A troubling ambivalence

While that indicates enormous challenges Prachanda may face in taking his cabinet along, there is lack of clarity in Government policies and his public speeches still carry an overdose of radicalism. On September 1, he told hotel industry representatives that old power centres, with the help of international forces, were out to create problems for the Maoist-led government.

Given the Maoist worldview, the US and India would primarily fit in that category.

Maoists say that all these treaties have been heavily loaded against Nepal’s interest in the past, and need drastic review, or abrogation altogether. He made a special reference to the Kosi project — a bilateral treaty signed between Nepal and India in 1954 for 199 years — in the light of the devastation that the river has caused in Nepal’ eastern Terai and India’s Bihar. He said it was a historical blunder to have signed such a treaty and that he would take up the issue with international community.

Kosi and Gandak projects are two especially debatable hydro-projects that Nepal signed with India in the 50s, but this is for the first time that a Prime Minister has sought its review. All this came on the eve of his trip to Beijing. Both the timing and content of his statement were understandably hurtful as well as displeasing to India.

Perhaps sensing that, Prachanda sent a message through his foreign minister , that his regime understands India’s sensitivity on the matter, and that his China visit was not aimed at undermining that reality. But Prachanda has not shed his revolutionary past, and his deep suspicion towards the US and India get undiluted expression in public forums. But his diatribes against India and the US at times are not subscribed to or accepted by most parties, including those in the government. With parallel power centres in the cabinet and such difference in the government’s attitude towards India and US, among the coalition partners, the viability of the administration is already under question.

... contd.