Pothik Ghosh
Demands for harsh and summary punishment for rapists, or for that matter, stringent laws to deal with rape – fuelled as they are by moral outrage – do little else than reinforce the capitalist structure of patriarchy that thrives on gendered division of labour between waged productive work and unwaged reproductive work. For, any such legal-juridical demand or move is willy-nilly grounded in the assumption that the capitalist-patriarchal structuring of social relations need not be transformed to protect women from sexual violence. In fact, such self-righteous moral outrage underpinned by the lust for inquisitorial-gladiatorial spectacle is, at the systemic-structural level, nothing but an ideology that legitimises the capitalist-patriarchal structure. It tends to reinforce the general consensus – precisely by marshalling the crises of the system it can no longer conceal – that the only matrix capable of protecting women against violence is one that is normatively capable of instituting stringent laws against perpetrators of such sexual and/or gender violence, ensures their strict enforcement and delivers harsh punishment to offenders. The reinforcement of such a consensus does no more or less than preserve and reproduce the structure of gendered division of labour, and sexual inequality.
Moral Outrage and Capitalist Juridicality
The legal-juridical approach to protect women not only denies them autonomous agency, as it serves to interpellate them as unequal subjects of a gendered socio-economic system, but also masks the implication of the agency of all its citizen-subjects in that gender-unequal structure of social power. Meanwhile, those citizen-subjects, who turn agents of such legal-juridical approach to anti-systemic politics, live in the neurotic comfort of condemning rape and baying for the blood of rapists even as they perpetuate the gender-unequal structure of social power through their agency as citizen-subjects of civil society and its constitutive unit: the family. This structure of social power is the very condition of possibility for such gruesome acts of sexual and gendered violence, which are, therefore, its cultural and ideological embodiments or mediations. Hence, such moral outrage of citizen-subjects ties up neatly with the legal-juridical approach that serves to sidestep the fundamental question of socio-economic transformation by sweeping the collective consciousness clean of it, thus enabling the system to manage its structural crisis by transferring it, either fully or partially, from one location to another. As a consequence, the system is not only preserved but it also reproduces itself through the further extension of its panoptic web of biopower and the political-economic logic that inheres in it. Clearly, morally outraged demands for fixing gruesome acts of sexual violence such as rape in their sheer immediacy is the political language constitutive of a subjective agency of opposition that is integral precisely to the extended reproduction of the very system it seeks to oppose in one of its many determinate moments. That, needless to say, reinforces the legal-juridical approach even as it precludes the transformation of the capitalist-patriarchal structuring of socio-economic power through its decimation.
The immediate fight against sexual violence such as rape must grasp such despicable violence not as a problem of sheer lawlessness that, therefore, can be eliminated through the enforcement of the law and the reinforcement of its concomitant system, but as a crisis of the very system and its structure that, therefore, needs to be destroyed in order to abolish such crises integral to it. Rape is not an aberration of the system that the latter can eradicate by asserting – instituting/enforcing – the law that holds the system together as its raison d’ etre. Rather, it is one of the many forms of heinously oppressive violence that is integral to regimes of class domination that is enshrined in and as the systemic rule of law. Hence, the eradication of rape and other such forms of coercive patriarchal oppression, which make for the constitutive exception of the law, is contingent not on extending the remit of the legal. Instead, it lies precisely in the abolition of the law and the capitalist socio-economic structure coeval with the legal and, which to reiterate the earlier point, is the condition of possibility of patriarchy and all its forms of control and coercion.
It is no accident that moral outrage against gruesome acts of rape and sexual violence, which fuel demands for either more stringent anti-rape laws or harsh punishment for rapists, or both, is inseparable from disciplinary control over the vector of women’s bodies and lifeworlds. All for their safety and security. The social, if not the individual, subject that articulates both those discourses is indivisible.
