In April, Nepal went into an election in which one of the political parties in contest still maintained an army of its own, albeit restricted to cantonments supervised by the United Nations. Thus, the elections to the Constituent Assembly represented not only a return to representative governance and the start of the constitution-writing process, but they were also an important part of the peace process, in which compromises are inevitably made for the greater goal of ending conflict. Therefore, the ironies are ample.
The country today has a Maoist commander as defence minister, exercising authority over the very national army with whom the rebels were in a brutal do-or-die struggle for a decade, till barely two years ago. The minister for peace and reconstruction is another rebel commander, now in charge of rehabilitation of the victims of war from both sides, and commands the kitty for rehabilitation of victims as well as the salaries of the combatants. As with all of his other comrades, Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal has not given up his nom de guerre of 'Prachanda', nor has the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) formally announced any abandonment of violence as a political tool. Apparently, a peace process demands great flexibility from the public and the other political parties, which showed enough 'understanding' to catapult the CPN (Maoist) to the front of the line.
Another way to look at it is that there is a process of co-optation underway, which is the only way that a conflict that had taken 14,000 lives could have been brought to a close. Having succeeded in elections with a magnitude that propelled the Maoists to lead the government in Kathmandu, insurgents who used to carry automatic rifles today have no choice but to receive garlands and bouquets, and to spend endless hours on the dais like the politicians of yore. We may rue this transformation, but better this than having sought to crush the insurgency, which would have led to the deaths of tens of thousands more innocents.
To yet others, it is undoubtedly painful to see the promises of 'revolution' being discarded with abandon as the Maoists take the lead in government. On 19 September, the finance minister presented a budget that has many popular and worthy plans and projections, but which stays steadfastly close to the donor-dependent, top-down, 'capitalistic' model of the past. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Dahal seems to have come into his own as a public-relations shooting star, as he has taken in Beijing, New Delhi and New York within the span of a month, with notably different messages for each community, in each city. The tirade against 'expansionist' India was buried a while back, but now the 'imperialist' United States is likewise being wooed for support on the development agenda.