impress people with their ‘godlike’ powers, monarchs who wield unfettered authority only prove the point that there are parts of the world where ruling classes are yet to graduate from tribalism to modernity. There is an insularity about certain monarchies that renders them impervious to the worries and nightmares of the world outside the palace gates. It is such insularity which defines Gyanendra and his system. It is such tribalism which has now pushed Nepal to the brink of greater chaos. 
   Let us sum up Nepal’s realities today. Its politicians are in the dungeons or in the woods. The Maoists are all over the countryside, taking village after village in their possession — and they may soon be at the gates of Kathmandu. After all, they have been there before, when they blockaded the capital for days before withdrawing on their own, and not because of any overpowering resistance from the government. On the streets of Kathmandu, the writ of the monarch may be running. But go to places like Pokhara, where only soldiers patrol the streets, where shops and offices stay shut. That being the unassailable truth, who needs a monarchy in Nepal? The Chinese to the north forge ahead under the progressive politics that communism is; and to the south the Indians turn into a global power with their democracy. Why must a power-driven individual, with a poor understanding of history and even poorer sense of judgment, keep the people of Nepal hostage to his parochialism?
   bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk