When two polar opposites of Nepal’s politics came together last week, they ended the spectacle of the tail wagging the dog and threw up a new coalition government that on paper appears sturdy. That Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’, 69, with just 32 seats in parliament—where the simple majority figure stands at 138—managed to stay as PM for so long was a testimony to his skills in alternatively playing the two biggest parties in the House against each other.
With the two-cats-and-a-monkey story manifesting, the loaf of bread to be shared equitably between the felines invariably ended in the wily Prachanda’s mouth. While the Nepali Congress led by Sher Bahadur Deuba, 78, has 88 seats, the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist with K P Sharma Oli, 72, at the helm has 77. Taken together, they add up to 165 seats—comfortably past the simple majority mark. But they are like water and oil; Deuba pro-India and Oli pro-China.
Apart from their king-sized egos, their trust deficit is near-total and their opposite ideologies can never mix. Yet, the alchemy of political compulsion brought the two together and cut the monkey out, though a possible foreign hand was the catalyst. Oli and Deuba have since agreed on rotational prime ministership, with the former leading the government in the first half.
Corruption probes opened by the Prachanda government against biggies in both the parties are said to be the immediate trigger for their new bond. Those probes would likely be buried and new dirt dug up against the outgoing government. Prachanda was a Marxist guerrilla leader before he entered the political mainstream. Would the politics of vendetta push him back to the bloody cycle of violence and gore is anybody’s guess.
A Beijing hand was visible in Prachanda approving an agreement on a rail link with China a day before he lost the trust vote. But Nepal’s new pragmatic policy is to accept foreign grants alone, not debt. In his last shot as PM, Oli indulged in cartographic aggression against India by producing a revised national map that included three villages in Uttarakhand. Whether Deuba would be able to moderate Oli’s baiting of India following Chinese prodding remains to be seen. Amid growth pangs, land-locked Nepal’s perennial political instability produced 14 governments in the past 16 years. It deserves better.