Beyond Capital

To say that the US invasion of Iraq “was not all about oil” is nothing novel. The triviality of “all about oil” argument is perhaps most clearly shown in the works of Marxists like Cyrus Bina. When neoliberal economic journalists like Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar criticise this argument, they ultimately circularly reiterate the same argument - not all about oil, but still all about oil. So he in one of his recent gems published on 10 March 2007 starts with saying:

“Many Indians, including respected foreign policy analysts, believe that the US invaded Iraq and ousted Saddam Hussein in 2003 simply to grab his oilfields. “Its all about oil,” they said. Well, it’s now four years since the invasion. Yet, we see no sign of the US grabbing Iraq’s oilfields”.

And ends by:

“The US still has a strong interest… in seeing that oil production in the Persian Gulf is not disrupted or monopolised by any military power. This was one reason why the US forced Saddam out of Kuwait, which he had invaded and occupied in 1990. The US Navy has for decades patrolled the sea lanes to ensure security for oil tankers. So, oil matters. But it is somewhat ridiculous to think that oil alone matters. The US invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it was not “all about oil.”

That’s just “one reason”, but in Aiyar’s write-up it is the only “one reason”.

Definitely, we cannot ask him to comprehend the dialectics of abstract and concrete, essence and appearance etc - the complex relationship between economy and polity, where we cannot reduce any to the other. Also, we cannot expect him to avoid the circularity of bourgeois economics.

However the interesting aspect of his article is the details which he offers to prove his “not all about oil” argument - when he draws parallel between Indian and the US oil interests:

“Those familiar with India’s oil policy will find the Iraqi controversy over production sharing [contracts to foreign companies] mystifying, even comic. India has long signed production-sharing deals with private and foreign oil companies, and nobody regards this as a sellout.

The latest bidding round this year drew 32 domestic and 36 foreign bidders. In production-sharing deals, the foreign or private sector partner bears all exploration costs, but shares with the government any oil or gas that is found. The terms of production-sharing have varied in different rounds of bidding in India.

But typically the winning bidder whether Indian or foreign first gets enough oil to recover costs of production and exploration (called cost oil); then gets two to three times as much as profit oil; and then hands over most or all of the residual production to the government.

For instance, the government’s share in gas at Reliance’s Krishna-Godavari field starts at roughly 15% at the beginning and goes to 85% in later stages.

The most successful foreign explorer in India has been Cairn Energy, which hopes to produce 7.5 million tonnes a year from its fields in Rajasthan. British Gas has also experienced some success.

ONGC itself has entered into production-sharing contracts in no less than 15 countries, including Russia, Vietnam, Sudan, Venezuela, Canada, Brazil, Nigeria and Cuba.

Reliance Industries has also signed production-sharing deals in Yemen, Oman, East Timor and Colombia. Indeed, ONGC and Reliance have jointly signed a production-sharing deal in guess where? Northern Iraq. This is not Indian imperialism. Nor have these Indian oil companies encountered US resistance.

So, Indian foreign policy analysts who think the Iraq invasion was all about oil, need to brush up their knowledge of the oil business. They are living in the past.

There was indeed a time when the US used military power to back US oil companies. When Mossadegh in Iran nationalised oil companies, he was overthrown in a 1953 coup masterminded by Britain and the US. However, that was the last act in the history of oil imperialism.

This was shown when OPEC countries in 1974 nationalised all oilfields, converting oil multinationals from owners to just buyers of oil. Some US diplomats and politicians wanted military action to regain the fields. But the US Administration ruled that the days of oil imperialism were over, and it was time to deal with sovereign governents.

The US still has a strong interest as does India in seeing that oil production in the Persian Gulf is not disrupted or monopolised by any military power. This was one reason why the US forced Saddam out of Kuwait, which he had invaded and occupied in 1990. The US Navy has for decades patrolled the sea lanes to ensure security for oil tankers.

So, oil matters. But it is somewhat ridiculous to think that oil alone matters. The US invasion of Iraq was a terrible mistake, but it was not “all about oil.”

Here Aiyar has given some facts, ignored even by leftists suffering from third worldism. They are relevant for understanding the material base of India’s expansionist, even imperialist ambitions. Private (foreign and domestic) and State capitalist production sharing is nothing new. In recent years, India’s state oil companies like ONGC have been proactively involved in satisfying the energy requirements of India’s capitalist development by their overseas exploration and operation. Aiyar also tells us that now private capitalists like Reliance are increasingly being given space in this industry, where the State had been the pioneer.

However, for Aiyar, if “this is not Indian imperialism” then there is no US “oil imperialism”. But why do we presume that there is no Indian imperialism? In fact, let’s reverse the order of the argument - if all such facts have grounded US imperialist interests in the Middle East and elsewhere (even if not just for oil, but “oil matters”), then the parallel that Aiyar draws between India and the US must tempt us to probe India’s ambitions too, without precluding their possible imperialist nature. Definitely, the export of capital is not sufficient to make a state imperialist, but what makes it so is the state’s capacity and interest in defending that export through international political intervention, of which war is just a part, as Clausewitz taught us. Maybe if “Indian oil companies [in their outward expansion in the Middle East have not] encountered US resistance”, this is just another proof that India is a part of the imperialist coalition led by the US, or the US sees it as as an ally. This would give us a key to interpret the tremendous growth in the US-India-Israel relationship too.

Of course, in capitalism collaboration does not preclude competition - there will be moments when collaborating interests would clash too. But we should not presume that if collaboration between US and India is occurring, it is a patron-client relationship. Likewise, competition too is not liberation, India’s frequent amorous passes to Russia, China and others are not necessarily anti-imperialist or anti-US.

For legitimising any imperialist and expansionist design, a State needs a particular ideology of “interests” that can mobilise opinion behind it within its territory, and also identify agencies outside which can justify its “cross-border” intervention. India with its rising economic interests beyond its territory has used all sorts of “identities” to create such diasporic homogeny under the garb of which it can operate. It is not very surprising that this expansionist tenor was firmly and vocally established by the Rightist forces. It can in fact be comfortably said that the rightists became a legitimate force in India only with the rise of neolliberalism, when Indian capital found Indianness, Hinduism etc to be effective in its “free” market consolidation and operation globally. One needs to cursorily go through the widely circulated weekly of Hindu fascists, Organiser and its chatterbox journalism to grasp the confident obscenity of Indian expansionism in its extreme. Recently it invented “The Western-Christian agenda in Kathmandu” and “the Christian leadership of the Maoists”, lamenting the threat to the “Hindu civilisation”:

“The bells are tolling, not just for the Nepalese monarchy, but also for the Hindu culture and civilisation of the nation.”

So embrace your khaki-nickers and oiled lathis to save monarchy, save Hinduism… while the Nepali resources - human and natural - are plundered by Indian interests in the name of “economics above politics”. Similarly, it was the leader of opposition, the instigator of the Babri Mosque demolition LK Advani who first petitioned the Indian government to “save Indians” in Uganda, where the Ugandan people are struggling against the Mehta group’s acquisition of Mabira forests.