This argument does in no way, however, preclude the question of politically fighting rape in its immediacy. Rather, what it insists on is the inescapable need for such a struggle to figure how the general strategy of fighting capital in order to overcome it should articulate its tactics in their immediacy, and not be conflated with it to be hypostatised. The legal-juridical fight against rape is a tactical position that ought not to be blinded by the affect of moral outrage that animates it to the strategy of decimating the capitalist-patriarchal structure. A strategy that ought to inform, articulate and orientate the social subject waging the immediate, tactical struggle for legal-juridical measures against rape. As for the question about whether or not moral outrage about rape is necessarily inseparable from patriarchy, the need is clearly to deal with it at its two different levels of determination: one of individual subjectivity and the other of social subjecthood. In the first instance, the correlation is not necessary, while in the second case, if the morally outraged social subject is interpellated by the legal-juridical approach and is thus rendered incapable and/or unwilling to pose the fundamental structural (or mediated) question then moral outrage is doubtless coeval with patriarchal power. It is actually no less than the ideology of capital in this, its late conjuncture. Of course, there is no duality between the two subject-positions as they are in a dialectic. And precisely, therefore, there can be no unidirectional determination. That is, an individual subjectivity of moral outrage, even if it is informed by a conception of social subject for structural transformation, cannot, merely by claiming to be informed by such radical subjectivity, stand in as such for the actuality of the radical, system-transforming social subject. That social subject, which is incipiently present in the subjectivity of a radical individual, has to be generalised beyond that incipience for it to be sustained in its actuality. Politics is what politics does. Not what it says it does.
Class Struggle on the Woman Question
Therefore, the woman question should not be reduced to a question of juridical identity and that it should, in its tactical determinateness, articulate the generalised strategy of class antagonism. This is not to say that rape becomes a secondary question from the vantage point of revolutionary working-class politics. And that, therefore, the struggle of the hour is for socialism, whose coming would automatically take care of gender inequality and sexual oppression. Instead, there is an urgent need to stake out a revolutionary working-class position with regard to intervention in gruesome instances of sexual violence where the public consensus is single-mindedly focused on meting out harsh punishments – death by hanging, castration, etc – while remaining incapable of or unwilling to question how gender-insensitive laws and law-enforcement are integral to the capitalist-patriarchal structuring of social relations, or social power.
However, what must at this juncture be openly acknowledged, and admitted – without a shred of ideological sophistry – is that the dominant current of movements, which have based themselves on the conceptual centrality of the class question, have been paradigmatically blind to how, among other things, capital has engendered class. In other words, the working-class movement should recognise that its dominant tendencies have failed to foreground how the structure of capital has divided labour and thus segmented the working class through the political-economic specification, re-inscription and re-articulation of the pre-capitalist gendered power relations. The capitalist structure has specified pre-capitalist patriarchy to effect gendered hierarchisation of the domains of productive and reproductive work to enable transfer of value to preserve and perpetuate a system constitutive of differential rates of exploitation (extraction of surplus value). Not just that. The capitalist-patriarchal ideology of ‘legitimate’ sexual inequality generated by this gendered privileging of productive over reproductive work has been instrumental in the gendered segmentation of labour – through unspoken custom if not enshrined contract – in the productive sphere itself as also the larger sphere of so-called non-work socialisation. The working-class movement would, therefore, do well to realise that the paradigmatic blindness of its dominant tendencies to this dimension of our political-economic reality has yielded a conception of working-class unity that is nothing but the instrumentalisation of the everydayness of working-class women by the politics of the male proletariat. That has rendered the latter the oppressive intermediaries of capital and dominant petty-bourgeois agencies of property-forms vis-à-vis the former. In short, such ‘working-class unity’ has been integral to the restoration of capitalist class power.
The women’s movement would, meanwhile, do well not to repeat such a paradigmatic error. The specification, and rearticulation, of the gendered relations of power by the capitalist structure cuts both ways. Capital does not merely engender class but also, in the same movement, classi-fies gender. It marshals gender inequality to segment the working-class even as the homogeneity of gender is itself subjected to a class-based internal differentiation based on a hierarchically relational gradation of property-form and labour-dimension. In such circumstances, to target only patriarchy as the root of such gender oppression and sexual violence as honour killings, rape and so on is to attack only the ideological form – culture if you will – of gender oppression and violence while leaving the capitalist structure that animates or articulates it intact. A structure that is capable of coopting anti-patriarchal women’s movements by articulating them in a manner that enables such movements to raise the perfectly just demands for the abolition of various unfreedoms that shackle womankind in its gendered entirety even while bringing emancipation from such gendered unfreedoms to certain locationally select segments and sections of women to the exclusion of the rest, and thereby neutralising the movements by weakening the strength and/or energy of the mass that drives such movements by accentuating the segmentation within it.
