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The ongoing Central Working Committee (CWC) meeting of the ruling Nepali Congress underpins the fact that the grand old party is a deeply divided house. The party is not even one when it comes to the issue of investigating and prosecuting corruption scandals involving their own leaders. 

The CWC gathering also showed that its president, Sher Bahadur Deuba, for better or worse, remains a force to reckon with in the party, and that the general secretary duo, Gagan Kumar Thapa and Bishwa Parkash Sharma, are not as popular as one believes them to be—not at least among the CWC members.  

Remember the situation of the ruling Nepali Congress before the oft-deferred CWC? Scores of leaders including Thapa and Sharma were critical of Deuba for running the party like a hegemon, without a care for party statute or internal democracy. 

Thapa even contested and lost the Parliamentary Party leader election against Deuba. Other leaders in the NC meanwhile talked about convening the special general convention to replace Deuba.  

At the time it seemed that the Congress president had fallen out of favor, especially after he failed to give continuity to the electoral alliance forged with the CPN (Maoist Center) immediately after the general elections of November last year (the alliance did get continuity eventually after a short-lived ruling partnership between the CPN-UML and Maoists). Deuba took even more battering from his party colleagues following the by-election outcome in Tanahun-1, which was won by Swarnim Wagle of the Rastriya Swatantra Party. Wagle, a former Congress member, had only just quit his old party expressing displeasure with Deuba and his coterie. His electoral victory was resounding and that too in the traditional political base of the NC.    

Many Congress leaders and members demanded answers from Deuba. They wanted a meeting of the CWC, which had not been held for nearly a year even though the party statute requires it to be convened every two months. 

Meanwhile Deuba remained unfazed and continued to maintain silence, even when the fake Bhutanese refugee scandal broke out, which led to the arrest of his close confidant and former home minister, Bal Krishna Khand.    

When Deuba finally agreed to call the CWC meeting, many had expected that he would face harsh criticisms from the leaders for his wilful leadership. There was a litany of complaints against the NC president, ranging from taking unilateral decisions on party as well as national affairs to failing to fix the date of policy convention and not appointing the chiefs of party departments. 

But the CWC meeting saw a different—and unexpected—scenario. It was Thapa and Sharma who got the thrashing for airing the party’s dirty laundry in public. Ironically, the meeting was live streamed for the first time in the party’s history.

The two general secretaries were reprimanded for ruining the party’s image with their call for a leadership change. Several CWC members even excoriated Thapa and Sharma for supporting Khand’s arrest in the refugee scam. The majority of the CWC members are of the view that Khand should be protected and that he must not be suspended from the party. 

What transpired at the CWC meeting is a serious blow to Thapa, who is preparing to fight for party presidency in the next general convention. It is apparent that his party colleagues are not ready to back him.

Despite being popular at the cadre level, Thapa does not have a strong sway among central members of the party.

Senior leader Shekhar Koirala, another party leadership hopeful, remained largely silent throughout what could be dubbed as the trial of Thapa and Sharma. The scion of NC founding leader BP Koirala is said to be maintaining a distance from Thapa to win Deuba’s support in the party leadership race.

As a general secretary, Thapa presented a political document at the meeting, which also faced criticisms from several CWC members. Arzoo Rana Deuba termed the document as a “wish list of non-governmental organizations” that offers no clear direction to the party or the country.

Dozens of CWC members appreciated Deuba’s leadership. Surendra Pandey blamed Thapa and Sharma of spreading negativity against the party president. If Deuba sinks, he warned, both general secretaries and the party will sink.  

Leader Mohan Basnet, also the health minister, criticized Thapa and Sharma for trying to widen the factional rift in the party. 

Ahead of the CWC meeting, the two general secretaries had convened a meeting of district presidents which was boycotted by Deuba and his supporters

Another key agenda of Thapa and Sharma was fighting the next general elections alone, without forming any electoral alliance. Thapa had even suggested leaving the current coalition if the government fails to deliver on its promises.  

But the issue too did not get much support from the CWC members.  

Leader Badri Panday said as the elections are still four years away, there is no need to take any decisions on electoral alliance. 

According to CWC member Bhishma Raj Angdembe, the meeting indicates that the popularity graphs of both general secretaries are going down, while the graph of Deuba is going up. 

After listening to the largely unfavorable views of the CWC members for days, it was time for Thapa and Sharma to speak on Monday. Both of them appeared somewhat defensive. They even softened their positions on several issues. 

Regarding the issue of electoral alliance, Thapa said he was in favor of continuing the current alliance with the Maoist Center until the next general elections. On the issue of leadership change too, Thapa seemed flexible, saying that he wanted to promote internal democracy and the culture of healthy debate inside the party. 

He added that the Nepali citizens were increasingly growing despondent with the current political state of affairs, and that it was upon the Congress party to lead them out of this situation. But first, Thapa told the CWC meeting, the Nepali Congress party should put its house in order.

Sharma reiterated that the NC needs a deep retrospection in order to find its footing to lead the country.