All over the world, the media projected the recent Ugandan agitation against the multinational acquisition of the country’s forest resources as racist. Indian media tout court led the wave by raising the ghost of Idi Amin. It seemed something like the Nazis’ holocaust. This is not for the first time that South Asians have raised similar metaphors. Post-1990 Hindu rightists have time and again used them to stress on the parallels between the Jews and Hindus, the uniqueness of Israel and India. Also, Indian governments have been proactively self-imposing themselves as protectors of People of Indian-origin (PIO) all over the world. World imperialism and its watchdogs which are ever ready to club Anti-globalisation movements, terrorism, fundamentalists - all their ‘evil’ enemies, “bad guys” together have found this Indian expansionism and its rising crossborder interests and concerns handy for their mission. This allows them to corner the ‘third world’ movements and regimes who pose threat to world capitalist interests.

One PIO MP in Uganda, Sanjay Tanna has clearly rebutted such propaganda. He “said it was unfortunate that the media had focused on the death of one Asian and portrayed Uganda as a racist country. He said two Ugandans lost their lives and many others were injured or lost property. He explained that Rawal’s death came from a sequence of events, which included an attempt by some Asians to drive through the demonstrators.” (New Vision, April 17 2007)

Regarding, the global imperialist usage of Indian expansionism, I wrote the following almost a year back during Bush’s India visit in February 2006 (Counterpunch), which might be relevant here too:

On the other hand, India’s mastery of ‘unreliable’, and ‘rogue’ polities, and its ability to forge indigenous clients in those polities make it a worthy partner for other global powers whose recent hyper-interventionism has reduced their own ability in this regard. Conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq have further attested this inability of the US hegemony, at least–political forces against which wars were waged in these countries were erstwhile US allies. These conflicts are symptomatic of the crisis of the US hegemony more than the unipolarity of the post-Cold War era. Unlike the ideology of the “Soviet threat”, the post-Cold War ideologies of human rights and non-proliferation could not form the legitimate basis for forging international alliances, since the duplicity of the “global powers” on those same accounts are too apparent. In fact, the orientalist bases of these ideologies have further curtailed the First World’s ability to directly manipulate political forces in the “third world”. At this juncture, ‘mediocre’ powers like India could become relevant interfaces between the two worlds, for perpetuating and sustaining global capitalism and its political structure.

It is sad that a young Indian worker died in the recent popular protests against the sale of Mabira forest in Uganda to an Indian multinational, Mehta Group. The Indian government has also reacted and contacted the Ugandan government for ensuring the safety of the Indian community. However, it has nothing to say about the Mehta deal, as the Ugandan government and business themselves are fully behind it and are ready to secure Indian capitalist interests. The mainstream media in India and elsewhere is trying to equate the scenario with Idi Amin’s anti-Asian drive, which is a clear attempt to sideline the issue of Indian imperialism, how Indian businesses have usurped Ugandan resources. The Mehta deal is not only an environmental disaster, but would also destroy local farmers, by its monopoly. Obviously, the local resentment and growing competition within a saturated local labour market in the absence of an effective counter-hegemonic solidarity make immigrant workers an easy target, providing a pretext to defocus and delegitimise the genuine grievances and legitimise repression.

A report rightly captures some issues behind the Ugandan protests:

It is time Indian businesses stop exploiting native Ugandan people, imported workers from India and, Ugandan national resources

Arun Sen
Apr. 14, 2007

It is shame what the Indian businesses have done in Kenya and Uganda. They exploited native Ugandan people, imported workers from India and Ugandan national resources. The atrocities go beyond imagination. Two Indians were killed and a temple attacked by a mob in Kampala. The mob was protesting against the alleged cutting down of a protected rain forest by an Indian firm.

Business communities in India run these Indian firms. They bribe local Ugandan authorities to do anything they like. They care little about human rights and Ugandan national interests.

According to media reports, Indians in the Ugandan capital Kampala are still frightened and shaken after Thursday’s mob attack in which at least two Indians were killed and a Hindu temple attacked by a mob protesting the proposed expansion plan of an Indian sugar firm by cutting down a protected rainforest.

The mob attack was an act of terror. But what the Indian business community did in Uganda is equally deplorable. The Ugandan Government is responsible. They take bribes from the rich business community from India and let them exploit Ugandans and imported workers from India. If some one tries to protest the atrocities, the Indian businesses bribe the local authorities and put the whistle blower in jail. Many imported Indian workers from India were put in jail because they demanded humane treatment. At the end these imported workers go back to India losing all they had accumulated from savings in Uganda. They can get out of jail but lose their all savings. The mob was protesting at the move by the Sugar Corporation of Uganda Limited (Scoul), part of the Indian-owned Mehta group, to expand its sugar estates by cutting the Mabira rain forest- one of Uganda’s last remaining patches of natural forest. It has been a nature reserve since 1932.

…The controversy began last year when the Ugandan government ordered a study into whether to cut down nearly a third of Mabira- one of Uganda’s last remaining patches of natural forest.

The government’s proposal had angered many in the country who alleged that the environmental costs of slashing the forest would far exceed the economic benefits of the plantation.

Until 1972, Asians constituted the largest non-indigenous ethnic group in Uganda. In that year, the Idi Amin regime expelled 50,000 Asians, who had been engaged in trade, industry, and various professions. In the years since Amin’s overthrow in 1979, Asians have slowly returned. They continued their atrocities against civilized norm of society after returning back to Uganda. The mob outbreak is sad and deplorable. It is time for Ugandans to take control over their own country.

The relationship between multinationals and national states is not so simple today. A multinational draws its strength from its “multiple” identities and states compete with one another to ‘home’ it. With financialisation this competition among the states have considerably increased with ‘capitals’ seeking to regiment the ‘arbitrary’ state behaviour with the everlooming threat of flight of capital. However it would be wrong to consider this relationship as totally one-sided, as the proponents of ‘footloose capital’ make us believe. With increasing monopolisation (but never monopoly) the competition among capitals has intensified too, they struggle to establish their production and circulation bases to surpass competitors. This forces them to rely on particular states for protection and representation in negotiations for the acquisition of these ‘bases’. Of course, financialisation has increasingly instrumentalised the state, but this has made capitals increasingly dependent on this instrument too.

A neo-neoliberal state like India in recent years has remarkably shown its efficacy as an ‘instrument’. If something has made the Indian state emerge as clearly neoliberal, it is its proactive reclaiming of Indian diasporic “non-resident” capitals. Unlike the Chinese, which tried to attract the Chinese diaspora to increase the production capacity within its territory, the Indian state has increasingly instrumentalised itself by facilitating Indian capital (NR and domestic) expansion beyond its territory. In fact, the Indian government was proactive in international acquisitions like Arcelor and Corus, and for its many pharmaceutical multinational companies. Many of these companies are not at all dependent on Indian earnings or don’t have any plans to re/patriate their NR earnings. However, they have found in the Indian state a tremendous agency for their bargainings, increasing their ‘political’ leverage in the competitive world market. A dual citizenship to Non-resident Indians (NRIs) and People of Indian Origins (PIOs) was not to attract working class remittances or the grandchildren of indentured labourers, but to provide ‘Indian’ capital all over the world an ‘identity’. It is interesting to note that the initial proposal was to restrict “dual citizenship to PIOs from a select group of countries”, excluding especially the Third World PIOs. But this could have excluded a very fat lot that dominate wealth in many third world countries especially in Africa and Asia.