Towards the Feminism of Proletarian Militancy
The point here is certainly not to join the chorus of status-quoist cynics, who are seeking to diminish the current anti-rape mass upsurge on the streets of Delhi as a middle-class fad. Such cynicism is insidious to say the least. Sexual violence and gender oppression cannot, by any stretch of imagination, qualify as a middle-class or petty-bourgeois concern. Insofar as gender inequality, which is a form of class domination, is co-constitutive of such violent oppression, sexual violence is a working-class question at its core. Rather, the point of the argument really is that the mass upsurge should recognise its objectively incipient working-class character so that it can be generalised. In short, this movement against sexual violence must not only challenge the dominant culture of patriarchy – which it is doing in large measure, thanks to the participation of various communist-left mass organisations and other radical women’s groups – but must also simultaneously become a struggle against segmentations and divisions within the gendered class of women proletarians if its battle against patriarchy has to really succeed. In other words, an effective struggle against patriarchy can only be a revolutionary working-class struggle. One that doesn’t evade the gender question in the name of some larger, beyond-gender working-class unity, but focuses on the gender question in its specificity in terms of rearticulation of the culture (ideology) of patriarchy within and by the materiality of capital. To do merely the former is the path of radical feminism while an approach that dialectically articulates the former with the latter is the feminism of proletarian militancy.
What would the adoption of such an approach mean in the concrete specificity of the current anti-rape mass movement in Delhi, though? For starters, it would not only mean stoutly resisting calls for capital punishment for or emasculation of the perpetrators of sexual violence but even steering clear of such juridical-legal demands as improving the abysmally low rate of conviction in rape cases, making rape investigations less patriarchally prejudiced and strengthening our frail and ineffectual anti-rape laws. Such demands – which are currently emanating from the more politically progressive tendencies in the movement – presuppose that the current system is capable of delivering on them and that such delivery is contingent merely on some disembodied, spiritualised will of the system. In other words, the socio-political subject that articulates such demands is a subject of reformist politics interpellated by the juridical-legal ideology and the concomitant hope that the system is structurally capable of reform. It is, therefore, unwittingly or not, complicit in the perpetuation of the capitalist systemic structure that is the necessary, if not sufficient, condition for the generation of cultures of gender oppression and sexual violence. Clearly, the stress of radical politics cannot, for that reason, lie on mobilising the street to berate and condemn the patriarchal mindset of the administrators either. Such an approach to the state of affairs dovetails nicely with the juridical-legal mode of reformist politics because such condemnation implies that it can shake a patriarchally callous and prejudiced administration from its anti-woman mindset by the sheer force of its intensity, and that therefore there is no structural constraint on the latter to transform itself for the better. Nothing, as we have seen, is farther from the truth. Worse, the discourse of such politics, thanks to its reformist modality, is inevitably populist that can (often has) dangerously veer to the right in the course of the mass movement. For, registers and idioms have a way of taking a life of their own, not least because they are inscribed within systemically operational structures.
Radical political intervention should learn to shun the discourse of crime and punishment to relearn its classical language of oppression and resistance. A language that disentangles the question of justice from that of law by freeing the former from the hypostatized prison of the latter. It should pose the very same systemic problems – low conviction rate, weak laws, culturally biased investigation and custom-based, communitarian subjugation of bodies and lives of women – with regard to gender oppression and sexual violence such as rape to expose the structural incapacity of the system to reform itself and remedy the situation. And through such exposure conscientise – orientate if you will – the mass upsurge triggered by perception of such ‘crimes’ to demand the impossible of the system: that its administration, police and, eventually, its private and public corporations, must cede their governmentalised control over and determination of every aspect of the lifeworld of the working masses to the popular subjectivity of the mass movement. A politics based on demanding the impossible is needed in this case not only because the system is structurally incapable of riding itself of gender-inequality and the patriarchal ideology co-constitutive of it but also because the juridical-legal approach legitimizes the politics of demands the system can possibly deliver on and, in the process, articulates a subject that reproduces the logic of duality and determination – which is constitutive of the capitalist law of value and phallocentric patriarchy, both embodied by the state.
