In the 1970s, there was INAS (Institute of Nepal & Asian Studies), housed in the Charkha Ghar or Gandhi Bhavan of Tribhuvan University in scenic Kirtipur. Soon it was rechristened CNAS (Research Centre for Nepal & Asian Studies). Dr Prayag Raj Sharma was the Dean, and the institution’s avatar set itself onto its newfound dynamism. One of its self-ordained tasks was to launch a comprehensive bibliography project on the “homegrown” Panchayat Polity of Nepal. It was called the Panchayat (the Political System of Nepal) Bibliography Project. The Project Chief was my own friend, Saket Behari Thakur, who inducted me as one of his senior research assistants. Since my beginner’s teaching schedules at Patan College and Pulchowk Central Campus were on part-time basis only, I had ample time to oblige my good friend and indulge in the postmortem pleasures of my job. Plus, the extra money and “political” portfolio would be handy and welcome.
There were, on and off, 10 of us in the excavation team, and our one-year tenure (1973-74) called for scouring all the temples of learning in Kathmandu which held the corpus on Panchayat. Thus, we turned upside down the archives at Tribhuvan University Library, the Gorkhapatra Corporation, Kaiser Library, the Department of Information, the Panchayat Pustakalaya, and other hives. My digging was into the printed stacks of Gorkhapatra Sansthan to plough into its Rising Nepal and Gorkhapatra dailies, Madhuparka and other occasional publications. Then I attacked the Information Department and the Panchayat Pustakalaya of Dirgharaj Prasai while other team members were assigned elsewhere. More often, the entire team zoomed on in one place, such as the Gorkhapatra Corp., and even the project chief worked as one of us.
We resorted to the shoebox filing system of noting the salient pointers of each article, write-up, and news coverage on a postcard-size plain white extra-mat-strength paper, available in town then. A typical proforma entry went like this:
The Rising Nepal of so-and-so date (underlined)
“Panchayat is not merely a political system of fullstop-ism”
- Prime Minister Kirti Nidhi Bista, while speaking in City Hall on the occasion of the Gaun Pharka Abhiyan (Go Back to the Village Campaign) Convention.
Other speakers were so-so and so-so from Tribhuvan University
Information Minister (name) and so-and-so Rashtriya Panchayat Members spoke mainly on His Majesty the King, Birendra Bir Kikram Shah Dev’s [the sovereign’s name must be in full and always emboldened and underscored] topic so gracefully given to the Royal Nepal Academy for this year’s national poetry competition, proving the sovereign’s own emphasis on the forward-march dynamism of Panchayat.
Note: For full details, refer to the RSS (Rashtriya Samachar Samiti) coverage of so-and-so date
Once collected, the Project Chief regularly collated the cards, edited the contents and finally had them neatly typed on another set of index for his Dewey Classification System, or something like that.
The research team, besides Thakur and myself, had some ladies whom we supervised. Thakur had also assembled the noted informants and scholars of the day – Messrs Daman Raj Tuladhar, Thakur Lal Manandhar, and Ishwara Nanda Shresthacharya. I had most occasions to work side by side with Manandhar and Tuladhar.
My virgin research revealed that Panchayat had its own self-appointed pundits, proselytizers, propagators, propagandists, profiteering punks, and pimping Panchas. There was a missionary zeal of assorted holier-than-thou beliefs and faiths in the political system’s apostles and apologists as if Panchayat was a Nepal Rashtra-farian religion, and King Mahendra and King Birendra were its Emperor Haile Selassie. Reading the Royal Constitution of Nepal and the competitively scholarly interpretations and reinterpretations of the Kingdom’s Charter through the prolific and pregnant pens of its intellectuals made my eyes moist, and my head and heart swelled with the realization that Nepal’s modern Magna Carta was unbeatable in the world of noble and just governance. Little did I realize then that my rude awakenings would torture me only later on, in the years that followed.
It is my feeling that this particular brand of Panchayat’s first pointillism was planted by the fabled Doctors Trio – Tulsi Giri, Mishra, and Jogendra Jha. Then the movement’s mantras were replicated by its latter-day saints – Malhotra, Mohammed Mohsin, Pashupati SJB Rana, Bishwa Bandhu Thapa, Pasang Goparma, Beda Nanda Jha et al. Younger zealots such as Dhruba Kumar Deuja, Dirgha Raj Prasai and others gave it their youthful flairs. Bureaucrats, government corporation executives, lecturers and professors, and even neutral “intellectuals” besieged The Rising Nepal and Gorkhapatra with their literary pieces on extolling the virtues of Panchayat, and sang hosannas to the kings and queens, and knocked on the doors of royal relatives and palace secretaries before dawn in their hope to climb up their career ladder to the positions of general manager, director-generalship, lucrative transfers, ambassadorial berths, PhD scholarships, tax holidays and parasitism, laidback monopolies in business, commerce and industries.
No wonder, as the Panchayat Bibliography Project progressed, there were, very early on, more than 40 streams of the Panchayat Philosophy through the vehicles of its principles and pragmatics, and these categories and classifications were to be identified and vigilantly monitored for notation by the researchers. Even village explainers were included in our findings and recordkeeping.
As for the political incumbent players and ambitious aspirants, one distinct pattern emerged in my findings. Among their many moral weaknesses, one unchanged practice held sway in every case. This was boringly evident, for instance, in every ascent-descent-and-reinstatement cycle of each prime ministerial honcho:
First, the prospective prime Pancha began by praising Panchayat and its supreme patron to high heavens. As expected, he (always he) was rewarded for his sycophancy, kowtowing, and whitewashing the grim reality for a farfetched vision of utopia in an ideal Hindu Kingdom. Once appointed to office, he was, however, checkmated before long, harassed and harangued, and tossed around for another favored candidate waiting in the wings. There was no option for the incumbent but to cry foul and criticize and condemn even the Absolute for every ill obtaining in the Kingdom (not country or nation). The lamb lambasted the Lord; and for this, he would, as expected, be summarily dismissed for the next favorite who had followed the same path of pleasing the potentate, and who would also very soon go through the same sadistic rigmarole.
The outcome was twofold: 1) Not a single prime ministerial term was ever allowed to complete its mandate, and 2) The repeated reappearance of the same man as prime minister. This latter phenomena had its own musical-chair farce: The unceremoniously ousted leader would hibernate for sometime in his political gulag before retuning his banshee and retooling himself for his new paeans to Panchayat and its Plenipotentiary. In the process, newly fangled Panchayat polemics would emerge – adding to the Bibliography Project’s new angles and topics – further redefining the nature and nurture of the Partyless Panchayat Polity as gifted by the King. His shameless comeback was thus reassured, to face the same humiliating axe once again later.
To add spices to the mundane political reprises, Narayanhiti occasionally added variations to the same themes. Consequently, some carpetbaggers and unknown and unworthy jokers were brought in to fill up Nepal’s most important posts and decisive slots.
In sum, this clockwork circus was due solely not to a prime minister’s automatic electoral path leading to his office but due to the royal pleasure of appointing him and then dissing and dismissing him as it pleased the monarch who, after all, was the absolute power and authority in Nepal; for he was the Karunamaya who bestowed on his “praja”-s (read “raiti”-s, subjects and serfs – not citizens) the Constitution of Nepal following the royal takeover of powers in 1960!
(To be concluded)
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