Stop speculating

The murder of media entrepreneur Jamim Shah in the heart of the capital has exposed the ineptitude of the country’s internal security apparatus and degenerating security situation in the country. Was the murder, which the media is already calling a contract killing, connected to his allegiance with infamous underworld fugitive Dawood Ibrahim and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Agency (ISI), or is it a calculated ploy meant to send chills in the spines of those that dare to work for the forces that are odds with the Indian establishment? Is it a mere coincidence that Shah has been murdered at a time when the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), the largest party in Nepal, is in a jingoistic mode, or happened, now, just because it is more convenient to execute the plan, as the internal security is in shambles? We may never have the answers to these questions but they are worth pondering upon.

As one who happens to know about Shah based on stories carried out by various newspapers and magazines, to me he comes across as a cosmopolitan man of diverse experience. Born in a Newari neighborhood and married to a Hindu girl, his life story exemplifies both the possibility of coexistence and breaking of the religious shackles, which in a traditional society like ours is not an easy thing. For a Muslim man to marry a Hindu girl, that too, a quarter of a century ago, in a Hindu kingdom, needed a bit of courage without doubt. It shows that his sense of progression definitely stretched beyond the rhetoric unlike of our present day politicians.

Shah did not buy his way into the Constituent Assembly (CA) in order to become a part of the history of building a “New Nepal” like many businessmen in Nepal. In a nation, where the difference between politicians and businessmen is getting increasingly blurred and where crime and corruption is edging out politics, we all stand benefited from Shah’s detrainment. But these aspects never got reported. For Shah, the media trials never ended. Even though he was never convicted in a court of law for his associations and criminal activities that might have resulted from it, trials by media severely damaged Shah’s reputation by creating a widespread perception of guilt regardless of any verdict.

The ghastly murder of Shah has basically shown two things. First, Nepali media pretty easily gets sucked into the propaganda fed by unseen forces and foreign media. Second, Nepali politicians have learned nothing from past blows in our gut. This is not the first time that a Nepali citizen implicated as working for Dawood Ibrahim and ISI has been murdered in a broad daylight. Remember Mirza Dil Sad Beg’s murder couple of years ago? He too was implicated as one of Dawood’s men in Nepal. Both of these men had one thing in common- unproven allegiance to Dawood Ibrahim and the ISI.

What about the Nepali citizens who have allegiance with Chhota Rajan, the break away Hindu faction of Dawood’s gang or the Research and Analysis Wing [RAW], an Indian Intelligence Agency? Despite the fact that Nepali politicians visit New Delhi more than regional politicians from within India itself and a media house reportedly being run on Indian benevolence, we never hear any negativity surrounding the relationships. None in particular has been implicated like Shah had been for his or her association with the RAW or the Chhota Rajan’s gang. Indian media is silent about it and so is the Nepali media. This raises an interesting question. Is Indian media selectively feeding its Nepali counterpart on the links that Nepali citizens have with the Dawood Ibrahim gang and the ISI or the relationship of Nepali citizens with the India’s RAW and Rajan’s gang is legal and transparent and that it does not require any mention in the media?

Nepali citizens are being repeatedly butchered for their unproven allegiance to the underworld fugitive and foreign intelligence agency but all our government does is set up inquiry commissions, whose findings are at best inconclusive, and end up collecting dusts. If you think rationally, it is not even worth setting a commission, anymore. Instead of the media subtly hinting that Shah deserved his fate, it should be pointing finger at the government, which is so incompetent that the security apparatus under its watch failed to apprehend criminals that murdered a prominent citizen in the heart of the city.

Appending the killers of Shah is important because it will once and for all expose the forces that murder Nepali citizens in their own land for alien motives. As a nation, we deserve the right to know, why Nepali citizens are maligned and murdered over and over again, don’t we? Nobody expects the current government to get to the bottom and find out if Shah was really working for Dawood, or for that matter, ISI, but it can do the minimum—provide some solace to his grieving wife, son, and father, who are paying the price of living in a lawless land, by at least finding out if the killers were really from the Chhota Rajan Gang or someone else was involved in the foul play.

The Nepali media should once and for all stop this game of subtly hinting “Who is working for whom?” and force the government to pursue on hard evidence so that culprits get punished for their unlawful allegiance and innocent citizens are not dragged into the neighboring countries’ perennial animosity. If we really get into this game of speculating “who is working for whom?”, we may soon reach a point whereby we realize that there are none at the highest level of the government and the opposition party that put nation’s interest before his or her own interest. If anything, such deduction would inflict more pain. Why pursue that path?

Politicized Courts

Recently, out of 42 committee members, 23 members of the Constituent Assembly’s (CA) committee to determine the judicial system in an up or down vote supported the provision for appointment and dismissal of justices from the parliament in the new constitution. Although the vote does not mean anything unless the CA decides on whether or not such a provision would actually be enshrined in the new constitution, it is important to understand why it is being pushed by the Maoists. And what it will mean in terms of political freedom in Nepal.

Political interference in judicial processes is not something that is unheard of. The judiciary in Nepal has actually never been fully independent. Be it in Panchayat or post-Panchayat era, political elites always have gotten the verdict the way they want. Has anyone heard of a politician no matter how corrupt he or she is – Nepal has plenty of them – going to jail? No politician has ever gone to jail for corruption or other serious crimes. Almost half a dozen of post-1990 politicians who are considered to be the most corrupt were given clean chit by various courts in Nepal. As free individuals, they are once again active in carving our collective destiny.
All our comrades are trying to do is replicate the well-tested model of using judiciary for political control. The control over the judiciary will take the notion of “civilian supremacy” even a step further.

Judicial activism is nothing new, why even bother? It is important to understand why the Maoists want a judicial system whereby judges are appointed by the parliament. The Maoists know it very well that the independence of judiciary is the biggest threat to any autocratic regime. Be it a radical communist state like North Korea or theocracy such as Iran, appointing ideologues as judges is crucial for the survival of the regime. The judicial system in North Korea, which is notoriously famous for its Stalinist show trials, does not require legal education as a qualification for being elected as a judge or so-called “people’s assessor.” Political reliability is the sole criteria for nomination. In Cuba, the judiciary is not even recognized as an independent branch of the government. Both in law and practice, it is subjugated to the executive. In Iran, where hundreds of reformist politicians, lawyers and journalists are endlessly accused and prosecuted for conspiring against the regime, the supreme leader picks the chief justice. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei recently tapped Sadeq Larijani, brother of Ali Larijani, Iran’s powerful parliamentary speaker.

Is it clear now why Pushpa Kamal Dahal and his comrades want the exact same judicial system that the dear leader Kim Jong-Il and Castro brothers have in North Korea and Cuba respectively. Or, for that matter, Khamenei has in Iran? The Maoists comrades know it very well that without having ideologues in the courtrooms, they cannot nail down political opponents. Anyone who has read Soviet history knows very well what role courts played when it came to handling political enemies. The courts and judges were used at all times against political enemies even though the repressive communist regime relied heavily on more direct forms of repression for matters of high priority, especially during the key periods of revolutionary change. So, all our comrades are trying to do is replicate the well-tested model of using judiciary for political control. The control over the judiciary will take the notion of “civilian supremacy” even a step further.

We have a dysfunctional judiciary now, which needs to be corrected. But if Dahal and his men are allowed to succeed in their latest design, judiciary will be in a gutter. And, it will take ages to get an independent judiciary then after. The judiciary is yet to be independent in most of the former communist countries even after nearly two decades of the fall of communist regimes. Even today in Russia, judiciary suffers from communist era hangovers. The exercise of rule of law is marred by the politicized use of statutes to punish political opponents.It is a well-orchestrated move on the part of the Maoists to destroy whatever independence the judiciary has in Nepal because an independent judiciary that is beyond the executive’s reach and capable of impartial adjudication is a real threat to their aspirations. Independent judiciary restricts the tools that autocrats typically employ to control political life and stay in power.

It is understandable why the Maoists want politicized courts but it is hard to understand why the regional parties are tailgating the Maoists in this issue. The Madhesi parties, among many other things, also claim to be fighting for political freedom. If that’s the case, they should do a little bit of homework on what politicization of judiciary does to the political freedom they claim to be fighting for. The level of freedom in any country is greatly dependent on whether or not the judges of that country are truly independent. A society can be free, and free in a real sense, only when the judiciary is loyal to the law. Citizens of a country where the judges are not independent from influences of power can only dream of complete political freedom.

Laws should be interpreted in an impartial way and justice should be served by competent and neutral judges. Nepali people deserve real political freedom and equality before law not the Stalinist show trials administered by some brainwashed ideologue, who barely managed to get a law degree.

Dealing with the nightmare

In Nepal, the more things change, the more they stay the same. As a matter of fact, one can argue, and argue pretty convincingly, that the more things change, the more they get worse. The general public would be happy if they stayed the same, as things have lately been deteriorating beyond one’s belief. Here is an example. The culture of gun-totting progressive politics initiated by the Maoists and glorified by the civil society pundits is being replicated in every nook and corner of the country. According to the home ministry’s latest report, there are 109 armed groups operating within Nepal. Soon every household in the country will have weapons like in North Western frontier province of Pakistan. All peasants empowered. Progressive politics cannot get better than that, can it?

