Tariq Ali writes: "But the people have lost their fear and it is this that makes them invincible. If a single platoon refuses to obey orders, the Bastille will fall and the palace will be stormed. Another crowned head will fall very soon. A caretaker government will organise free elections to a constituent assembly, and this will determine the future shape of the country."
Yes, that would have been possible, but things didn't quite get there.
One thing that Ali doesn't mention in this article is that, all throughout the general strike, the leaders of the seven political parties were meeting with envoys from Washington, New Delhi, etc. who pressured them to accept the King's offer of concession. The party leaders rejected the first offer but they accepted the second one.
<blockquote>When Nepal's main political parties named four-time prime minister Girija Prasad Koirala on Tuesday to head a new government in the troubled nation, the wheel had come full circle for the veteran politician.
In 1991, Koirala became Nepal's first elected prime minister in 30 years when his social democratic Nepali Congress won elections after then King Birendra gave in to a popular demand for multi-party democracy.
A similar mass campaign this month against King Gyanendra, Birendra's brother who grabbed power last year – culminated in the monarch agreeing to step down and reinstating a dissolved parliament, leading to Koirala's return.
In the intervening decade-and-a-half, Koirala, 84, has watched Nepal plunge from the heady days of a new democracy to the brink of chaos. He has himself been prime minister four times, reflecting the political instability that plagued the nation since 1991.
With the impoverished Himalayan kingdom staring at severe political, economic and humanitarian crises left in the wake of 15 years of turmoil, Koirala's fifth time as prime minister is expected to be his most challenging. "It was a nascent democracy. We all made mistakes, myself also," Koirala said less than two weeks ago.
"But democracy is a system to address the mistakes also. People have realised it. In future, we will not make those mistakes," he said, referring to the misrule and corruption that plagued Nepali politics under multi-party democracy.
Analysts describe the chain-smoking, former trade union leader as stubborn, inflexible and sometimes, inarticulate. However, the politician who never went to college is also credited with introducing sweeping economic reforms and privatisation in the face of communist objections. <http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006%5C04%5C26%5Cstory_26-4-2006_pg4_23></blockquote>
It looks like deja vu.
The difference is that more people participated in the urban uprising this time, that guerrillas control more rural territory than before, and that neither urban protesters nor Maoist guerrillas are satisfied with the parliamentary party leaders' move, so there will be much pressures on them from below. Therefore, the hope that monarchy will end and a democratic republic will get established is not lost yet, but things can go wrong, in various ways.
Two different takes on the present: Somini Sengupta, "Nepal's Opposition Finds the Front Is No Longer United," <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/26/world/asia/26nepal.html>; Bharat Bhushan, "Nepal Parties minus Maoists," <http://www.telegraphindia.com/1060426/asp/frontpage/story_6146795.asp>.
The local power elite, as well as great powers, probably are thinking that they can't quite defeat the Maoists by force alone, especially when urban masses can be so militant in the streets. They may be hoping for a Salvadoran solution: the guerrilla force disarming and becoming just another parliamentary party.*
* A recent article on El Salvador shows that it is among the most repressive countries in the world when it comes to women's right to abortion, and the FMLN compromised itself, unable to take a clear and united stand against the criminalization of abortion in the end.
<blockquote>Positions on the strengthened ban [on abortions] essentially split along party lines, at least at first. "The majority of our leadership came out in opposition," Lorena Peña, an FMLN representative in the Assembly, told me. But the FMLN held only a minority of the seats in the 84-member Assembly, and they were unable to stop the bill. The proposal to ban all abortions passed the Assembly in 1997 and became the law of the country in April 1998.
"But that was not enough," [Regina] de Cardenal later wrote in an article recounting the victory. In 1997, her foundation also proposed a constitutional amendment that would recognize the government's duty to protect life from the time of conception.
A proposed constitutional amendment in El Salvador has to pass two important votes. It must be accepted by a majority in one session of the Assembly and then, after a new election, ratified by a two-thirds vote in the next Assembly. During the first vote, in 1997, FMLN legislators stood against the amendment, but they were outvoted, and the amendment passed the first round.
In January 1999, as the issue headed toward the second vote in the Assembly, Pope John Paul II visited Latin America. . . .
The leadership of the FMLN, afraid that the party would be trounced in the coming elections if they were on the record as opposing the amendment, freed its deputies from their obligation to follow the party's position and urged them to vote with their consciences. When the final vote was taken, the amendment passed overwhelmingly. (Jack Hitt, "Pro-Life Nation," 9 April 2006, <http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html?ei=5070&en=57a2c78b3ec11074&ex=1146196800&pagewanted=all>)</blockquote>
The result is that "Abortion is a serious felony here [in El Salvador] for everyone involved, including the woman who has the abortion. Some young women are now serving prison sentences, a few as long as 30 years" (Hitt, 9 April 2006).
-- Yoshie <http://montages.blogspot.com/> <http://mrzine.org> <http://monthlyreview.org/>