Only when the current mass upsurge comes to be animated by this radically (im)possibility will it have begun actualising its revolutionary incipience by struggling to not merely occupy Delhi but seeking to take control of that occupied urban spatio-temporality by re-organising the social relations constitutive of it through the general assembly-driven mode of popular vigilance into a free associational or solidaristic sociality. The actualisation of such a radical subjectivity by the movement in question would enable it to see and envisage its struggle against the system in its dialectical indivisibility with the task of re-organising the given social and production relations. Something the class power constitutive of the system in question tends to render impossible, thus making the deployment of popular force by those who struggle indispensable for their task of generating counter-power through such re-organisation of the given socio-economic relations. That would, inter-alia, put an end to the false and grossly counter-productive binary between violent and peaceful protests that we have seen emanating from within the movement over the past few days. One that threatens to sap the movement of its unity and energy, what with the clear and present danger of the movement being hijacked from within – either by the reformists or the petty-bourgeois right – staring it in the face.
That this is no flight of fancy is more than evident in what the anti-rape mass movement itself has thrown up. Some radical students and youth organisations and individuals of Delhi have imagined into being a campaign, as part of the ongoing protest movement, to “reclaim the nights of the city”. The carnivalesque spontaneity of this reclamation campaign posits – of course, in a rather nascent form – the possibility of an insurrectionary sociality of people’s militias that wrest Delhi and its streets from all oppressors – the rapists, as much as the police and administration that is structurally complicit in such oppression – for popular vigilance and control. That possibility must, however, be recognised if the campaign is not to get caught in its carnivalesque spontaneity and degenerate into another festival of the anarcho-desiring petty-bourgeois youth. Only through such recognition can the politically conscious elements of the revolutionary left that is part of the campaign seriously strive towards building wider solidarity networks with the larger sections of the working people of the city, beyond the student-youth axis of the current campaign. Such wide-ranging solidarity networks are, needless to say, indispensable and integral to the process of occupation of a city and the simultaneous subordination of the socio-economic process constitutive of it to popular vigilance and control. Ironically, it is only by organising the carnivalesque spontaneity of the so-called reclamation campaign into a mode of popular control and vigilance of the sociality that are the nights, as also the days, of Delhi can this carnival preserve itself by obviating its day-after to become, in Ernst Bloch’s words, a “concrete utopia” of uninterrupted insurrection.
Instead, what we have so far from the radicals in the anti-rape mass movement, the communist left groups included, is, at best, a version of the juridical-legal approach tinged with the rhetoric of radical feminism. This approach has given their politics, even though they raise precisely the very same set of pertinently concrete questions they ought to have raised in order to radicalize the situation, a disagreeably unradical populist odour. It even risks reversing the good faith of such politics into bad. Such juridical-legal demands, regardless of the nobility of intent of the subject of such politics, can only serve to further securitise and thus governmentalise the political discourse and enable the extension and intensification of repressive state apparatuses and biopolitical instrumentalities such as the police force, and CCTV cameras and global positioning systems in public spaces respectively. And that is because the nobility of its intent does little to change the fact that such politics is wholly geared towards eliciting governmental – executive, legislative and judicial – responses from the system. Those are not merely the only responses the system can possibly come up with but ones it must come up with in order to extend its dominion and thereby reproduce itself.
In a more general sense, the communist left must remember that a revolutionary subjectivity is not one that evades certain immediate questions that history/capital throws at it. Rather, that every such question is a ground for leap against capital and its history, and that such a leap can concretely, as opposed to abstractly, come about only if it is able to understand and plot its interventions with regard to the concreteness of those immediate or determinate questions in terms of two mutually related characteristic features of our responses as subjects situated within and informed by capitalism and its history: one, commonsense is ideological and two, our struggle against any immediate domination must in the same determinate instance also articulate a struggle against the generalised hegemony within whose structure both immediate domination and the struggle against it are situated. A social subject of opposition that is not orientated by such knowledge runs the grave and virtually imminent risk of falling prey to the cunning of capital in precisely the same moment when it puts up its most spirited fight against it.
Radical Notes 
Nepal: Revolution’s Restorative Tangle
Pothik Ghosh
“We can be defeated both by dictatorship itself and by being reduced to opposing only dictatorship. Defeat consists as much in losing the war as in losing the choice of which war to wage.” – The Coming Insurrection, The Invisible Committee
The shelf-life of democracy in Nepal is turning out to be rather short. And instead of adhering to its ideological credo of “uninterrupted revolution” (Mao Zedong), the Unified Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (UCPN-M) has allowed itself to become a party to this brutal interruption of democracy. The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (CA), after it failed to give the fledgling republic a Constitution in spite of innumerable extensions, has undoubtedly precipitated a constitutional crisis. Such a crisis, needless to say, has been caused because the interim constitution did not foresee that a situation like the one that currently stares the republic in its young but battered face could ever arise. To see the current situation merely in those terms would, however, amount to barely scratching the surface. What, on the face of it, is an intractable constitutional deadlock is at its heart a political calamity. The soul of Nepal – its social cohesion – is suffering from a virtually incurable fracture.