It would be interesting to see the Indian state’s response (taking into consideration that it has not shown any mercy to such resentment within its own territory) to recent Ugandan uprising against “a government proposal to allow the Mehta Group to clear a quarter of the Mabira forest reserve to grow sugar. The 30,000-hectare (7,400-acre) reserve, east of Kampala, contains some of the last patches of virgin forest in Uganda and serves as an important water catchment area.” (Guardian, April 13, 2007)

Joseph Stiglitz is counted as one of a few dissenting economists in mainstream academia, and for some time now his dissent has been attracting quite a number of activists. He is officially invited by the “Another World is Possible” people to their meetings. Naturally he will think himself authorised to tell people how another world is possible, and what will be that world. He precisely does this job in his March column, “The EU’s Global Mission” distributed through Project-Syndicate:

“Another world is possible. But it is up to Europe to take the lead in achieving it.”

So the revolutionary project already has a vanguard, the only job left for the foot soldiers is to convince him/her/it to lead. How insightful! Any pessimism in this regard is ill-founded as

“the European project has been an enormous success, not only for Europe, but also for the world.”

Of course, like our Indian monkey-god Hanuman, Europe lacks ready self-confidence and needs a bear bard for encouragement. Stiglitz’s article does that job. Questioning the economistic common sense, he tells Europeans not to feel unconfident before the warlords in the US, as their competitors’ supremacy is baseless and phoney -

“…while GDP per capita has been rising in the US, most Americans are worse off today than they were five years ago. An economy that, year after year, leaves most of its citizens worse off is not a success.”

Moreover, the European Union’s mission is distinct, which are not laws, regulation, or phoney prosperity, but “long-lasting peace”, “greater understanding, underpinned by the myriad interactions that inevitably flow from commerce”. And “The EU has realized that dream” - “neighbors live together more peacefully”, “people move more freely and with greater security”. Stringent immigrant laws for and policing of the people from the South (this identity is very broad since it includes Black and Arab French, Muslim Europeans…) etc are perhaps aberrations, or may be the Southerners are racially ‘uncountable’ “within a new European identity that is not bound to national citizenship”.

Furthermore, Europe has mastered the competitive art of giving, and has surpassed the US -

“Europe has led the way, providing more assistance to developing countries than anyone else (and at a markedly higher fraction of its GDP than the US).”

Do we need to tell our Nobel laureate the economics of Aid, even AIDS?

Stiglitz too feels (not unlike Bush) that the world has changed during the past six years. However, he finds “democratic multilateralism” being challenged, human rights abrogated. Obviously he ignores all the contributions in grounding Bushism that earlier US governments made, especially Clinton’s, of which Stiglitz himself was a part. What if NATO was not less active earlier, Iraq too was continuously bombarded…

Stiglitz feels the need for multipolarity, and that Europe

“must become one of the central pillars of such a world by projecting what has come to be called “soft power” – the power and influence of ideas and example. Indeed, Europe’s success is due in part to its promotion of a set of values that, while quintessentially European, are at the same time global.”

Does it really matter if this whole discourse of “a set of [quintessentially European, but universal] values” seems hardly any different from Bush’s? Moreover, what are these values? First is “Democracy” - not just elections, “but also active and meaningful participation in decision making, which requires an engaged civil society, strong freedom of information norms, and a vibrant and diversified media that are not controlled by the state or a few oligarchs.”

Which formally democratic country officially denies these, and how many countries, including the EU members, provide safeguards against corporate-state monopoly over information and media? Further, the whole logic of the European monetary integration was to insulate strategic financial and economic institutions from any “active and meaningful” democratic influence, as it was considered external and an economic nuisance.

“The second value is social justice”, which is just individualism, however realized “only if we live in harmony with each other”. Does Bush deny this? The issue is rather who will establish the rules for that “harmony”.

What else?

In Stiglitz’s dream, the White Man’s burden definitely changes shoulders, but it remains the white man’s burden all the same -

“For the sake of all of us, Europe must continue to speak out – even more forcibly than it has in the past.”

Back to the old world - while the “world” remains the same - a white man’s world.

36 of the 946 billionaires featuring on the Forbes’ list of richest are Indian citizens. This is being posed as India’s march forward. But is this so?

They are stinking rich. Their richness, wealth stinks. Is this a complement? But still identity-hungry Indians toiling in global sweatshops - academic, industrial etc, are asked to rejoice in the growing capacity of a few to stink. This world is really a PORCILE - with the number of Indians stinkers being only next to Russians (another group of gangster capitalists, who emerged during the post 1989 loot of public property), with the US and Germans, being front-runners.

“I killed my father. I ate human flesh and I quiver with joy.” Farmer suicides are increasing with a growing number of underemployeds being ravished in the panopticon world of new industries, call centres and peripheral informal sector units, while we are asked to quiver with joy.

——

Absolute Poverty (not just relative poverty with growing divide between rich and poor, which is generally recognised) is increasing, as people are more and more dispossessed, alienated from their means of production, losing control over their conditions of production. Even if we find consumerism rising - with new gadgets cropping up in the home of the new poor, it only increases her material and mental destitution and dependence - this is not a sign of enrichment. The secret of the billionaires’ wealth too is not more gadgets and things at home, but their ability to control over the majority’s means and conditions of production. Then why more gadgets and things at home be the parameters of judging the poor’s poverty?

Pratyush Chandra

The Bush-Blair duo’s statements immediately after Zarqawi’s death were very interesting. The adolescent victorious spirit that they generally display was clearly absent. Bush said: “The difficult and necessary mission in Iraq continues. We can expect the terrorists and insurgents to carry on without him. We can expect the sectarian violence to continue.” And Blair echoed: “The death of Zarqawi is a strike against al-Qaeda in Iraq and therefore a strike against al-Qaeda everywhere but we should have no illusions. We know that they will continue to kill, we know that there are many, many obstacles to overcome.” Evidently, the ‘optimism’ that they demonstrated after Taliban’s and Saddam’s defeats was nowhere to be seen.

