Only ten years ago, Nepal was a country full of hope for its future. How have things gone so horribly wrong?
To understand today's tormented Nepal – from the non-functioning Parliament with its uninspiring leadership to the dead-end of the Maoist-inspired Emergency – one has to go back in history, not too far back, but just far back enough to see some of the strands that weave the present with the past and establish the patterns for the future.
The first of these threads is the plebiscite of 1980 and the failure of the Nepali state to adopt reforms that would make it more representative. After all, almost half the voters said at that time that they would want a reformed Panchayat that gave space to political parties. However, the king-led leaders of the Panchayat opted for bureaucratic closure (we won, you lost: we rule, you shut up) rather than opening up the political space to include the opposition. In an eerie parallel, leaders of today's democratic dispensation are repeating the same mistake, using procedural arguments denying constitutional reform against a Maoist antagonist that does not believe in the framework itself.
The second of the threads is the role of India, which has inherited together with the Raj, its "Great Games" paranoia regarding the northern mountains and what lie behind it. "Security concern" has formed the staple of Indian foreign policy in the region for the past half-century, as a corollary of which India ends up supporting costly clients rather than faithful friends in the neighbourhood. Given the obsolescence of the Himalaya as a military barrier in the age of star wars, this "security concern" vis-à-vis Nepal is technological atavism – in reality it is Nepal that should have "security concerns" vis-à-vis the dacoit-infested badlands of the Bihar and Uttar Pradesh periphery. Nepal's political leadership, however, reacts to India with extreme behaviour of its own, from anti-Indian rhetoric bordering on xenophobia at one extreme to obsequious toadying before Delhi officialdom on the other. The Maoists, too, have exhibited proclivities at both ends of the spectrum.