Maoist Protests, day 5

Today is day 5! Astonishing, really, how long it has held together. Prachanda says it will reach fever pitch over couple of days, but I don't believe him. I think the high-point was May 1, Saturday. The movement is coming undone: entrepreneurs forced to supply water to the protesters are supplying them with dirty water pumped up from the banks of Bagmati and Bishnumati. For those who don't understand the implications, consider this: Both rivers are stand-still cesspools. Within ten kilometers of their origin, they both enter city limits; all fresh water has been diverted by that point, and passes through humans to re-enter the rivers as effulgence.

Maoist "supporters" who had been given the choice between paying Rs. 1,000/- per household or joining the ranks of the protesters have started returning, sometimes undertaking journeys as long as 150 KM [to Chitawan] in order to return home.

Prachanda appealed to the ethnic Newars and citizens of Kathmandu to join the protests, but some neighborhoods have started organizing retaliatory groups. Around Sanepa, they have declared neighborhoods "Maoist-prohibited zones," going so far as to stop tankers carrying drinking water from passing through the streets. I doubt if anyone is offering protesters drinking water or sanitary facilities out of spontaneous support for the cause.

Maoist rhetoric is becoming less and less precise: it is no longer possible to tell exactly why these protests are happening. It is clear that a "prince" is missing from the picture, someone who could bend the wills of lesser minions and forge a strong unity. GPK seems to have done that the last time the Maoists declared an "indefinite" strike. This time around, it seems aimed only at toppling the government, establishing Prachanda as the next PM, not including any other political party in the government.

How this will help the Maoists draft and pass a constitution that is favorable to them is opaque to me. Unless, through some authoritarian act, the Maoists draft a constitution all on their own and pass it without requiring the President--who is the protector of the Interim Constitution, and whose mandate is to ensure that the next constitution gets written under existing laws--to sign it off.

Because, whenever the Maoists go to the CA to pass even the phrasing of the prologue to the constitution, they will need broad support from many other parties.

Most other parties do not believe the Maoist party is a democratic party. It has never agreed to make the fundamental gesture of making YCL into a civilian organization, instead of the semi-militant organization that it is now.

It has never agreed to stop its donation drives, which are very thinly-disguised extortion schemes. If the party were to be billed for the expenses it has legitimately accrued over the past week by putting its cadres up in various avenues, I am sure it would add up to a mind-boggling amount.

That, is also a measure of their extortion of private citizens, and their looting of the state coffers.

I think the most instructive "un-gluing" of the party and the people happened in Pokhara, where Maoists beat up sand-mine workers who support the Maoist party for working during the bandh. The workers then beat the Maoists right back. If the Party can't sell this "revolution" to its basest of the base, there is something fundamentally wrong with its PR operation. Or, of its sense of purpose. They are not coming forward with their true intention: to be in power when shit starts rolling downhill, and to force a particular character into the new constitution.

Which is what frustrates me more than anything else. For anyone who gives it any thought, most of the stuff the Party will want in the constitution is exactly what Nepal needs. But the likes of Prachanda can't stop there: they will try to make it an opportunity to cement themselves into it.

Which, in this day and age, is very dumb. Very self-destructive.

It is far more profitable for any political group to build self-redundancy into any articulation of a vision for public service, but then go on to earn the sort of merit that allows people to imagine that the political group is indispensable.

Something like what the "Civil Society" managed during the revolution of 2006.