There is only one reason behind this cautiousness in the imperialist camp, that the duo themselves makes clear, is that the death of all these “evil” symbols will not curb the continuity of insurgency. In fact, as these symbols are rubbed off the media lenses, the anxiety increases with the revelation of the continuous and mass character of the insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

The presence of al-Qaeda has been a boon in the post-Cold War era, providing a definite target and rationale for the continued military expansion to cover up the political economic fragility of US-British imperialism. The domestic opinion was easily mobilized by this comic-strip type situation of the two Supermen countering the bearded and hideous aliens. With these aliens dying in their own fire, the Superiority of the “good” men diminishes. And that is dangerous. Thus we find Bush/Blair fumbling for words to characterize the ‘new’ insurgency, and to convince the public of continuing their own ‘noble’ mission. In fact, Blair in his statement on Zarqawi’s death went to the extent of completely shifting the subject to the irrelevant “domestic agenda”, which meant to tell the public that - don’t always stress on our gymnastics, we know we have landed in a thick soup, let’s talk about something else.

And we find them trying hard to convince their international allies, too: “And what I’ve always said about this is whatever people think about the original decision to remove Saddam — I mean, that happened now three years ago — our forces, American forces, other forces have been there with a full U.N. mandate, with the consent of the Iraqi government to do one thing, and that is stand with the Iraqi people in their desire for democracy.” (Blair)

Looming large on all these efforts to recompose the imperialist camp and its ideological campaign, the most formidable danger is the real danger of the increased and coherent insurgency. Al-Qaeda’s elitist character and its sectarian violence, despite its frequent use of pan-Islamic rhetoric to obtain legitimacy, curb every attempt by the colonized people of Afghanistan and Iraq to self-organize, thus helping the occupying forces in divide and rule. Al-Qaeda’s insistence to be the sole-contractor to “save Islam” in this world forces it to target civilians more than the occupants and oppressors, and indulge in sectarian terrorism replicating the same imperialist policy of divide and rule. It was thus that these ‘holy’ soldiers served the global masters during the Cold War, and after the Cold War they continue to serve them. In fact, throughout the Global South the ‘religiosisation’ and sectization of the nationalist and regional politics that we see today have been the immediate results of Post World War II neo-colonization that found post-colonial secular nationalism and regionalism as grave dangers to the imperial powers’ hegemony.

However, as these self-imposing vanguards vanish one by one, who indulge in physically removing the masses from the center-stage of insurgent politics with the help and for the benefit of the occupying forces, the spontaneous and organized nature of mass insurgency will be smoothly nurtured, which until now was always nipped in the bud after sectarian killings, bombings and kidnappings, forcing it to remobilize itself from scratch. The days are not very far when we might see an organized insurgency independent of all clans and sects, which will insist like the Algerians did in the 1950s - “Placing national interest above all petty and erroneous considerations of personality and prestige, in conformity with revolutionary principles, our action is directly solely against colonialism, our only blind and obstinate enemy, which has always refused to grant the least freedom by peaceful means.”

And the Middle East has a great history of anti-colonialist and nationalist uprisings. Even if the officials (both colonials and their local cahoots) have forgotten this, the Middle Eastern people can never forget it. They don’t need to “borrow history” from others. Zarqawi and bin Laden can inspire fear and admiration among those who have forgotten the brilliant struggle for decolonization, but the people throughout the Global South have continued to live this struggle every moment of their lives - against political and economic tyranny, against direct or semi-coloniality. As violence escalates in Iraq and Afghanistan, the natives are not at all afraid. They are not afraid and innocent; they too threw stones at the passing tanks and brigades in the streets of the Afghani towns. As Fanon aptly taught us -

“This atmosphere of violence and menaces, these rockets brandished by both sides, do not frighten nor deflect the colonized peoples. We have seen that all their recent history has prepared them to understand and grasp the situation…. The native and the underdeveloped man are today political animals in the most universal sense of the word.”

Herein lies the danger for imperialism. Afraid of relying on hired locals, as it increases its force and drowns in its own muck, there is a genuine hope for the organized rise in the aspirations of self-determination among the natives. As Sartre would put, all that these hired soldiers can do is to delay the completion of the uncompleted decolonization process that started long back, but ultimately, as Jesus commanded, “So the last shall be first, and the first last” (Mathew 20:16). Amen.

And thus the colonizers are anxious, and the colonized hopeful.

Pratyush Chandra

Only one aspect of Nepal’s Finance Minister Ram Sharan Mahat’s budgetary speech delivered on July 12, 2006 is stunningly consistent: its ceremonial mentioning of people’s movement, their aspirations and their martyrdom. Along with references to “rural empowerment”, “peace” and “sharp cuts in royal palace allocations”, these incantations are intended to provide new discursive “instruments of legitimation” for the Nepali state, or as the World Bank Country Director for Nepal, Ken Ohashi, says, all these are necessary for “establishing the credibility of the state” (“Seizing the open moment”, Nepali Times, 7-13 July 2006). Only time will tell if radical forces are able to expose the new regime’s opportunism under cute baubles: the progression of regression in Nepal.

Let us first ponder briefly over the present state of Nepal’s economy to understand the full meaning and implications of the budget. In 2004, Nepal’s population was around 25.2 millions, of which around 85% resided in the rural areas, suggesting their dependence on agriculture. The per capita income in 2004 was US$260, which is far below the average per capita income in low-income countries ($510) and in South Asia ($590). Particularly revealing is the structure of the economy according to the sectoral shares in the Gross Domestic Product (GDP):

Source: World Bank (2006), “Nepal at a glance”.

Source: World Bank (2006), “Nepal at a glance”.

As Table 1 shows, there has been a continuous decline in the share of agriculture in the GDP. The industrial sector’s share definitely did expand from 1984 to 1994. However, since 1994, at least, its share has been stagnant, while the manufacturing industries’ share is on the decline. It seems that the non-manufacturing industries and services sector have been compensating the decreasing share of agriculture in the GDP, but as evident from Table 2, none of these sectors have been promising in their self-expansion. In fact, the average annual growth rate in the industrial sector has drastically reduced in the period 1994-2004.

Even though the increasing share of non-agricultural sectors in the GDP is a universal trend, in Nepal, like in other South Asian countries, this has not been accompanied by a proportionate shift in the labour force from agriculture to the other two sectors. According to the estimates of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN, the percentage of agricultural labour force in total labour force in Nepal remains almost unchanged since 1979 - it was 94% during 1979-91, while for several years now it is stuck to 93%.

All these indicate a huge rural/urban divide – an immense sea of rural poverty encircling a few islands of urban affluence. Taking into consideration the inequitable distribution of land holdings (Table 3) and semi-feudal forms of exploitation in an increasingly monetised rural setting, one can only imagine the state of the poor peasantry, semi-proletarians and the landless.

Source: Devendra Chhetry, “Understanding Rural Poverty in Nepal”, in Christopher Edmonds and Sara Medina (ed.), Defining an Agenda for Poverty Reduction (Vol. 1), Asian Development Bank (Manila, 2002). The figures are drawn from National Sample Census of Agriculture Nepal, 1991/92, Analysis of Results, Central Bureau of Statistics (Kathmandu, 1994). Ha= hectares

Even the World Bank admits (Economic Update 2002) that poverty could not be reduced in Nepal since “growth has been concentrated primarily in the urban areas and particularly in Kathmandu valley, largely excluding 86 percent of the population who live in rural areas, where per capita agricultural production has grown minimally and the overall level of economic activity has been sluggish”.