The rise of criminal outfits in the name of ethnic resistance is a distinctive form of organized crime and reflects more than just the temporary dislocations and uncertainties of the country’s transition to a free-market democracy. When killings of innocent civilians are rationalized in the name of progress, what you end up getting is more killings, not less. It is common sense. Forming a criminal group that operates under the guise of ethnic resistance is the easiest part. What is hard, however, is shielding such outfits from possible crackdown by security forces. For that, you have to have the backing of political parties and support of the elites within the ethnic minorities who can blow tons of hot air when one of these criminals gets killed or trapped into the security force’s net.

People wonder why the law and order situation is not improving with the change of government. The simple answer is that except for the general public, who has to work hard to make ends meet, everyone else is benefiting from it, especially the political parties. Let’s take an example of criminal groups that have infested the Tarai. India wants them because it can use them at key moments; the regional Madhesi parties want them because they provide a solid back-up; the NC and UML use them at key moments and think they are useful because they provide competition to the Madhesi parties. Why would you go after people that might be of some use to further your agenda down the road?

Recently, Superintendent of Police Ramesh Kharel was transferred from Siraha, where he had been undertaking a special initiative to deal with criminal activities. The elites, blinded with ethnic vendetta, hated him because he was really getting good at containing criminal activities taking place in the name of politics. But instead of praising him for his hard work, he is being accused of human rights violations by elites within the ethnic minorities in the Tarai. What about the human rights violations these criminals are engaged in? They are actively engaged in everything from fleecing local businessmen and relatively well-to-do citizens to abductions and killings of innocent civilians. Think about the overall socioeconomic costs of their antisocial activities.

I am not surprised by the condemnation coming from the supporters of these criminals who see the work of our men in uniform through ethnic lenses but what surprises me the most is the transfer of an officer, who was pretty successful in curbing criminal activities, by the home minister who says he is all for maintaining law and order. Madhav Kumar Nepal’s government, which was born because of Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s miscalculations, appears bewildered and directionless. It is a classical case of not knowing what to do with an unexpected and under deserved bounty.

Kharel is one of the thousands of brave men and women in the security sector that put their lives in harms way so that, we, the general public, feel safe. But these men and women get repeatedly betrayed by the politicians who send them to political landmines. It happened with the Nepali Army during the insurgency and now it is being repeated with the Nepal Police. The professionals from the police and army are never applauded for their hard work. Especially, the army is always at the crosshair of leftist politicians and left-leaning civil society pundits and human rights defenders. Despite being confined to the barracks and adhering to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the army has not been left out of the political games being played out in the country’s highly-politicized media landscape. And, particularly the political pundits, depending on which side of the political divide they identify with, have often found political angles for stories demonizing the army.

It is not very hard to understand why they want to constantly drag the security forces into the political debate. The threat of military intervention in politics increases when civilian leaders fail to provide “good government” and earn their legitimacy by solving the problems plaguing the country. When politicians cannot deliver, what they typically do –and this is true to all failing nations like ours – is blame the military for hatching conspiracies. As political legitimacy dwindles, the game of preempting military intervention into politics increases. The talk about civilian supremacy over the army that the Maoists regurgitated endlessly after Dahal’s government collapsed was nothing but a move towards what Samuel P. Huntington called subjective control of the military. It entails ideological indoctrination of the armed forces as well as promoting rivalries between the various branches of the military. It is right out of the “red book” of the former Soviet Union’s communists.

The politicians, irrespective of their position in the political spectrum, will continue to suffer from the nightmare of army intervention till they successfully create a state structure to promote a national identity aimed at enticing diverse groups to identify with the new order, determine the level of popular participation in political processes suitable to multi-party democratic framework, and organize the fair distribution of wealth. It is not too late to work on these fronts. Instead of trying to remain relevant in politics by attacking the last functioning institution, do the right thing. The best way to preempt possible military intervention in politics is by ensuring good governance. This will leave military elites with no options to develop such an inclination nor the opportunity to intervene in politics.

Living in Lawless Times

It’s been almost a month since Madhav Kumar Nepal was sworn in as the country’s new prime minister. While the country continues to hemorrhage from never-ending political instability and lawlessness, Mr. Nepal is yet to figure out ways to deal with his own share of problems: Filling cabinet berths, keeping ideologically- and temperamentally-incompatible coalition members’ support intact and, the hardest part of it all, finding ways of keeping the Maoists engaged and off the streets. Given the internal rifts within the major political parties and unquenching thirst for greater power amongst the coalition members, safeguarding the majority needed to remain in power may be harder than Mr. Nepal had anticipated.