The UCPN-M-led government may believe that in deciding to call for fresh elections to institute a new CA it has done the best for democracy. Nevertheless, it would be delusional on its part to imagine that making what in current circumstances is a necessary procedural gesture would be sufficient condition for enabling the continuance of democracy in the country.
No number of elections will yield the missing social consensus for a genuinely cohesive Nepal. Envisaging the electoral process as the exclusive driver of democratisation would just not do. Not unless a vibrant politics of radical social transformation, which compels the electoral process and the polity it constitutes to reflect and embody its spirit, is in place. Such transformative politics is capable of generating an effective consensus for social cohesion because it seeks to forge a new, egalitarian form of social unity by challenging and dismantling the hierarchised aggregation of socio-economic strata and socio-cultural identities.
The stiff opposition mounted by the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist-Leninist (CPN-UML) not only against the demand for a strong federal polity being championed by the Maoists and their political allies among the Madheshis and Janjatis, but even against the declaration of fresh elections by the UCPN-M-led government, demonstrates the utter hopelessness of the situation. It also serves to reveal the retrograde nature of the prevailing social consensus insofar as it has inspired and enabled forces such as the NC and the CPN-UML to resist the most obviously basic procedure in a republican democracy – declaration of elections – without any fear of taint or loss. In such a situation, elections – even if the socially dominant classes and castes that back the NC and CPN-UML allow them to be held – is unlikely to yield the kind of progressive mandate required to legitimise the framing of a strongly federalist Constitution.
Unless the prevailing hegemony of competitive identity politics – the source of social division and the absence of a consensus for cohesive Nepali society – is shattered, the demand for a strong federalist constitution, incontrovertibly progressive and democratic, will remain a pipe-dream. The fulfillment of political democracy is clearly linked to democratic transformation of a hierarchical and stratified society. And the politics that seeks to accomplish this transformation can do so by establishing unity among subalternised working-class elements across various social blocs or identities in the commonality of their struggles to not only emancipate themselves from the specificities of their respective domination but through such struggles come together to extinguish the general condition of subalternisation per se. (That, in essence, is what the revolutionary politics of working-class solidarity amounts to.) Such a political manoeuvre, in attempting to disaggregate identities and breach their homogeneity, would fundamentally alter the prevailing configuration of social and economic power in Nepal. It would also create an effective consensus for a federalised republican polity. The demand for federalism would gain legitimacy beyond the marginalised and oppressed identities, whose demand it particularly is, due to the cross-identitarian character of working-class solidarity that such transformative politics would accomplish.
Unfortunately, UCPN-M chairman Prachanda’s recent statement bespeaks no such awareness. His assertion that his party would fight polls on the plank of identity-based federalism and would win two-thirds majority in the new CA is not only thoroughly misplaced but is a tragic revelation to boot. It demonstrates how the Maoists have come to vest such complete and exclusive faith in the electoral process as if it were the demi-urge of democracy in Nepal. Electoral politics, in the absence of a larger movement for radical social transformation, is threatening to undermine precisely that which it is meant to establish: democracy. In Nepal today, it is an embodiment of the ethic of competition that underlies the acutely hierarchised, deeply class-divided and sharply fractured society.
Even more appalling is the fact that the importance of establishing the inextricable link between political democracy and radical social transformation should be so completely lost on the leadership of a political force with a recent and glorious revolutionary past. The Maoists should have known the realisation of federalism as a constitutionally enshrined principle is contingent not on sheer electoral mobilisation, but on the capacity of a political force to situate such mobilisation within the matrix of vigorous transformative politics that delegitimises identitarian competition by seeking to level the social hierarchy that fosters it. The objective basis of their politics in the most subalternised sections of the working people, thanks to their participation in and leadership of the two-decade-long People’s War, ought to have ensured at least this much. That it did not proves their subjectivity is no longer fully committed to the objective basis of their politics.