The disproportion between the share of the non-agricultural sectors in the GDP and the amount of employment generated in these sectors indicates that whatever growth we find in these sectors are either in capital-intensive industries controlled by foreign capital collaborating with a handful of Nepali mercantilist corporates, or in the informal economy where the circulatory migrants from rural Nepal toil with no job security and very low wages.

Moreover, impoverishment in rural (also in urban areas) has resulted in sluggishness in domestic demand for industrial goods, which has further eroded the possibility of an increased industrial growth in Nepal. This fact coupled with the backlash of liberalisation (export-oriented production) has made the industries in Nepal increasingly dependent on external markets – depleting internal resources to feed external demand. This further perpetuates the need for capital-intensity and an import of technologies to compete globally, thus making the dependency total, and the goal of employment-generating industrialisation a chimera.

In this situation, it is expected from any post-April 2006 government, which draws its power from popular radicalism that has enwrapped Nepal today, that it will represent the aspirations of the masses and address their basic problems - rural poverty, inequitable land distribution, unbridled commercialisation, profit-motivated industrialisation, lack of economic activities induced by popular needs, etc. The figures in Tables 1-2 testify the reality of neoliberalism as practiced in the Nepali setting.

It was in 1984 when the Nepali State accepted the IMF/WB liberalisation package, and never deterred from the neoliberal course despite the so-called 1990 democratic achievements. The Maoist revolt was a challenge to this path, and it was obviously expected that a post-April 2006 government would rethink the model of economic management that the Nepali State has been pursuing till now. But this was not to be, at least if we go by Mahat’s budgetary exercise.

In the introductory paragraphs of the speech, the Finance Minister talks about the need to “form a common vision of socio-economic development through dialogue among political and social forces active in the country” and asserts that “the dialogue between Government of Nepal and Nepal Communist Party (Maoist)” is most certainly a formidable step in this regard. In his zeal to make this point, he goes to the extent of visualising the fantastic possibility “to end all forms of conflict prevalent in the country”. However, the revolutionaries would never claim to negotiate for such a utopia, not with the democrats who are still uncomfortable with the possibility of sweeping away the most blatant point of contention: the burden of royalty.

But the Finance Minister himself betrays his and his colleagues’ conscious design of which all this wordiness is an important characteristic. This blueprint becomes clear in the following sentences: “The national debate today has surely centered on determining the future political system and process to achieve sustainable peace. This does not mean that the issue of economic development should be pushed to back burner. Democracy cannot flourish on the foundation of a weak economy. The economy is in crisis for over half a decade. It is looking for a new momentum.”

This statement contains all the essential ideological elements that characterise global neoliberalism, the weaning diet of the leadership of developing countries. First and foremost, the will to separate the economic from the political, that is, to ensure the complete depoliticisation of the former, is expressed in clear terms. To present that the “national debate” is only about politics is not only a gross misrepresentation of Nepali politics, but more importantly, it is a ploy to ensure that “the issue of economic development” does not become part of this “national debate”. Of course, economic development should not “be pushed to back burner”; rather with Mahat it must compete with political development more vigorously. But what will be the course of this economic development? The immediate answer that we seem to get is: No politics, please.

Economic development, for Mahat and his ilk, is unilinear along a neoliberal trajectory, or whichever one set by the global and regional masters. And the fundamental duty of any “national” leadership under the global neoliberal regime today is to police this unilinearity so that politics does not contaminate economics. This is the redefinition of the cherished “rule of law” today. If all conflicts in the politics of economic development are systematically ruled out, then, of course, the fantastic vision that Mahat has about ending “all forms of conflict prevalent in the country” will become real and there will be everlasting “sustainable peace”.

Consider provisions of the budget. As usual, there is an overabundance of promises, allocations and words as proof of the government’s commitment to the people in Mahat’s budgetary speech. All these are duly balanced by its fidelity to “investment-friendly atmosphere” for agro-businesses and “commercial farming”, “to encourage private investment” in every sector and, of course, faithfulness to its donors.

In the name of the pro-poor programme, the government will formulate an agriculture business promotion policy for “enhancing private sector participation in agriculture, market infrastructure development and agro-industries”. “As per the concept of public-private partnership, a policy will be adopted to encourage private sector in the expansion of technology and seeds under agriculture extension programme”. Then, there will be interest subsidy in tea farming, floriculture and milk chilling centres. The “One-Village-One-Product” programme “under public-private partnership will be initiated to increase production of commodities, which have adequate export potentials in foreign countries”. “Assistance will be provided for improved seeds, fertilisers and technology to jute producing farmers”. And the clincher - “concessional credit facility will be provided to the landless people for the purchase of land”.

Thus, the government will alleviate rural poverty, to ensure food security and implement land reforms. Market is the magic wand. What if there is no food, no land? Market will resolve everything.

Is it too demanding to realise the implications of these budgetary provisions? Where do they locate rural Nepal and its toiling masses in the global agro-industrial complex by excessive commodification of their lives? They are milled into “a new division of labour in agriculture”, where “the centre has specialised in capital-intensive production of grains and dumped them in the periphery, while peripheral states have battled for saturated markets for traditional exports, or have discovered ‘comparative advantage’ in various ‘non-traditional’ goods and land uses, namely ‘exotic’ fruits, cut flowers and vegetable, as well as ostrich husbandry and ‘wildlife’ management (ecotourism). In turn, all of these have been biased towards large-scale landholding, controlled by corporate capital, and destined for luxury peripheral and metropolitan consumption.”(Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros (ed), Reclaiming the Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, Zed Books, London, 2005, p.1

In the industrial sector too, Mahat has all his recipes ready for resolving industrial difficulties. He dips straight into undergrad textbooks on Economics to derive his recipes. For private sector there is a development and rehabilitation programme. “An Industrial Rehabilitation Fund will be established with the participation of the government, central bank, financial institutions and interested industrialists and entrepreneurs in order to rehabilitate the conflict-affected sick industries”. There will be a new labour law too, amenable to the needs of new industries, special economic zones and export processing zones.

This means the institutionalisation of the already informal labour market with no security for the workers. And, if these workers organise themselves and agitate, they will be accused of serving “the narrow interests of a small group”, as World Bank Country Director Ken Ohashi (“Seizing the open moment”, Nepali Times, 7-13 July 2006, p. 4) puts in an article published on the eve of the budget submission, since “peace, social and political inclusiveness, and economic growth” can be attained only if energy is directed “away from self interests to a collective purpose”. Strikingly, it seems either Mahat has literally lifted phrases from this article, or else the budget was drafted in the WB’s office. He too pleads for “a balance between the collective wishes and collective means”.

It is not very hard to identify the nature of this collectivity. In a class-divided society, the hegemonic collectivity is that of the ruling class, and the State is a definite instrument to serve its purpose. Hence, to meet this ‘collective purpose’, the Koirala government has everything to offer to their rich protégé-protectors, even a complete tax holiday for the newly-established industries in 22 remote districts for ten years. But for the same ‘collective purpose’, the workers and poor peasantry must understand that all “goals cannot possibly be met by this budget” (Ohashi) and that “the state does not have adequate resources to immediately fulfill unlimited needs of the people” (Mahat).

