The empire of reckless depoliticisation

When allegiance to Power was demanded,
Those who said 'yes' and those who said 'no',
Were both considered offenders.
—Faiz Ahmad Faiz

To build and hold their empire, Romans built roads. Portuguese spice-traders and Spanish speculators became emperors by exploring shorter and safer sea lanes. The defeat of the Spanish Armada might have helped the rise of Pax Britannia, but to hold itself together, it had to extend its shipping inland, which it did by river navigation and later by girding the globe with railways. Along with swords and sermons, empires of yore needed effective transportation network to entrench itself in distant lands. But the dominance of these emperors of the Old World came to be challenged with the laying of submarine cables. The need of a volunteer colonialist to rough it out in the sweltering heat throughout the year suddenly disappeared.

In Einstein's analogy, wireless communication was something similar to a cat with its long tail: you twisted the tail in New York and its face distorted in pain in the Philippines, except that you could not see the cat. Communication network thus became the new tool of control over the 'colonies'. Emperors of the New World could sit in the climate-controlled offices of Langley and Foggy Bottom and direct the course of events in distant lands. Thus arose a string of puppet dictators through out Asia, Africa, and South America in the decades after the Second World War.

The so-called de-colonisation process worked well in very few countries; for most other states on the periphery, all that happened was that the centre shifted from London and Paris to Washington and New York. Satellite television began to rock the Russian Bear and kept shaking it until it fell from its pedestal in the wake of a showdown with the Jehadis in the wilderness of Afghanistan. Instead of real warriors, Americans sent in the Rambo video to neutralise the ensuing chaos; and in place of shipment of manufactured goods for basic commodities, New Colonies had to make do with loans to pay for the services of 'consultants', and the branded soda. More than anything, it were the 'consultants' that bred corrupt regimes every where in the developing world while branded colas helped create depoliticised zombies mortally afraid of questioning the conventional wisdom.

The high-priests of Bretton Woods orthodoxy have been so successful in instituting the dogma of the free-market that the very process of legitimating of political regimes has fundamentally changed. No contestant in the recent elections of Sri Lanka challenged the WTO world-view. In India that is said to be 'shining' with its 'feel good' factor (spins manufactured by the wordsmiths of the free-market), there is very little to choose between the political economy of the two claimants to the throne in New Delhi—the Bhartiya Janata Party and the Congress (I) led electoral fronts. The result? Whatever be the outcome of the political contest, the legitimacy of the regime shall remain clouded for large sections of the electorate.

Rather than looking inward to sustain the base, the ruling elite of Southasia are recklessly de-legitimising themselves by depending upon the power of the Empire to keep themselves comfortably ensconced. As it is, it's not easy to extricate oneself out of the stranglehold of the empire of propaganda, but the tragedy is that Southasian leaders do not even want to try. The dissonance, between the aspirations of the people who hold the legitimating power and the ruling regimes who have bought the free-market propaganda wholesale, is so large that the region can implode from within without any advance warning. Unless Southasian states correct their course, the present state of Nepal—where the centre is struggling to hold as extremism of the left and the right continue crushing it mercilessly—would be the future of the entire region.

Loyal Regimes
Hamid Karzai and his henchmen in Kabul may not accept it, but the Marines are their biggest liability. US forces can guard Karzai, but they cannot make him either popular or effective. There are only four ways of acquiring legitimate authority—ancestry, elections, guns, or propaganda. Karzai has no claim to any of them. When Americans decide to dump him, as it sure will sooner or later, Afghanistan will still be bereft of institutions capable enough of producing a successor from within. The ensuing anarchy is only likely to transform surviving Talibans into saviours and the region can once again slide back into the abysses of violent marauding tribes.

For the moment, General Pervez Musharraf has succeeded in taming the American eagle to do his bidding, but what will happen when he sheds his uniform? General Zia-ul-Haq was no less effective in making the US treasury pay for his Islamisation process, but it did not save Pakistan from acute humiliation in Afghanistan. There is no guarantee that General Musharraf's Kashmir policy will not meet the same fate despite the non-NATO ally status that his regime is gloating about. A parliament made impotent by the overbearing presence of a non-elected body like the National Security Council is sure to fail and the thought of a nuclear-power with a failing military is only too frightening.

The Empire controls the Indian mind through subtler but more insidious means. Through concerted propaganda, an entire generation of the Indian middle-class has been brainwashed into believing that political freedom is the root of all evils, and free-market fundamentalism its sole panacea. From senior officers of the South Block to senile academics at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, and from glamorous starlets of Bollywood to struggling scribes in Patna, the entire Middle India is breathlessly waiting to board the globalisation bandwagon. But the free-market, which is not really all that free if the raging controversy over outsourcing is anything to go by, has no space for the marginalised and the disadvantaged—the silent majority of the unwieldy country. To assert their rights, the real majority have to either opt for the centripetal forces of left insurgency or join ethnic insurgencies of centrifugal nature that are erupting everywhere from Kashmir to Kanyakumari and from Kuchh to Kohima. They have no other choice—the mainstream has left them to their own devices largely because they are non-market actors.

