The trouncing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in West Bengal's assembly elections, ending a 34-year uninterrupted communist rule, has been interpreted by some "analysts" here in Nepal as carrying important implications for Nepal's left parties and their economic policies, with some suggesting that Nepali communist parties must shape up or ship out. Their main argument is that the Communist Party, in its long reign, could not deliver economic growth and was therefore punished in the hustings. This scribe, while no apologist for any political ideology or party unlike many a writer in the Nepali media, finds such inferences highly contrived and overblown, in some instances even born of the writers' political prejudices that blind them to the differing contexts in India and Nepal.
1. Glaringly missing from such analyses is why even as the voting public apparently got sick and tired of CPI (M) misrule, a Maoist insurgency is raging in different parts of India, including in West Bengal, covering 40 percent of India's villages. An insurgency that the Indian prime minister Man Mohan Singh described as the greatest challenge to India from within. If the rejoinder is that the Maoists there do not enjoy the support of the people and do not have anything to offer for a positive transformation of the Indian state/economy, then the same could be said of Nepal's Maoists when they too were waging their "people's war" against the Nepali state. But that would be at serious odds with the fact that the key political features of New Nepal were essentially Maoist agendas, good or bad. Nepal's Maoists emerged as the largest party in the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections vetted as being largely free and fair by the international community, including western democracies. Of course, just because western democracies said the elections were fair it does not mean that the election were actually fair, but if the analysts do not think the elections were fair, then they should have the guts to chastise the members of the international community that suggested otherwise.
2. Paradoxically, CPI (Marxist) is the very party whose leaders were chummy with Nepali Maoist leaders who self-avowedly spent most of the insurgency years on Indian soil, in and on the outskirts of New Delhi, and who ostensibly persuaded Nepali Maoists to rejoin multiparty politics. They were hailed in the mainstream media for helping end the armed conflict in Nepal. The analysts do not deem it relevant to enquire why the CPI (Marxist) leaders cannot achieve the same in their own beloved homeland, the world's largest electoral democracy – why can't they propose that Indian Maoists be brought into mainstream politics, even if it means conceding to some of the Maoists' demands, expanding the Lok Sabha liberally to accommodate the Maoists, and then instituting reforms to the Indian political and economic systems by incorporating the Maoists' demands – a la Nepal? Why, instead, the CPI (Marxist) government in West Bengal was cracking down on Indian Maoists? Why such bonhomie with Nepali Maoists and animosity with their compatriot Maoists?
3. The suggestion for mainstreaming made above won't work there? But it is working here in Nepal, right? No? Then say so loud and clear.
4. The fact is that just as Nepal's Maoists considered the then largest mainstream communist party of Nepal (CPN-UML) a revisionist party that had deviated from communist philosophy, India's Maoists' do not consider CPI (M) as a real communist party. Indian Maoists do not consider CPI(M) to be Red enough.
5. The analysts, who argue that CPI (M)'s core economic philosophy proved to be its undoing, ignore the fact that Mamata Banerjee, who cruised her party Trinamool-Congress to a thumping victory over the communists in West Bengal, had sided with farmers protesting the acquisition of their land for setting up a Tata plant while the ruling communist party was bent on facilitating the establishment of the plant. Which position was good for the welfare of West Bengalis is not relevant here. The point is that Mamata was doing what the communists should have been doing (but were not doing). This irony is lost on the analysts.
6. Unlike what the analysts would have us believe, there is no significant difference in the economic policies of major political parties of Nepal, communists or otherwise. On crucial issues of national interest, they have let the nation down. All of them, for example, have pursued an export-oriented hydropower policy even as the economy reels under crippling power cuts. Politicization of the bureaucracy, rampant corruption, politico-criminal nexus, capture of government policies and decisions by vested interests, external interests calling the shots in national policymaking and decision-making and mismanagement of public enterprises have been the bane of all governments, with or without communist parties.
7. Whether there is a communist government or a UPA government or a BJP-led NDA government at the centre in India and whether there is a communist government or a UPA government or a BJP-led NDA government or any other government in any state in India is unlikely to change basic Indian foreign policy (including its component economic policy) towards Nepal.
8. The paradox of Nepali communist parties, even when in power, endorsing the neocolonial economic relationship between Nepal and its neighbor as exemplified by the pursuit of the policy of exporting hydroelectricity at dirt-cheap rates, and thereby exporting away potential multiplier benefits for the domestic economy from utilizing hydropower within, is likely to continue.
9. Actually, it is not a paradox; only the operation of a principle: there is no free lunch. External benefactors naturally want their pound of flesh.
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