All this should definitely encourage foreign investors and their local agencies, but Mahat draws something more from the free market of ideas. This time around he desires to satiate the swadeshi and patriotic spirit. For this, he has a Swadeshi Jutta (national shoe) formula: “In order to promote the domestic production, the existing legal provision to purchase the domestic products by the government agencies even in cases where such goods are costlier by 10 percent than the foreign products will be implemented strictly. It is believed that the use of indigenous shoes and clothes by agencies like Nepal Army, Armed Police and Nepal Police under this program will encourage the domestic industries to a great extent.”

While all these development and rehabilitation programmes will be implemented to boost the private sector, the classical medicine is in store for “public enterprises”: Liquidation. It is not very difficult for even a newspaper-reading or TV-watching layperson to decipher the neoliberal ideological character of these budgetary measures, squeezed between the wordy paragraphs on “inclusive society and economy” and poverty-alleviation rhetoric.

The Nepali leadership, which has been historically compliant to the needs of the global masters, literally as their security guards, has never found neoliberal lessons very difficult to learn. Like in other countries, Nepal’s balance of payments crisis in 1982-85 gave the country’s leadership the classical rationale to ride the IMF/WB led neoliberal wave. Thus, they negotiated “a standby credit arrangement with the IMF. Accordingly, Nepal implemented an economic stabilisation programme in 1984/85. This was followed by the Structural Adjustment programme of IMF and the World Bank in 1986/87″. (”Understanding Reforms in Nepal”, Institute for Policy Research and Development, 2005). The political economy of Nepal, which had been a guinea pig in the hands of international finance capital for testing strategic panaceas, was once again brought to the operating table for yet another surgery. When the side effects started showing up in the shape of the democratic uprising, a patchwork was arranged in 1990.

The 1990 political arrangement broadened the experience and reach of this leadership in renting out the local natural and human resources for the benefits of the global machinery of capitalism. The localised elements of the ruling class that were nurtured by the aid regime and extensive commercialisation of the economy were brought into the fold of the State power. The limited democratic “political competition” established in 1990 provided a mechanism to attune the composition of the State to the changes in the ruling class composition. It was visualised that formal democracy would reduce all inter- and intra-class conflicts to competition between lobbies and dissipate any fundamental challenge to the economic structure, while the process of neoliberalism intensified.

The standard remedy in neo-classical bourgeois economics for any crisis due to marketisation is more marketisation with peripheral superstructural arrangements. Thus in Nepal too, “Economic liberalisation and privatisation policies were intensified from 1992 onward with the implementation of the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF) programme. Given the open border and special trade relations with the southern neighbour, the speed and direction of reforms were also affected by the reform drive pursued in India. Since then reforms have either been continued or deepened in the modern economic sphere of trade, industry, finance, exchange rate, and monetary and fiscal policies. As a result, Nepal now stands as one of the most liberalised and open economies in the South Asian region” (ibid). A least developed country has been blessed by the most liberalised economy in the region; such is the endowment of neoliberalism.

This reckless and continuous compliance to the needs of global capitalist accumulation and its political regime nurtured radicalism in the consciousness of the Nepali downtrodden. Before 1984, this was spontaneous and sporadic. Under neoliberalism, it became general and organised, reaching its zenith in the form of Nepali Maoism. In 1990, it was thought that electoral games and formal democracy will keep this radicalism at bay and the Nepali downtrodden playful. On the contrary, it helped in rooting out the local elements of the Nepali ruling classes and neo-rich, revelling in their newfound proximity to Kathmandu and royal institutions. Thus the prism of caste, ethnic and local consciousness that inverted the reality and united the downtrodden with their oppressors was shattered.

As wealth and growth concentrated in few urban areas in a few hands close to power, close to local political linkages of international investment and finance, the rural-urban divide sharpened. There was an unprecedented intensification in vertical and horizontal inequalities leading to the unity of class war and autonomous identity movements under People’s War. The rural poor and migrant workers united with all the other marginalised forces to challenge the basic structure.

The alternative that emerged in the Maoist practice sought for “land to the tillers”, endogenous development geared towards the popular need and political institutions best suited to facilitate such development. The energy that this practice unleashed rocked the fragile 1990 arrangement despite the consistent neoliberal pursuit by all the governments that were formed thereafter. However, there could never be a clear unity within the political elite due to increased competition for commissions in administering the aid regime and proximity to global and regional players. At the wake of the parallel governments under the Maoists, this competition was further accentuated as the formal structure’s reach of influence narrowed spatially. This overcrowding wrecked the political arrangement that was inaugurated with so much fanfare with the blessings of the global powers. This led to the royal regression, while the democrats for the first time had the time to listen to the radical voices outside the parliament, and thereby allied with the Maoists.

The Koirala government formed after the reinstatement of Parliament in Nepal was, however, quick to realise the significance of the depoliticisation of the economic in order to sustain the Nepali State’s role as the local agency for global and regional capital. Negotiations with the Maoists are making the international forces, especially India and the US, increasingly nervous. The rushed visit to India and Mahat’s presentation before Indian capitalists was to assure Indian and other ‘donors’ that they have not deviated from the neoliberal path. The act of presenting the budget without consulting the Maoists is part of this design. What else could be the reason to overload any future regime with so many prior obligations, but to reassure the supremacy of global capitalist interests after the post-April fluidity?

This brings us to another neoliberal ideological element, which is subtly evident in Mahat’s statement quoted in the first section, where he seeks to pose democracy as the end not the means to attain economic development. This is intrinsically part of the same project of depoliticisation of the economic. If democracy is the end, you do not need to practise democracy in deciding and pursuing the course of economic development. On the contrary, the elite push for liberalisation will itself engender democracy. So wait and suffer!

Of course, this is the ideal of bourgeois democracy: a system of elite decision and public ratification, as Chomsky defines it. But did Nepali people really come on the streets and suffer bullets for this brand of democracy? Royal regression can go, but the Nepali leadership continues to serve the neo-liberal counter-revolution, that leaves the lives of the labouring majority at the mercy of the ups and downs of the globalising market.

Under the neoliberal regime, capital effectively dodges every regulation and controls politics by threatening to fly away in the wake of any uncomfortable circumstances, while the political elite rationalises its anti-labour policies in the name of making the environment investment-friendly. In the name of removing market imperfections caused by “extra-economic” factors, a new authoritarianism is perpetuated, which Venezuelan Vice-President Jose Vicente Rangel calls, “economic authoritarianism”. This renders the democratic control over human and natural resources impossible, while it instrumentalises the state in favour of the hegemonic market interests. As Rangel further says in his address to the 13th Meeting of the Latin American Economic System (SELA) Council in 2003, “Authoritarianism that is dressed in democratic forms is difficult to fight. The neoliberal model and economic decisions, which sustain and reproduce it, need a democratic façade to feign legitimacy.” Hence, the fetish of elections, as “the beginning and the end of democracy”, while economic authoritarianism continues.

