The perplexity of Ram Sharan Mahat is palpable. He did everything according to the book of the Washington Consensus, and religiously followed every prescription of IMF-World Bank. The results weren't too unimpressive either. And yet the Maobaadi unleashed a violent revolution. Monarchists accused the democratic experiment of being an unmitigated disaster. Most of the direct beneficiaries of the free-market fundamentalism pursued by post-1990 governments lost no time in becoming their biggest critics as they saw the tide turning (so they thought) in favour of King Gyanendra. What went wrong? The question is indeed worthy of a tome that Mahat has tried to come up with.
Mahat is an important player in Nepali politics. His omissions cannot be attributed to ignorance. He has intentionally downplayed the idea and ideals of socialism in his book, which is ironic since his political party, the Nepali Congress, has won every election on the platform of democratic socialism and continues to publicly swear. Almost all the voters who elected Mahat to the Central Committee of Nepali Congress on 1 September 2005 in Kathmandu are fired by the ideals of egalitarianism, not the economic Darwinism advocated by the neoliberals that populate Kathmandu's cocktail circuit.
In democratic politics, Mahat began at the top. Upon his return from a UNDP job in the wake of the successful People's Movement of 1990, he fought and lost in the first parliamentary elections. Premier Girija Prasad Koirala appointed him to the powerful post of vice-chairman of National Planning Commission (NPC), an agency that should have played a leading role in the implementation of the party manifesto. But Mahat was still enamoured by the idea that socialism had 'failed'. Under him, the NPC became the focal point of the LPG (liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation) agenda served under the rubric of 'economic reforms'. The rest is history, of promises not kept and aspirations belied.
Surprisingly, the author does not seem to realise that the road not taken created the disillusionment leading to the division and downfall of his party. While the rise of the Maoist insurgency cannot be directly attributed to the distortions in the economic policies of the Nepali Congress, there is no denying the fact that a sizeable section of the population began to feel neglected by a government that seemed to be promoting the private sector at the cost of everything else. On second thought, the omissions in the book may not be so surprising after all. Mahat still harbours the illusion that the elected government had assumed office in 1991 "with an agenda for reforms". With that kind of understanding, it did not take him long to get into the good books of powerful diplomats and aid agency chiefs.