Even though Mr. Nepal has done everything possible (from extending an olive branch to Maoists to bifurcating ministries to satisfy the demands for lucrative ministries by coalition partners and nominating cabinet members who are not members of the Constituent Assembly) in order to diffuse possible future rebellion against his leadership, in the muddied political culture whereby loyalties towards the power center outside the nation’s geographical boundary is greater than one’s own land and people, support for his government may vanish into thin air the very minute he fails to serve foreign interests in the capacity he is expected to. Pushpa Kamal Dahal is an example of what happens when you try to outgrow your foreign master. So, given the expectation from foreign masters and fragmented support from within the coalition partners, Mr. Nepal is sure to have a tightrope walk.


While the pie is being divided at a painfully slow pace, lawlessness is spiraling out of control. School bus carrying children is getting attacked by vandals and educators are being assaulted in broad daylight. An attack on a microbus carrying students of Saipal Academy at Sukedhara, Kathmandu, and a brutal physical assault on Devidatta Sah, the campus chief of Mahendra Bindeswori Campus, Rajbiraj, are examples of how uncivilized Nepali society is becoming with each passing day. The growing indecency within the college campuses is nothing new but what is becoming increasing troublesome is how the major political parties are coming out of the closet and supporting the goons in guise of students within the college campuses openly. The major political parties – NC, CPN-UML, MPRF, TMLP – instead of condemning the attack on Mr. Sah, ganged up in favor of the infamous Yadav trio – Ramchandra, Jaya Prakash and Santosh – who committed the crime of assaulting the campus chief. So, it is not only the Maoists whose actions are perpetuating lawlessness and culture of impunity in Nepal. The other major political parties are equally responsible. Building a nation needs human capital.


By supporting goons who traumatize children and attack educators, these very politicians, who talk about building a “New Nepal” are destroying the foundation in whatever capacity it might be available. Children, whose buses are getting attacked, will have no desire to remain in the land of goons when they grow up. Educators that are getting attacked will have no interest in sincerely imparting the knowledge that they have acquired by slogging hard. Like everything else, education system in Nepal too is crashing. With the culture of impunity seeping into college campuses, educational institutions across the nation may very well end up becoming brainwashed-demagogue producing factories.


Do our politicians have even the slightest sense of the need and role of human capital in governing the states that they are clamoring to establish in future? With social capital in tatters, financial capital leaving the country like never before, and now, the institutions responsible for producing human capital under attack, capital assets required to build a prosperous nation will become even more scarce in future. With what do they intend to build a “New Nepal” if the hoopla about building it is nothing but populist circus to remain in the corridors of power? A brutal physical assault on Devidatta Sah, the campus chief of Mahendra Bindeswori Campus, Rajbiraj, is an example of how uncivilized Nepali society is becoming.


From Rishi Dhamala to the Yadav trio, political parties by openly siding with perpetrators are not only promoting the culture of impunity but also subverting the judicial process, which could have very well taken care of unlawful activities that Devidatta Sah might have indulged in. While promoting political violence, what our politicians fail to realize is that it will definitely come back to haunt them in the future. Once these musclemen in college campuses across the nation gain further clout and make money, which in present day Nepal with booming abduction and extortion industry is not too difficult, they will outgrow their masters. You don’t have to go too far to witness this phenomenon. Just look at student politics in the Indian states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh and what it has produced over the years and you will soon realize that a goon in guise of a student does have political ambitions and will do everything in his power to establish his foothold in politics. While the Maoists are culprits for trying to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat in the name of “civilian supremacy,” the other major political parties are equally responsible for encouraging “jungle raj” in an otherwise peaceful nation by standing in favor of those that take laws into their hands. Where in the civilized nation do we see the major political parties coming out in favor of goons in the guise of students that assault mentors?


With each passing day, Nepal is increasingly becoming ungovernable. Priorities are different for different sets of people. For politicians, it is all about consolidating power, whereas for the general public, it is about day-to-day survival. What will it take and who will bring back the normalcy? The new “normal,” however, will never be the same; it will be about respecting each other’s ethnicity, religion, political beliefs and playing by the laws of the land. Even though there is not much ground to be convinced that the current government, which has not been able to take a proper shape so far, will be able to pull it off, it has saved us all, at least for now, from getting trapped into the clutches of self-righteous blowhards called the Maoists. But the political experiment continues.