For over a decade, as his party was waging a bloody insurgency and pushing the state to its limits, Dahal had seen how the NC was gradually losing connection with people; how this party was being marred by never-ending internal feuds; how the party had lost touch with the emerging socio-political realities of Nepali society and how it consistently lacked the enthusiasm to understand and address these failings.
And then came the Constituent Assembly (CA) election and its result – the Maoists defeated the NC with a margin that pleasantly surprised even Dahal and his senior party colleagues. The NC had to satisfy itself with just 37 CA members elected through the first-past-the-post system, while the Maoists took away 120 seats. Humiliatingly enough, many senior NC leaders were routed in the polls by political novices from the Maoist party. It was also in this context of electoral success that the Maoist chairman was writing off the NC.
Unless the NC establishes organic connection between its active members and general voters, and gives the latter some sense of ownership and control, I’m afraid the current expansion of active membership or inclusion of marginalized communities in the party’s structures won’t make much of a difference.
Electoral success is a fickle measure of any party’s future, for the electorate’s mood swings between glorifying some parties during one electoral cycle and devastating them during the next.
The question of the NC’s revival should, therefore, be analyzed on the basis of more important factors that affect the party’s life in the long run.
The current optimism among NC leaders about their party is partly based on the mobilization of NC cadres for the upcoming party convention.
As war-time threat and intimidation by the Maoist party subsided significantly in the villages, the NC has, for the first time since the insurgency, distributed active memberships massively in the run up to the general convention. It brought more than 180,000 new active members into the party fold, outnumbering old active members by a margin of 50,000. The party also held, for the first time in its history, elections at the village, regional and district level and elected inclusive leadership teams at each level. Amending its statute, the party has made mandatory provisions for inclusion of women, Madhesis, Janajatis and Dalits at every level of party organization, right from the center down to village committees.
The central question, however, is what is the quality of this participation and inclusion process?
When the party says it has enlisted 180,000 new active members, an important question that arises is: Through what process were these new members added? Were they simply given active membership by local party leaders hoping to boost their electoral chances during the party elections? Do these new members come from among friends and family circles of the old party clique at the local level? Will they work actively to expand the party base in future? Similarly, there are also questions about the quality of the inclusion process: Do the new members, elected at various levels of the party organization under inclusion quotas, truly represent their constituencies or is this just an NC sop to the marginalized communities?
One of the perennial problems for the NC, as for many other parties, is how its active members lack organic linkages to its general membership, or to voters for that matter.
Party active membership is typically distributed by local leaders, which often makes such members beholden to them. Neither do the active members feel accountable to the NC’s general members or voters nor do the latter feel that they have any control or influence over the active members. Unless the NC addresses this issue, establishing an organic connection of its active members with general voters and giving the latter some sense of ownership and control, I’m afraid the current expansion of active membership or inclusion of marginalized communities in the party’s structures won’t make much of a difference.
On the policy and philosophical front, the NC’s challenges are two-fold: How does it address the issues of economic class and of caste or ethnicity that dominates current political discourse in Nepal?
Ever since the NC adopted a free-market economy, dumping its socialist philosophy, it has failed or neglected to come up with policies and programs to address the issues of the poor, and mainly the issue of their livelihood. The outdated policy of mixed-economy, as championed by the Panchayat regime, is not an option; a lesser option is a socialist model with a closed economy. What we need, instead, is a well-regulated, free-market economy where cartels and monopolies are strictly discouraged, fierce competition is protected and individual enterprise is promoted, even celebrated. But at the same time, we also need a program that addresses lack of access by the poor to productive capital – be it land or otherwise. The Chinese resolved this dilemma through a more or less equitable distribution of land which was at the disposal of the communist state.
The issue of ethnicity and caste is no less tricky. Pandering to ethnic chauvinism, as many parties have done, by a centrist party like the NC can be exceedingly dangerous for the future of the country. Thankfully, the NC has shown admirable resistance against moving in that direction but, at the same time, it has also failed to come up with a sensible model to address the issue of identity and exclusion and to give a populace as diverse as ours a shared sense of nationhood.
When the NC’s Mukti Sena waged a war against the Ranas in the early 1950s, its main supporters in the hills were Janajatis, and in the Tarai it was the Madhesis. The NC must find an answer to the question why these two broad communities have largely abandoned the NC lately, before it dreams of a revival.
However, even if the NC fails to address these challenges, it is not going to be wiped out from the political landscape of Nepal as Maoist Chairman Dahal wished, nor it is likely to do worse in the next election – whenever that happens – compared to the last one. But without meeting these challenges, it’s less likely to revive its past glory.
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