Although International Relations (IR) is taught at Tribhuvan University as a social science discipline, one’s attempt to identify the ingredients of ‘social’ and ‘science’ in the prescribed syllabus of IR may become a futile struggle. Scanning the syllabus, one may notice a perceptible dearth of topics, concepts, approaches, and methods for enquiring, understanding, and interpreting the role of wider social interactions in a country’s foreign policy choices.

The syllabus was introduced in 2013 and revised after receiving ‘expert opinions’ in 2017. Still, misreading and misrepresenting IR only as the study of state power further repudiates the role that social units have in the production, accumulation, and reproduction of power. While IR fundamentally claims to study the relations between the state and non-state actors, the Nepali IR has principally failed to identify and inculcate the larger social aspects of such relations that help measure power as social production.

Firstly, teaching IR in Nepal is robbed of any academic inquiry into the existing social phenomenon that presents politics as a social activity. Secondly, its minuscule reliance on political science for any scientific observation is not sufficient to produce a good political scientist. Thirdly, its overemphasis on national power and national security divulges divergence between everyday social realities and political rhetoric. As such, IR is more of an elite sense, not a social science.

More elite, less social

The syllabus of IR is crammed with global, regional, and national issues. But those issues are scarcely studied and investigated in the context of social realities. Professors in the IR program may make a quick escape by divulging the lack of required human resources to teach the subject. Here, physical walls built by departments inside the university also share the blame. After all, the physical walls confine your epistemic behavior to the constructed sense of belonging to one academic discipline. It utterly prevents the discipline from becoming suitably interdisciplinary. Just lettering your syllabus as interdisciplinary doesn’t fulfill the objective unless an IR wala is made enthusiastic to sit in the classrooms of political science, sociology, anthropology, history, and economics prior to his/her foreign policy analysis of any diplomatic episodes. Sad but true, there are no practices of visiting philosophically associated departments and spending time in each other’s libraries and classrooms. In such a context, how and from where a young program like IR will acquire and develop the components of ‘social’ and ‘science’?

A prevalent irony in Tribhuvan University’s social sciences is the rationale behind classifying the academic subjects as social sciences. Generally, social science is understood as the study of society, social institutions, and social behavior. But those elements are missing in the syllabus and teaching of IR in the university.

University’s social sciences—which are largely expected to study social realities—have today poignantly failed to grasp the nature and characteristics of existing Nepali society. Despite the mediocre history of social sciences in Nepal, just a cliche(mentioned as an example below) may instantly attest that social sciences in the university remain ignorant of everyday social experiences. For instance, academic departments and programs at Tribhuvan University, including the IR program, are never tired of describing Nepal as a “poor and underdeveloped/ developing country”. But the exorbitant semester fees imposed on the students of “the poor and underdeveloped/ developing country” stands contrary to their claim. It’s an apt example revealing the indifference of university authorities to existing social realities shaped by class, wealth, income, and social inequalities. When the university doesn’t pay heed to the students of “the poor and underdeveloped/ developing country” opposing the exorbitant semester fees, it becomes obvious that the university is apathetic to social realities. In such an environment, programs like International Relations may attract more money to the university.

An IR wala never gets bored of reiterating foreign policy as the extension of domestic policies. But the social actors and factors associated with those domestic policies are seldom discussed in the classroom. It may be because of two reasons: Firstly, faculties find it easier to weave the accessible media narratives on the everyday changes taking place in global and regional politics. Secondly, IR students remain submissive to the details drawn from the elitist phenomenon of decision-making in world affairs. Actually, they find the world being presented to them in the classroom adventurous. As such, they rhapsodize world political affairs, where the amount of ‘social’ is swiftly relegated to the study of power and influence.

While the IR program at TU is all set to make a decade-long institutional history, students and young faculties in the IR are incessantly lured by the mere mentions and fleeting references of the globally renowned diplomats. Being ignorant of the significance of intellectual biography and intellectual history, their taste and flavor are either reduced to general likes/dislikes or driven by popular narratives. In the Nepali context, two historical characters are seemingly glorified in the IR classroom—PN Shah and Mahendra Shah—for their reported contributions to Nepal’s national security and diplomatic responsibilities. Interestingly, the social realities in their days never become the units of the syllabus, the matter of classroom discussion, and the topic or argument of dissertation writing/ supervision.

Although the key actors shaping Nepal’s foreign policy and diplomacy in different periods of time are taught and studied, neither the IR faculties nor the students have the access and understanding to identify the backroom boys and decipher their roles in foreign policy decision-making. Take the case of MCC as an example, the classroom discussions of international relations in the university were widely dependent on the news and views from the mainstream media. The IR faculties may be well paid for what they teach but their dependence on media analyses and internet surfing corrode the analytical and observatory capacities, which a university faculty should cultivate unremittingly. Consequently, their routine emphasis on the secondary data positioned around the matters of national power, national security, and national interest fails to comprehend the social realities shaping both the historical and contemporary episodes with regard to what is nation and national.

