In an adaptation of musical chairs repeatedly being played in Nepal since 2015, two performers take turns installing the third contestant on the throne after hush-hush parleys and midnight settlements. The winner this time is Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli, the unchallengeable supremo of the CPN-UML and the widely accepted chieftain of the Khas-Arya supremacists.

Sher Bahadur Deuba, the chair of the Nepali Congress, figuratively carried Sharma Oli from his mansion at Balkot to the official quarters of the Prime Minister at Baluwatar. There is nothing dramatic about the political development and no surprising political shift in the power-sharing deal between the second and the largest party in Parliament under the leadership of the former. In Nepal, traditions of parliamentary procedure don’t apply, and conventions routinely fall by the wayside. The observance of ethical practices of democracy is often an exception rather than the rule.

After the installation of the ethnonational chieftain as the chief executive, the jubilation in the dominant community is perhaps justified. The triumphant tone of the headline in one of the major newspapers in Nepali was unmistakable: “Ousted by mandamus, mandate reinstates”! Another editorialised it as an “opportunity for Oli” as if he hadn’t missed and misused one too many over three decades. A few other bigwigs of public life were equally celebratory, though mercifully less euphoric, about the return of Sharma Oli to the centre stage for the fourth time in less than a decade. A significant section of the dominant community is convinced that Sharma Oli is their best hope for the institutionalisation of the supremacist order that the 16-point conspiracy signed by four parties in 2015 had sought to establish for the continuation of Khas-Arya hegemony.

In 2017, President Donald Trump coined a neologism with a midnight Tweet: “The state of our union was … covfefe.” The state of Nepal in the same year was so convoluted that I had to come up with an adjective to describe the prevalent supremacist atmosphere as “Oliological arguments that are neither logical nor illogical; but are doggedly obdurate, stubbornly bigoted, spiritedly jingoistic, determinedly prejudiced, indomitably chauvinistic, and unswervingly xenophobic in tone, tenor and intent.” All such propositions are beyond being true or false as they pander to the pleasurable prejudices of the existing order.

Communal consensus

Nominally a democratic organisation espousing nationalistic socialism, the NC has always been a big tent party that offered shelter to the politicos swearing allegiance to a broad spectrum of ideologies. One could be a monarchist dyed in yellow, a pink socialist or a gilded capitalist, yet find ample space under the charismatic leadership of Bisheshwar Prasad Koirala. The definition of the “Nepali nation”, however, was common to all personal convictions of every politician.

In keeping with the spirit of the anticolonial movements of the 1950s, the nationalistic aim of BP was the production of national unity with the voluntary erasure of diversities within the country. When Bedanand Jha of the Terai Congress talked about the political dimension of Pahadi domination, BP pitted Madhav Regmi against him and succeeded in mobilising the Madheshis to defeat all Madheshi contenders in the electoral fray. Benimadho Singh, a political novice, was picked to defeat the towering politician Bhadrakali Mishra. Nirgun Yadav happily vacated a constituency where Yadavs were in the majority to ensure the victory of Saroj Koirala.

After the royal-military coup of 1960, the monarchists began a concerted campaign to defame the NC by questioning their nationalist credentials. The party was so much under pressure to prove its allegiance to the Pahadi identity that many of its Madheshi, Janajati and Dalit cadres began to flaunt ‘Nepali’ as their surname. When BP was the towering leader of South Asia, he could be seen in public in the white Churidar and black Sherwani ensemble. After adopting Daura-Suruwal upon becoming the Prime Minister, he was never seen in anything else, even when he was denied entry into the royal palace because the colour of his coat differed from the officially sanctioned shade for commoners.

When Krishna Prasad Bhattarai went to New Delhi as the first Prime Minister of the country after the restoration of parliamentary democracy, he confronted a question about the exclusion of the Madheshis from the Nepali Army with an irrelevant retort that the Madheshis weren’t recruited as Gurkhas of foreign armies. Back home, the chutzpah of a descendant of the family priest of the Gorkhali royal family was celebrated as nationalistic.

The long and short of the ideological examination is that the monarchists, the democrats, the Marxists and the Maoists subscribe to the same definition of Nepali nationality: The ethnonational supremacism of what has been constitutionally described as Khas-Arya community through the contested constitution of 2015. Due to the ethnonational solidarity around Nepalipan, perhaps a large section of the NC finds the control of Sharma Oli more comfortable than some of their own secular or somewhat less communal leaders.

Alternative aspirations

The Madheshis came to the streets in 2007 mainly because the Maoists and the mainstream parties had failed to address their aspirations of identity, representation and self-rule through the interim constitution. Divided between the territories under the control of Gorkhali expansionists and the East India Company (EIC) after the ratification of the treaty of Sugauli in 1816, the Madheshis continued to be a bewildered nation. Gorkhalis treated Madhesh as a productive territory to sustain their military. In the cost-benefit analysis of the EIC, the rate of return on the investment of holding on to the conquered territories in the flood-prone flatlands below the Churia ranges wasn’t worth the trouble. Abandoned by losers and winners alike, the Madheshis were left to their own devices for almost two centuries.

Unlike the Pahadis in Madhesh, the Madheshis aren’t settlers in an alien land. The history of the Gorkhali conquest is hardly two centuries old, while the ancestors of the Maithils and the Awadhis have lived in the region for millennia. However, they hardly fall under the indigenous category in the sense of the Malaysian term bumiputera. The Tamils of Sri Lanka had to bear the burden of their association with British colonisers, but the Madheshis were at the forefront of struggles against Ranarchy and the absolutist regime of the Shahs.

Despite sharing a racial lineage, the same people fought and got their separate states on the basis of religion and culture in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The Madheshis have no such collective memory of animosity with people across the international border. They are considered a permanent minority in their own land due to the hegemony of the ruling community.

Apart from power-sharing, constitutional amendments to strengthen Khas-Arya supremacy appear to be the main agenda of the Sharma Oli government. Paradoxically, the Madheshis will probably be called upon to protect the constitution that they once burnt to register their protest because not doing so will create conditions for fresh confrontations and a further increase in state violence. Contemplating the fate of permanent minorities under the regime of a hegemonic majority, political theorist Mahmood Mamdani postulates, “… violence can be especially ferocious when one community comes to believe that it is the state.”

Ruefully moans Cecil Day Lewis:

It is the logic of our times,

No subject for immortal verse –

That we who lived by honest dreams

Defend the bad against the worse.