It has been such a long journey for Pushpa Kamal Dahal since he broke away from the Communist Party of Nepal (Unity Centre) to form the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and waged a People's War in Nepal. The travails of the arduous trip from the remote villages of mid-mountains where the first guns against the government were fired on February 13, 1996, to an unceremonious ouster from what appears to have been his last stint as prime minister on July 12, 2024, seem to have taken a heavy toll on the Maoist supremo. Struggling to retain the leadership of a party that he steered away from armed insurgency to parliamentary politics, Dahal increasingly looks and sounds like a defeated captain of a dispirited team.

In the mid-1990s, sabotaging the parliamentary system within five years of its restoration appeared foolhardy. But for impetuous and ambitious politicos, the pull of romanticism is invariably stronger than the restraint of rationality. Dahal displayed uncanny leadership in bringing Mohan Baidya out of his defeatism, convincing Baburam Bhattarai that his development theses needed the power of guns for their implementation and motivating Ram Bahadur Thapa to organise a fighting force of the deprived from almost nothing.

The leftwing intelligentsia in Kathmandu was quick to manufacture apologia for the armed insurgency. The intellectual vigilantes of the Panchayat regime joined the communist chorus to discredit democracy. Naxalite remnants of the Jhapa Rebellion emerged from the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) ranks to act as overground mouthpieces of the underground insurgency. By the late 1990s, Dahal, under his nom de guerre Prachand, was a mythical hero with charismatic leadership qualities ascribed to his name. It didn’t help that parliamentary parties in the late 1990s had begun to disgrace themselves with unparliamentary activities.

The post-facto legitimation of the armed insurgency almost fell into the lap of Maoists once King Gyanendra staged the “creeping coup” with the dissolution of the parliament and the dismissal of former prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba between May and October 2002. After the autogolpe of February 1, 2005, it suddenly dawned upon parliamentary parties that tackling an autocratic monarch was more important than trembling in the imaginary fears of a Maoist takeover.

Dahal lost no time in clutching the olive branch extended by the Seven Party Alliance (SPA), struggling for the reinstitution of parliament. The role of Indian interlocutors in formulating the 12-point Understanding is undeniable, but it was a win-win for both signatories: SPA conferred political legitimacy upon the Maoists and received the backing of an armed organisation controlling a significant territory in return.

Peace process

Girija Prasad Koirala had decided to call his deal with the outlawed Maoists merely an ‘understanding’ even though some of its provisions were revolutionary. The third point of the pact put the Maoist militia and the soldiers of the then Royal Army on the same footing and envisioned keeping them “under the United Nations or a reliable international supervision during the process of the election of constituent assembly”.

The internationalisation of opposition to an autocratic monarchy inadvertently delegitimised the military. Once forced to choose between a discredited king on the one hand and popular acceptance with international approval on the other, the Royal Army took a while but decided to back the winning side during the April Uprising of 2006. The Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) 2006 was the formalisation of Maoists’ entry into competitive politics, and once they accepted to be admitted into the interim parliament in 2007, their revolutionary dreams were put into the cupboard where they were to shrivel and die in neglect.

By January 15, 2011, when the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) was driven out of Nepal without completing its task, the peace process had become proverbial “Birbal’s Khichdi” put up above the stove to prove the point that Maoists needed to irrevocably discard their agenda and ideology.

The Constituent Assembly elected in 2008 had derived its claim to sovereignty from the success of the April Uprising, the CPA and the interim constitution. It was dissolved through a judicial coup. The legislative assembly formed through the elections conducted by an extra-constitutional arrangement possessed the legitimacy conferred upon it by the Supreme Court. However, only a sovereign, a popular movement, a revolution or a parliamentary decision has the mandate to confer sovereignty upon an elected, appointed or usurping body. The so-called second Constituent Assembly was legitimate but not sovereign. Maoists lost the game by being a willing participant in the political charade. The re-energised PEON graciously granted them the Enforced Disappearances Inquiry and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on April 21, 2014, through an act of parliament to save face.

Transitional Justice

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of the Investigation on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) were formed in 2015. However, the Supreme Court took the wind out of their sails by decreeing that several provisions of the very act under which they had been formed were unconstitutional and in conflict with international standards. In the absence of a legal framework, there was little that the statuary commissions could do to formalise the mechanism of transitional justice. They folded up once the Maoists were further marginalised through the first parliamentary elections in 2017 under the fast-tracked constitution.

There are two ways for renegades to lose their class consciousness. The process of bourgeoisification, defined as the adoption of the characteristics of the bourgeoisie, first turns the leadership into an imitative aristocracy with tastes more expensive than the legitimate sources of income can sustain.

Analogous to bourgeoisification, embourgeoisement turns the rank and file of a once-revolutionary organisation into meek conformists of social, cultural, economic and lifestyle values of the bourgeoisie. Dahal’s decision to merge his party into the CPN-UML on May 17, 2018, was as much an acceptance of ground realities as a desire to align with the Xi Jinping Thought.

The Supreme Court dissolved the nascent Nepal Communist Party on March 8, 2021, and Dahal’s ambitions once again grew wings. By playing egoistic Deuba and calculative Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli against each other, he managed to lead the government for almost two years. The Transitional Justice Bill, recently passed by both houses of parliament, is the mechanism through which the dominant trio of Nepali politics wants to bury the past and move on.

Terming it a flawed step forward, three international human rights organisations have welcomed the legislation with some reservations. The United Nations Human Rights Office has urged for its victim-centred implementation. But other than the NGO industry of Kathmandu and the limousine liberals of Lalitpur, there seems to be little interest among the larger public in the impending law.

The processes of establishing truth, justice, reparation, memorialisation and guarantees of non-recurrence are essential elements of transitional justice. Its purpose, however, is to transform an unjust regime into a just one that ensures liberty, equality, fraternity, secularity and inclusive participation in governance for its citizens. It’s extremely unlikely that the present dispensation will do any such thing to loosen its ethnonational hegemony. With the help of Deuba and Sharma Oli, Dahal may succeed in burying dreams of a just regime, but peace of the cemeteries is inherently unstable.