In that context, the responsibility for the current crisis of democratic consensus in Nepal should largely be the Maoists’ burden. And that, contrary to the suggestion of the preponderant anti-Maoist wisdom on the Indian subcontinent, is not because the UCPN-M has failed to sufficiently accommodate the so-called concerns of such reactionary political forces as the NC and CPN-UML. Instead, the crisis has arisen precisely because it has been too accommodating. The Maoists have, for all practical purposes, accepted the dominance of the traditional social elite by submitting to the hegemonic determination of the latter’s republicanist ideology of competitive politics and hierarchised social corporatist aggregation.
It would, however, be analytically misplaced to overstate this criticism. What is needed is to put it in its proper historical perspective. After all, it was the concerted initiative of the Maoists to deepen and democratise Nepal’s republican political process – made inevitable by the 2006 anti-monarchy Jan Andolan of the NC-led seven-party alliance (SPA) and the Maoists – that compelled the post-Gyanendra mainstream polity to concede to their demand for drawing up a more democratic social contract in the form of a new Constitution. It was this that led to the Comprehensive Peace Agreement between the Maoists and the SPA, the abolition of monarchy and the institution of the now-dissolved CA through elections in which the Maoists too participated. When the SPA had accepted the reinstatement of the Nepal House of Representatives by King Gyanendra in April 2006, Baburam Bhattarai had categorically stated that merely restoring parliament would not resolve the problems and that Maoist guerrillas would continue to fight government forces as long as their demands for the formation of a CA and abolition of monarchy were not accepted. Such a statement proves the Maoists had then been doggedly committed to the democratisation of the emergent republican polity.
Such commitment stemmed from the objective basis of their politics in the demands and aspirations of the oppressed sections of Nepali society for greater democratisation. It meant that the hierarchised aggregation of differentially inclusive identitarianised strata become less hierarchical. The demand for a new social contract was meant to accomplish exactly that. But can such a social contract gain widespread popular legitimacy as long as society is irreconcilably divided along hierarchically and thus mutually competitive identitarian lines?
Aspirations that pertain to certain oppressed identities, no matter how democratic, will not find acceptance among dominant identities unless those identities themselves are disaggregated through a process of opening up of struggles between the dominated and the dominant within each of those identities. It is only then that the oppressed identities and the proletarianised sections within the dominant identities can come together in their common condition of oppression and their common struggle against the abolition of that condition per se. Only when that is accomplished can the democratic aspirations of the oppressed identities find wider resonance with the concerns of the subalternised sections within the dominant identities and win popular legitimacy.
This is the full implication of aspirations and demands such as federalism that the Maoists have failed to grasp in spite of having concertedly raised those demands due to the objective location of their politics among the wretched of the earth. It is time, however, they understood that their struggle to deepen republicanism was no more than a moment in the process of the larger political movement to radically transform Nepali society. Had that been their approach all along, their struggle to deepen the republican political process would have morphed into the next moment of struggle for social transformation without interruption. They should now know that democratisation of a republican polity without radical transformation of society would – even if it were to succeed – inevitably lead to the electoral instrumentalisation of the questions and concerns of the working class by different sections of the socially dominant classes and the ruling elite in their mutually competitive quest for political power. Such instrumentalisation would strengthen homogeneous identities and thus reinforce the hegemony of a hierarchical society and competitive identity politics.
The UCPN-M, so far, has given no sign that it has started comprehending its demand for a constitutionally-ordained federal polity in those terms. As a consequence, what was meant to be the means by which a wide-ranging political movement for social transformation could be waged and energised continues to be reduced to a shibboleth by the party for bolstering its case in a competitive struggle for political power. Something that rather than challenge has only served to reinforce the unequal social basis of such power. Clearly, the Maoists appear to have conflated and confused their politics of radical social transformation with the tactics of the republican moment of such politics. That has, in an ironic twist, rendered republicanism the strategic goal of a political force that professes to stand for revolutionary working-class politics.
The fatal flaw of the Maoist leadership on that score had become evident in 2005-06 itself when the party had begun diverting its political resources and energy from the People’s War campaign in rural Nepal to an urban mass movement that was erupting in the form of an anti-monarchy Jan Andolan. The problem is not that Maoist politics came out of the bush into the cities to become open. Nor can the decision of the Maoists to participate in the mainstream electoral process be faulted as such. At that moment, those were absolutely the right things to do by way of tactics. The real problem lay in the way they went about doing all that.