(This is a slightly modified version of the article originally published in Combat Law, September-October, 2006)

Pratyush Chandra

International Nepal Solidarity Network

Today, the talk of people’s power in Nepal is the order of the day. Even the Mainstream Media, Moriarty, Manmohan and their intellectual goons are full of that. Evidently they are having hysterical fits intensified by the return of the Cold War paranoia. The possibility of the Maoists’ coming over ground and their revolutionary agenda — targeting the Nepali dependency — being constitutionalized is definitely a grave crisis for Indo-American imperialism in South Asia. And in order to have a scope for diplomatic engineering, they need sanitized expressions like people’s movement, people’s power etc without identifying who the people are and without detailing their demands.

Definitely the mainstream hatred against the Maoists knows no bound. The media campaign to denigrate the Maoists has never been so vigorous as now, showing the crisis and desperation in the imperialist camp — its failure to color and control the democratic upsurge in Nepal as in East Europe and other parts of the world. As one of the coup organizers against Chavez in Venezuela, Vice Admiral Ramírez Pérez told a private channel just after the coup on April 11, 2002, “We had a deadly weapon: the media.” And as Pablo Neruda, once reminded us, “He’s the skulking coward hired to praise dirty hands. He’s an orator or journalist. Suddenly he surfaces in the palace enthusiastically masticating the sovereign’s dejections”.

1. People’s Movement - a New Phase in the People’s War?

Just a cursory reading of the mainstream media headlines on Nepal and the Maoists today shows that they increasingly concentrate on Maoist “extortions” and other “criminal” activities. One needs to just go through the reports under those headlines to have a glimpse of the conscious game plan. Only to cite a couple of examples:

a) As reported, recently, Indian company Dabur suspended its operations in Nepal. The headline and the first paragraph of the report in Telegraph (May 20), one of the mainstream newspapers in India, told it was because the company refused “to buckle under the extortion threats of the Maoist rebels”. But the same report subsequently went on: “The Maoist-affiliated trade union, All Nepal Trade Union Federation (ANTUF), on May 15 issued a 22-point charter of demands to all the units in the Bara-Parsa-Birgunj industrial belt. They demanded scrapping of the labour contract system, payment of a minimum monthly wage of Rs 5,000 and provisions of housing, medicare and education facilities to the workers and their families. The union warned of dire consequences if its demands were not met within a week.” So the genuine workers movement and its demands in the Nepali sweatshops controlled by Indian imperialists are extortions.

b) The prestigious International Federation of Journalists (IFJ, Asia-Pacific) issued a media release on May 19, where a subheading said - “Maoists attack radio station” (later “attack” was changed to “threaten”). It is obvious that many people who have the habit of reading just headlines will interpret — Oh! These gun-trotting “polpotists” must have raided the radio station. But no! “The Maoist-aligned All Nepal Trade Union Federation issued a letter on May 12, 2006 accusing the two FM radio stations of exploiting their respective staffs, dismissing staff without reason, extreme excesses and mental torture of the staff, and called for the immediate termination of the Kalika FM station director, alleging him to be a pro-royalist.” So, this was an attack!

In order to understand the impact of such unambiguous media reports, one needs to remember how even a great novelist from the Left Jose Saramago went on to dub the great guerrilla movement under the Frente Armada Revolucionaria de Colombia (FARC) as an “armed gang” dedicated “to kidnapping, murdering, violating human rights.” One can only imagine what will happen in the case of Nepal.

The international left movement divided into innumerable sects is taking its toll on the Nepali movement too. So we find even sober Marxist analysts indulging in subjective analyses of the peasant movement in Nepal displaying their rich repertoire of inter-sect abuses ready for the Maoists just because they have learnt from the Chinese peasant movement and call themselves Maoists. The irresponsible reactive armchair leftism ever online enamored of the rights discourse and neutrality too in its efforts to justify its own passivity is increasingly involved in this media redbaiting. As James Petras noted in his open letter to Saramago (Counterpunch, December 22, 2004):

“[T]here are many types of “communists” today: Those who stole the public patrimony of Russia and became notable oligarchs; Those who collaborate with the US colonial regime in Iraq; Those who have struggled for forty years in the factories, jungles and countryside of Colombia for a society without classes; And those “communists” who fear the problem (imperialism) and fear the solution (popular revolution) and make it all a question of personal preferences.”

All kinds of media and ideological manipulations are going on endeavoring to disrupt the New Phase of People’s War in Nepal — its extension to the urban streets with its own peculiarities, to the urban proletarian struggle - with the increased Maoist interventions in urban mobilization and trade union activities. We find rosy words being showered on the People, while denigrating their War. The rightists, “leftists” and imperialists are all united in this propaganda campaign.

Personalities who were never on the streets to suffer police beatings and face bullets were the first ones to declare victory of the People’s Movement with the King’s pronouncements. The desperate Indo-US imperialism and its media touts were booed when they prematurely partied after the King’s April 21 invitation to the parties to name the prime minister, which every force in the movement duly rejected, including the nervous parliamentary leaders. However the panicky US-EU-India interests ultimately found loyal agency in this “responsible leadership” when it unilaterally accepted the April 24 declaration restoring the defunct parliament.

And thus started the sanitization program — of talking about People’s War vs. People’s Movement, of the failure of the first against the successes of the latter as proof of the virtue of non-violence. The hidden agenda is very apparent, that is to restore the sanctified institutions of State Terror while disarming the People by preaching them non-violence. The neutral apostles of Human Rights do this by treating the State’s offence at par with the Popular defense. Imperialisms do this via their “Community Faces” too - through well funded “Civil Society” groups and NGOs, who specialize in administering and selling the social agenda of Neoliberalism, providing “Social Cushion” in the face of the growing marginalization and social unrest. As perfect plainclothesmen, all these apostles of non-violence can be spotted here and there in the Nepali unrest with their clear job of policing the movement from within. After the so-called “victory” of April 24, their additional job has been to write anecdotes about their participation in the “Turn-the-other-cheek-Revolution” with the mainstream and “civil society” media ever ready to channel the processes of sanitization and betrayal.

In this regard, it suffices to quote Black revolutionary Malcolm X who was himself the epitome of Popular Suffering, Anger and Movement right in the belly of the beast:

“I don’t go for anything that’s non-violent and turn-the-other-cheekish. I don’t see how any revolution—I’ve never heard of a non-violent revolution or a revolution that was brought about by turning the other cheek, and so I believe that it is a crime for anyone to teach a person who is being brutalized to continue to accept that brutality without doing something to defend himself. If this is what the Christian-Gandhian philosophy teaches then it is criminal—a criminal philosophy.”

