Nepal’s senior Maoist leader and former Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai has requested India to use its good offices with the Government of Nepal in a bid to break the deadlock over the Constitution. He said that Kathmandu was trying to thrust a Constitution on the people of Nepal through a two-third brute majority which the ruling Nepali Congress-Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist leninist) enjoys in the Constituent Assembly, and not by a process of consensus involving also the wishes of his party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist).
Bhattarai, however, was quick to add that he was not seeking New Delhi’s “intervention in the internal affairs of Nepal”, but merely expecting “official or unofficial” help from the Government of India, well-wishers of Nepal in India as well as social activists, to persuade the rulers in Kathmandu to abandon their insistence on going ahead with the Constitution’s adoption in a way that is “against the spirit of the earlier agreements”.
The former Prime Minister was speaking at a roundtable in New Delhi on February 2, organised by Society for Policy Studies in collaboration with India International Centre, and chaired by former Foreign Secretary Shyam Saran. Bhattarai warned of consequences in case the crisis continued to linger for long. “The Nepalese Government’s decision can result in another round of conflict,” he said. He hastened to add, though, that the conflict would not necessarily be an armed one. “I don’t think we will go back to, or wish to go back to, to the kind of confrontation that we led through the decade from 1996 to 2006,” he remarked.
The senior Maoist leader pointed out that his party’s workers and supporters had already come out on the streets of Nepal to protest against the Government’s decision on the Constitution. On being asked as to how long will they continue to protest and what form that protest will take, he stated, “We don’t want to be on the streets a day longer than is necessary. As to the form of protest, we want it to be peaceful.”
Maintaining his pitch for India’s ‘official or unofficial’ action, Bhattarai reminded the gathering that his party had actively sought New Delhi’s intervention in the run-up to the end of the decade-long People’s War the Maoists had raged and which had contributed largely to the disbanding of the monarchy. “My party had approached the Vajpayee regime through the then National Security Advisor, Brajesh Mishra, for help to arrive at the 12-point Memorandum of Understanding and the Comprehensive Peace Agreement. let the ruling coalition in Kathmandu and our party come to a similar understanding over the Constitution”, he suggested.
The former Nepalese Prime Minister said that the Maoists’ primary objection to the provisions of the Constitution as it stood presently before the House was that it did not adequately protect the interests of Nepal’s many ethnic communities, Dalits and women. Seeking to dispel the impression that the Maoists were pushing for exclusive ethnic-based States as part of the larger federal structure that the Constitution hopes to provide, Bhattarai said that his party was merely demanding the creation of States based on “sizeable” ethnic populations where geography and other factors too provided for it. “We are not seeking new States for every single ethnic group in the country,” he asserted.