While die-hard feudal monarchists of Nepal have been preparing everything they can in the background to thwart conflict transformation and state restructuring processes, monarchists within the government-heading Nepali Congress have asked their top leadership not to hold joint regional mass meetings with the Maoists. The Maoists, following a decade-long armed insurgency, has entered the peace process on condition of the establishment of a multi-ethnic federal republican state structure through the Constituent Assembly polls.
The Seven Party Alliance (SPA) of which the Nepali Congress is a coalition partner, are founded on the 12-point understanding (2005), the April Uprising Verdict (2006) and the Interim Constitution (2007). As part of the peace process, the Maoists’ People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has been in the cantonments under the UN supervision for more than a year. But more surprisingly, some pro-monarchy Nepali Congress leaders have now asked their top leadership to avoid co-working with the Maoist insurgents.
Some of the identified pro-monarchy Nepali Congress leaders defending the outgoing monarchy are K. B. Gurung (General Secretary), Govinda Raj Joshi, Vijay Kumar Gachchhadar, Sujata Koirala (Prime Minister Koirala’s daughter), Khum Bahadur Khadka and Sarad Singh Bhandari. They have been stressing on not co-working with the Maoists. Several of these pro-monarchy Nepali Congress leaders had been jailed for huge corruption scandals in the past.
Their objection to having joint mass meetings with the Maoists in the Terai region generates a serious apprehension: are the Terai armed groups (the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum that massacred 29 unarmed Maoist cadres in Gaur in March 2007), God knows who runs them for what purposes, preparing to massacre Maoists again? These pro-monarchy Congress leaders estimably may have partnered with other Terai armed and unarmed groups in order to cope with Maoists.
Nepal’s monarchist forces aided by Indian Hindu extremists such as the RSS, Vishwa Hindu Parishad, the Shiva Sena and the BJP have in an underground way been moving heaven and earth to protect monarchy and its privileged positions by derailing the Constituent Assembly poll.
The coming political phenomena of Nepal will determine the nature of politics the Nepalis are going to adopt. If an undesired revocation of bloody civil war occurs, it will not only blood-shroud the country’s peace process but may also catapult the current political forces into refugee camps. Political leaderships, therefore, could prevent serious losses by becoming more watchful of their own suspicious intra-party elements.