2. The Nepali Movement Beyond Sectism

There is far more to a movement than just its personalities and ideologico-cultural labels - Zapatistas, Chavistas and Maoists. However, there is always a mainstream tendency to relegate these movements to a few personalities, symbols and ideological lineages. This definitely benefits the status quo as the movements are effectively portrayed as sects with some innate pathological tendencies. The failures and problems of the older movements whose idioms the present movements have adopted and adapted to mobilize and organize the masses are extrapolated to vilify the latter. The fundamental issues of the changed conjuncture and the composition of the movements are effectively swept aside through this exercise, ideologically arming the status quo to contravene the ’subversive’ forces.

Feeding to this is the widespread sectism prevalent within the Left, which aids the hegemonic forces in this regard. The leftist dissection, labeling and libeling are more effective than any repression and mainstream media propaganda in forming and deforming the opinion, as they can be projected as internal dissensions. Karl Marx while summarizing his experience in the First International rightly notes in his letter to Friedrich Bolte (November 23, 1871):

“The development of the system of Socialist sects and that of the real workers’ movement always stand in inverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are (historically) justified, the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historic movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary.”

The recent upheaval in Nepal has once again brought this sectism to the center-stage as people everywhere are trying to cope up with the Maoist element in it. We find Mao’s failures and Pol Pot’s barbarism discussed more than what the Nepali Maoists have done in Nepal - how they have energized the issues of land, land reforms, decadent forms of gender, national and ethnic oppressions, neo-liberal commercialization, distress migration etc as their central concerns.

In the hands of the Maoists, the issue of the constituent assembly, which was forgotten by the democrats, became a rallying point for uniting the rural and urban downtrodden. It was the Maoists’ strength with the growing influence of their slogans and radicalism on the lower leadership and the mass base of the petty bourgeois parliamentary parties that shattered the Nepali ruling machinery’s ability to control the growing rage of the people’s war. Eventually the 1990 historic “compromise” between the royalty and the democrats brokered by the imperialist interests in the region collapsed leading to the latter’s historic alliance with the Maoists in 2005.

This alliance triggered the mass upsurge that we witnessed throughout April this year. The imperialist onlookers were awe-stricken by the response to the General Strike called by the Seven Party Alliance facilitated by the unilateral ceasefire declared by the Maoists in the Kathmandu region with an increased armed assault on the (then Royal) Nepalese Army in other regions. US Ambassador went on with his rumor mongering and presented the situation as “pre-revolutionary” in one of his interviews, which was correct but was meant to terrorize the Nepali petty bourgeois leaders and mobilize international opinion against the revolutionaries. India, who has the history of utilizing the unequal treaties with Nepal for changing the internal political arrangement that best suited India’s interests that necessarily used to include a cosmetic democracy, this time was (and is) desperate to preserve the monarchy. However the Indian response has been moderated due to the immense mobilization within India in solidarity with the Nepali democracy movement.

The petty bourgeois leaders of the parliamentary parties feared direct action in the rocking streets and burning fields of Nepal destroying every institution that mothered them. Instead of the path of revolution, they chose the path of legislation, which allows manipulation and compromise. Afraid of the revolutionary ‘uncertainty’ they found a ready opportunity to withdraw their support to the movement when the King restored their parliamentary privileges. But the movement continued as the Maoists and the grassroots of these parties rejected this compromise and sustained the spontaneous upsurge in popular consciousness, ever vigilant of the old leadership returning to its old habits and forcing some concrete progressive “concessions” that we hear in the news today.

3. Hands Off Nepal: Rebuff the possible ‘Plan Nepal’

Today, most dangerously, all imperialist manipulations, media propaganda and the parliamentary drunkenness in Nepal might prepare the background for something like Plan Colombia, which derailed the similar process of overgrounding of the peasant and people’s upsurge in Colombia under the leadership of the FARC. The FARC in 1999-2001 suspended their armed struggle and negotiated with the Pastrana regime, insisting on a demilitarized zone, putting forth “a political program of agrarian reform, national public control of strategic resources, and massive public works programs to generate jobs”. All these radical measures were destined to destroy the reactionary political economic institutions that allowed the imperialist network to operate in the country, devastating the peasantry, indebting the economy and entrenching corruption in the state structure. Therefore, “with the backing of the US government the Pastrana regime abruptly broke off negotiations and launched an attack on the demilitarized zone” and restarted funding, training and arming the drug traffickers and private armies of the landlords as para-military forces to harass and destroy the people’s movement.

There are well-documented evidences of the drug mafia network under the CIA of which “The King of Nepal” has been an important part. Last year there were reports that Crown Prince Paras “has been allegedly in the drug business for seven years, but his stakes and that of the Nepali royal family have grown by leaps and bounds in the last few years…[T]he crown prince is now reported to be operating his network beyond South Asia.” (Newsinsight.net, July 6, 2005) With the history of the linkages between the drug trade and the US’ counter-insurgency drive, one cannot ignore the possibility of a Plan Nepal in the pipeline until and unless the revolutionary Nepali people are vigilant enough forcing the country’s ever shaky “democratic” leadership to facilitate the ‘overgrounding’ of the Maoists and the crushing of the military leadership trained for imperialist wars, thus thwarting the danger of any imperialist manipulation.

Remember the US insists to keep the Maoists on its terror list, which allows it to intervene and manipulate regimes beyond the seven seas for its domestic security interests. The first thing that the US did after “welcoming” the April 24 proclamation was to sit with the military leaders, not even with the King. The parliamentary forces might remove R(oyalty) from the name of every institution, might add Secular in the official name of Nepal, but the country needs the negation of the whole system nurtured by 200 years of semi-colonialism, that allowed the imperialist powers to use the Nepali people, army and resources as reserve for crushing liberation struggles internationally (in India, Afghanistan among others), as canon-fodder. And all these in exchange with a promise that the Nepali royalty and elite could handshake and dine with the White Royalty, while the Nepali people suffered dual exploitation, and later, in exchange with rents in the form of foreign aid.

In the age of neo-liberalism, when the Nepali soldiers are not sent for killing, they can be used as guinea pigs too for pharmaceutical researches. Recently, there was news about “the American government’s exploitation of Nepali soldiers as human guinea pigs to find a Hepatitis vaccine.” As Jason Andrews wrote in The American Journal of Bioethics: “Noting the millions of dollars, military training, and arms that the State Department and Military have been giving to the RNA to help them put down the Maoist rebellion, it seems plausible that the resultant military and economic dependence of the host institution/population (RNA) upon the research sponsor (the U.S. Military) threatened the voluntary nature of the institutional and individual participation in the trial. That is, the RNA probably was not in a good position to say ‘no’ to the small request by their generous benefactor.”

Servility and loyalty towards global imperialism entrenched in the Nepali state structure and elites can never be removed only by legislations — it needs a complete structural transformation, it needs a revolution, which has just begun and can go anywhere from here. With the growing imperialist counseling to the newly formed Nepali government, and the consensual ideological campaign endeavoring to alienate the movement from its revolutionary leadership through ‘neutral’ rights discourse and by media, any complacency on the part of the revolutionary masses of Nepal at this juncture will curb the process of democratization of the Nepali society and state.