Mere sense, no science

Social science studies society on various fronts. In today’s academic milieu, while political science, sociology, anthropology, and history themselves have botched to report, investigate, and analyze society and social institutions treading on the existing philosophical, historical, and theoretical standpoints, it may not be fitting to expect a new program like IR—which theoretically and philosophically doesn’t have anything of its own—concentrate its teaching and study on the inevitability of social elements shaping foreign policy decisions?

Already, as a discipline, IR is preoccupied with the interests and relations between the states. Saddest of all, in developing countries, those interests and relations are also not taught as per global academic practices, commenced and continued by the best IR schools around the world.  As a result, faculties and students in countries like ours may make sense of the events and phenomena but can rarely practice it as a social science.

After all, the strands of society are largely elapsed in their approaches and analyses. In all the dissertations produced by the students of the IR department since 2016, the social component is relentlessly missing. A cursory look over the analysis and inferences drawn in their dissertations may indicate the presence of scientific research methods but a thorough probe into the dissertation may reveal the story of duplication and oversimplification. Dissertations produced on Nepal-China relations are an apt example. How justifiable is it to pen a dissertation on Nepal-China relations without knowing basic Mandarin or the basic attributes of Chinese society? Is it convincing and per the popular research ethics to pull the information already available in Google or archives and reproduce it as your own analysis? The most bewildering aspect of teaching IR at the university is the acceptability of the dissertations without any scientific knowledge of the proposed issues. Not even a handful of dissertations are based on field visits, participant observations, ethnography, and interviews. Against such a backdrop, on the basis of what remaining yardsticks can IR be considered a social science in the Nepali context? Methodologically, it has compromised science over sense. In terms of perspectives, it has dismissed social interests and social relations over the promotion of elite interests and power relations, which are often misunderstood as national interest in IR classrooms.

'Khambandi'

Injecting a few components of ‘social’ and ‘science’ into the disciplinary hat of International Relations won’t make its approach social, however. Instead, the understanding of ‘social’ may vary from one IR walla to the other, at least, until power remains at the core of its disciplinary existence. The element of ‘science’ that the syllabus is supposed to carry—not in a prescriptive sense, but more in a reflective sense—has already been compromised to the 'Khambandi' culture. When acquaintances come to know that your department has received funds from the University Grants Commission (UGC) or elsewhere, you will see ‘experts’ in droves being welcomed with 'Khambandi'—paid in an envelope for their ‘expertise’. Despite the reckless duplication in the contents of the syllabus being revised, plagiarism in the units, and above all, more guff-gaaf and less expertise in the process of syllabus-making, they don’t hesitate to receive the 'Khambandi'. On what moral and professional grounds is that justifiable? When experts and practitioners are lured more by 'Khambandi', faculties are dependent on Google and popular narratives, and students are reliant only on the faculties’ slides, one can imagine the future of Nepali IR under the semester system in the oldest university of Nepal.

The number of trekkers visiting the Annapurna Conservation Area has bounced back and reached the pre-covid levels.

A total of 172,108 trekkers visited the area in the fiscal year 2022/23, according to Rabin Kadariya, the information officer of the Annapurna Conservation Area Project (ACAP). This figure comes close to the pre-covod record of 183,357 trekkers in 2018/19. This is the highest footfall the area has seen so far

After the outbreak, however, trekker numbers dropped to 104,165 trekkers in 2019/20 and a meager 4,916 in 2020/21 during the peak of the pandemic. However, there was a positive resurgence, with numbers picking up to 75,824 in 2021/22. In the fiscal year 2022/23, ACAP generated Rs 299.43m (including VAT) from permit fees.

As only the ACAP and Pokhara International Airport records the number of tourists visiting Pokhara, the exact number of foreign tourists visiting Gandaki Province is not precisely known. The provincial tourism ministry had initiated the registration of foreign tourists two years before the covid pandemic, but it has been discontinued now.

With the commencement of construction on Pokhara International Airport, tourism entrepreneurs have made substantial investments in various tourism infrastructures such as hotels, restaurants, and several adventure activities. The hotel industry alone received investments of over Rs 100bn in the past five years, according to Laxman Subedi, president of Pashchimanchal Hotel Song Pokhara, the industry lobby representing hotels operating in Pokhara and its surrounding areas.

Charges leveled against me (vis-a-vis the 100-kg gold smuggling case) are totally false and fabricated. What’s the motive? I see things from two perspectives. First, whenever some big scandal happens, our police and political system face pressure to identify the main culprit immediately. Buckling under pressure, they fabricate a character.

Second, all this is meant to divert public attention and protect the main culprit. There’s another baffling thing in this case. It is cheaper and more profitable to purchase brake shoes produced in India in the same country. No trader can make profit by importing brake shoes from Hong Kong via air. Our customs officials don’t even know a basic thing?

The government has formed a panel to probe the case. It should identify the main culprit through a proper and impartial investigation; it should expose the nexus involved. Linking a businessperson in this case is a character assassination attempt.