After Koirala, what?

The subjects being bickered over have been among the most decisive of the peace process, subjects that will make or break Nepal in the coming years. Who is to be the head of state, the prime minister or with the king now gone a president? Which of these should hold executive power? How, if at all, should the Nepal Army and the Maoists8217; People8217;s Liberation Army be merged? Who should be the commander-in-chief?

To the public, the shock has not been that these matters need settling, but that their settlement has been left to this late hour. After all, the political parties have had since April 2006 to work all this out.

Koirala8217;s apologists argue that he has stayed on as prime minister not out of megalomania, but out of a desire to correct the oversights of the peace process.

Indeed, from the start, the peace process has been poorly conceived. At the very outset, the political parties captured a process that should have been launched with a nation-wide round-table conference. This left the country 8212; in particular, the Janajatis the ethnic nationalities, the women, the Dalits, and the Madeshis 8212; battling the parties for inclusion, fair representation, local self-governance and federation. These, the major successes of the peace process, should rightly be attributed to their activists.

Then 8212; with the blessings of the international community, especially India 8212; the political parties ignored all matters pertaining to the two extant militaries, and focused exclusively on holding the Constituent Assembly election. This is the oversight that most worries Koirala8217;s apologists now. With 20/20 hindsight, they now see that had the Maoists been transformed into a legitimate political party without an army of their own, that is prior to the Constituent Assembly election, their victory would have amounted to a vote for progressive politics. Their victory would have been palatable. As things stand now, however, the Maoists remain a paramilitary organisation. Their victory carries more sinister potential, for 8212; in their crude actions at the grassroots, if not in their fine words in the capital 8212; they remain illiberal, even totalitarian, in vision.

Koirala8217;s apologists see him as the best defender of liberal democracy in Nepal, a foe of dictatorship by kings and communists alike. Indeed, this is a legacy that Koirala would be pleased to accept. But the reality has been more mixed.

Nobody questions the sacrifices that he 8212; and hundreds of thousands of political activists, both liberal and progressive 8212; made in toppling Panchayat rule. He and his generation could have rested on the laurels of this achievement alone. But of course they did not.

In 1990, Koirala, Krishna Prasad Bhattarai and Ganesh Man Singh were co-leaders of the Nepali Congress. Their rivalry heightened when Koirala became prime minister in 1991. What the country had needed at that time was a Nehru, but what it got was a Mrs Gandhi: he set about instating his family as his party8217;s inheritors. The power struggles he waged in his own party cost it its majority in 1994, diminished its public standing, and eventually split it down the middle, with Sher Bahadur Deuba heading the 8220;rebel8221; splinter party.

Koirala also badly mishandled the counterinsurgency. Following on Deuba8217;s brutal police crackdown of 1996 8212; 8220;Operation Romeo8221; 8212; Koirala in 1998 unleashed 8220;Operation Kilo Sierra8221; in the Maoist heartland. Like all the violation-rife crackdowns that followed, this inflamed resentment against the state, benefiting the Maoists. Koirala was adamantly against negotiating with the Maoists; he wanted to defeat them militarily. He created the Armed Police Force in January 2001, and four months later launched the Integrated Security and Development Programme, laying the grounds for the Royal Nepal Army8217;s engagement. In July, a month after the massacre at the royal palace, he ordered the RNA to war. They refused: but a precedent had been set, a precedent that Deuba followed upon at the end of that year.

This hawkishness sparked military ambitions. Gyanendra Shah8217;s takeover in 2002 and the 2005 coup could not have happened without the RNA8217;s full backing. Only when the RNA found themselves starved of foreign aid, and threatened with the end of international peacekeeping, did they abandon Shah. The renamed Nepal Army has since turned to Koirala for its protection.

And protect them he did. By not immediately settling the matter of the Nepal Army/People8217;s Liberation Army integration, by not pushing for the reform of the security sector, by not pursuing the prosecution of war crimes all key parts of the peace process, Koirala has got the country to where it is, with an extremely weak polity sandwiched between two rival militaries.

All this, in the name of defending liberal democracy. This has been Koirala8217;s curious legacy 8212; to usher in democracy, then imperil it, then rescue it over and over, sometimes from his own family members, sometimes from rival party members, sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right. Over the years, he has created as many problems as he has solved; but by tenacity alone, he has established himself as the emblematic figure of our muddled era.

He will step down now 8212; his resignation is yet to be accepted by a president who is yet to be nominated 8212; and then we will see if anyone else can do a better job of defending liberal democracy in Nepal.

Manjushree Thapa is the Kathmandu-based author of 8216;Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy8217;expressexpressindia.com