Whatever critical assessment the Maoists might have had of the Jan Andolan, the politics of their participation in it revealed nothing more than the acceptance of massification that was the dominant ideological and political tendency of the movement. The 2006 Jan Andolan was a movement constituted through an aggregation of different strata of Nepali society against disparate forms of domination inflicted and imposed on them by their common enemy – the monarchy – that nevertheless left the relationships of domination, power and mutual competition among its constituents intact.
The Maoist participation in that movement should have been based on a continuous questioning and practical critique of the concrete forms in which the movement engendered social relations of hierarchy and concomitant ideologies of competition even while the party fought the common battle against the monarchy without yielding an inch. In other words, the Maoists should have been the principal proponents of a revolution within revolution. Instead, blinded by their tactical paradigm of republicanism, they ended up elevating the problem of Jan Andolan into a virtue.
The hierarchised mass, shaped and guided by ideologies of mutual competition among its various constituent strata and/or identities, was assumed by them to be a repository of social unity in its apparently common struggle against Gyanendra’s monarchy. Naturally, they thought that questioning the hierarchies and segmentations internal to that mass would weaken the movement. This was probably also partly prompted by their desire to quickly seize state-power. They probably lost the nerve to undertake the protracted and arduous political odyssey needed for making such seizure contingent on altering the social relations and structure from which emanates the oppressive state-formation of Nepal. But as Maoists they should have known that “revolution is not a dinner party”, or a piece of cake for that matter.
What was required of them was to sustain the movement on the streets of urban Nepal through unceasing political activity driven by independent working-class initiative. Such a movement, if it went on in tandem with the task of framing the Constitution, would have ensured the CA debates successfully culminated in the framing of a new Constitution. More importantly, the debates and the Constitution yielded by them would have been what they ought to be in a substantively democratic socio-political formation: the legislative and institutional reflection of the popular will, which is the unceasing movement on the street towards a higher form of unity and a new order of social cohesion. The Maoists, in choosing to uncritically submerge themselves in the massified zeitgeist of the 2006 Jan Andolan, frittered that opportunity away. The republican political subjectivity they have acquired as a result is borne out by the ease with which they have continually submitted to the demands of the Indian state.
New Delhi, like a watchful big brother in the neighbourhood seeking to protect the purportedly fragile republican balance of power in Nepal, has time and again compelled the Maoists and their government to control and check the advance of their working-class base in the farms, factories and streets of Nepal. The UCPN-M-led government has, at the Indian government’s behest, repeatedly curbed the activities and democratic assertions of such movement-based oganisations as its Young Communist League and labour unions. It has also dissolved the various organs of people’s power it had developed between 1996 and 2006. For the sake of this so-called republican integrity, the Maoist-led government during Prachanda’s premiership even went to the extent of deciding to return the land it had seized from landowning classes in the People’s War phase.
The big-brotherly protection of Nepal’s fragile republican balance of power by India essentially amounts to New Delhi acting as the political executive of Nepal’s Marwari mercantile/industrial capitalists and Bihari rich peasants (of Terai) – connected to the Indian mainland by kinship ties – to safeguard their ill-gotten privilege and socio-economic power. If this is not imperialism, what is? Clearly, the republican distortions of Maoist politics is as much a consequence as cause of India’s imperialistic meddling in Nepal. Of course, the Maoists themselves are primarily responsible for having adopted a republican political subjectivity that has now not only ceased to be radical but is enabling a socio-political project that is downright restorative. But the sustained level and nature of India’s imperialistic interference in Nepal has created conditions that do not leave radical political forces with too many other options.
It, therefore, follows that unless a radical Left-democratic movement is able to gather enough mass and power in India to shatter the settled nationalist consensus from which this country’s ruling class derives the legitimacy to indulge in imperialistic interference in its subcontinental neighbourhood, the future of radical democracy in Nepal is doomed. And damned. The Indian Left would do well to understand that it needs to do much more for the revolution in Nepal than instructing and advising the Maoists and other radical forces there on how to go about their business.
That is, however, not meant to exculpate the Nepali Maoists and discharge them from the responsibility of effecting a revolutionary transformation of socio-economic and political power in Nepal. It is only to tell them that if they do not mend their ways and continue to walk the path they have been walking since 2006, the best they will be able to deliver is a messed-up passive revolution.