In a little kingdom in the Himalaya, an oriental despot is too happy to be a vassal as long as his sponsors do not object to his purification through ethnic cleansing attempts. Justice Allybon defined ruler-subject relations in 1688 thus: "It is the business of the government to manage matters relating to the government; it is the business of subjects to mind their own properties and interests". This doctrine still holds in Thimpu where democracy is a dirty word. But its soldiers will not always be ready to lay down their lives to protect and propagate the pelf and privileges of the ruling family. When that happens—the doubting 'if' is not necessary any longer—will it sink as easily as Sikkim?

The Bangladeshi elite are too cultured to nurse the grudge of pre-independence excesses—soldiers of West Pakistan ravaged their land, but the real overlords were the Americans—but the people in the street may not limit themselves to dawn-to-dusk hartals if the current stagnation continues for long. The abruptly interrupted peace process in Sri Lanka cannot resume as long as the Empire continues to play its games of weakening the LTTE insurgency from within and strengthening the Colombo regime from without.

The crisis of legitimacy haunts all the loyal regimes of the Empire in Southasia, but nowhere is it as intense as in Nepal where King Gyanendra holds that, "The days of Monarchy being seen but not heard, watching the people´s difficulties but not addressing them, and being a silent spectator to their tear-stained faces are over". So he is flying around in the country in full military uniform—hugging babies, engaging elders, and granting autographs to awe-struck teenagers wherever his helicopter lands. Meanwhile, the country continues to bear the burnt of a raging Maoist insurgency that has already claimed almost 10,000 lives.

Royal Model
Historically, Nepal has remained loyal to the British Crown ever since Jang Bahadur helped quell the 1857 Sepoy Mutiny (First War of Independence to a section of Indians and Pakistanis). After the partition of British India, Nepal continued to remain a faithful ally of the West and allowed Israelis to open their first embassy in Southasia. Whether it was the short-lived democratic regime of BP Koirala (within 18 months of its election, King Mahendra staged a coup to oust it from power) or the 30-year long Panchayat autocracy, the establishment in Kathmandu never wavered in their commitment to the policies of the West.

Democratic regimes after the restoration of democracy in the country were only too willing to give continuity to the traditional loyalty of the Kathmandu establishment. Even the minority government of the Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxists and Leninist) or UML, which is as 'communist' as North Korea is 'democratic' and insists on keeping the name for its 'brand' value, has never questioned the loyalty of the royal regime to the Western alliance. But the rise of Maobadi insurgency began to challenge the cosy relationship. Perhaps the need of a new royal model of democracy to keep Nepal under tight lease was felt soon after the first local elections that threw up young leaders not content with the status quo of unquestioned commitment of the government to the policy prescriptions of the Empire.

The 1 June, 2001 Narayanhiti Massacre proved the old adage, 'The real power reveals itself in extraordinary situations', as the monarchy began to assert itself. After the Royal takeover of October Four 2003, its yesterday once again, as King Gyanendra is busy re-enacting the drama of the early sixties when his father turned the kingdom into a political laboratory for the Americans and allowed them to replicate General Ayub Khan's Pakistani model of Basic Democracy. But King Mahendra did not have a restive population to reckon with back then, political parties were still nascent, the middle-class was almost non-existent. Geo-politics has changed much in the intervening period to allow the Americans keep an unpopular system propped up with unlimited supply of funds. The present king will, however, try his best to experiment with a hybrid political system of semi-authoritarianism that is high on rhetoric and low in substance. Such a system will be easier for the West to handle, now that Nepal has become first among the 'poorest of the poor' countries of the world to join the World Trade Organisation.

King Gyanendra has three proven models of military-dominated polity for his alchemy:
Six principles from the Western Turkey of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk—republicanism, populism, revolutionarism, nationalism, statism, and secularism—can provide him the basis to centralise all authority.

The "guided democracy" of Suharto's Indonesia can give lessons in the establishment of crony capitalism.

Musharrafship of Pakistan offers useful lessons in institutionalising the dominance of the military in the affairs of the state.

But all these models are tools to produce and exercise state power. None of them can provide the legitimacy that any modern regime needs. Perhaps that is the reason the present king has been insisting for an election to legitimise the October Four Takeover. King Gyanendra wants to play a 'constructive' role within the framework of a constitutional monarchy, and wishes to be a Hindu god that not only listens and talks but acts as well. These are not easy objectives even for the Vishnu-incarnate. He has been desperately experimenting with all kinds of ministries to ensure discreet "pre-poll rigging" in the manner of General Musharraf. But Nepalis have tasted freedom for much longer than their Pakistani counterparts.

Free-market without fundamental freedoms, private enterprise without representative government, and globalisation without universal human rights are no more possible in a country where parties are agitating on the streets while insurgents are fighting with the forces of the state in the countryside. This time, the Empire will not have its way unless it supports the forces of change. People are no longer afraid to be offenders. Maobadis may never succeed in unfurling the hammer-and-sickle atop Mount Everest, but the legitimacy of unrepresentative loyal regimes of the Empire is openly being challenged in Nepal. A bugle blown from up in the Himalayas is sure to resound throughout Southasia.

The rise of the New Empire gave birth to corruption and CCOMPOSA. Its fall has the potential of heralding a new wave of further democratisation of the region. From the crisis of the present chaos, a new Southasia will arise to take its rightful place on the world stage. Sings Ralph Waldo Emerson in 'Circles', "In nature every moment is new; the past is always swallowed and forgotten; the coming only is sacred".