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The week-long Nepal Communist Party Central Committee meeting that kicked off in Kathmandu on January 29 was overdue. The party statute provisions for the CC meeting every six months. But the ongoing meeting is only the second since the formal unification of the two largest communist forces in the country some 20 months ago. On paper, the 441-member Central Committee is the party’s second most powerful decision-making body, after only the General Convention. Yet the committee was virtually defunct as the two NCP chairmen, among them, made nearly all important decisions. What they could not agree on, they got done via the nine-member Secretariat.

The Central Committee plays a vital role in strengthening the party organization and in energizing the grassroots. But the NCP Central Committee could not convene, first, because the two chairmen and the Secretariat did not consider it necessary. Second, the former UML and Maoist members could not settle their differences. Twenty-long-months after the formal unification, the NCP is still a divided house. One notable division is over the American MCC accord, which is sure to create a stir in the Central Committee meeting too. The ex-UML leaders, for instance, are more amenable to the accord’s parliamentary endorsement than are the ex-Maoists.

It will be interesting to see how such ideological debates play out on the CC floor. Another big ideological debate concerns whether the new party has gone too far down the capitalist road and whether the time has come to rein in the excesses of its senior leaders. Maintaining party control over the functioning of the federal government, which is widely seen as underperforming, will be another area of focus.

Perhaps the leaders and cadres of the newly minted NCP can take comfort as the main opposition, Nepali Congress, is arguably even more divided and chaotic, and the NCP has no serious electoral challenger on the horizon. But that isn’t saying much. The CC meeting would have achieved a lot if it can send out a clearer message of unity, an assurance that the bitter divisions between the UML and Maoist parties of the yore have been narrowed if not bridged altogether. (Announcement of the ‘Unity General Convention’ for April 7-12, 2020 could be step in that direction.) In that case, many other issues will sort themselves out for the political behemoth with 800,000 active members.

 This is a cold-cold Nepali winter, with chilly days forecast well into the next few weeks. Sporadic deaths have been reported from the Tarai as those without concrete homes struggle to keep warm. In fact, this is a tragic yearly occurrence. This winter, eight people have lost their lives, en masse, for a different reason. To fight the cold, they had locked themselves into a room with a gas-heater on. The eight Indian nationals, including four minors, who were staying at a resort in Daman, Makawanpur, reportedly asphyxiated to their deaths.

Common sense would dictate that you never go to sleep with a heater on and all the doors and windows shut. In fact, the Indian tourists had no intent of doing so. But when the little children could not sleep because of the biting cold, they were forced to ask the hotel for a gas heater. Although they had booked four rooms, 15 people of the touring party had all huddled into two to keep themselves warm. But why weren’t there enough heating arrangements in a hotel at one of the coldest holiday destinations in Nepal?

This isn’t the first time foreign tourists have died from asphyxiation in Nepali hotel rooms. In December 2013, two Chinese tourists passed away in a hotel room in another popular tourist destination of Nagarkot on the outskirts of Kathmandu. A suspected cause was leakage of gas from a bathroom heater. Meanwhile, the Department of Tourism has set up a probe committee to find out whether there was any negligence on the part of the Daman resort owners where the eight Indians died.

In fact, this should be a wake-up call. A minimum requirement of warm blankets and (working) air-conditioners or some other heating alternatives should be mandatory for all hotels. Apparently, the electric blankets in the resort in Daman had failed to warm, whereupon the tourist party had to ask for a ‘big heater’. There can hardly be a frequent traveler inside Nepal who has not had to put up in cold and dank hotel rooms with filthy bedsheets and blankets. As more and more tourists are coming to Nepal, there is a risk of the hotels and resorts cutting corners to adjust more guests, often by compromising on safety and sanitation. Let this Visit Nepal Year also be the year that our hotels and guesthouses were made safe for all travelers, in all seasons.

The prolonged impasse over the election of a new speaker of the federal lower house, and deputy speaker Shiva Maya Tumbahamphe’s refusal to step down, give one overarching message: the ruling Nepal Communist Party (NCP) is still very much a divided house, nearly 20 months after the formal unity of the country’s two largest communist forces. Popular media has backed Tumbahamphe’s resolute stand against the ‘party patriarchy’ that wants her to go. But she might have resigned by now without the covert backing of both President Bidya Bhandari and PM KP Oli.

Party co-chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has been vehement about the need to remove Tumbahamphe and start a new process for the election of new speaker and deputy speaker. His co-chair, Oli, wants to ensure the speaker’s post does not go to the former Maoist faction. The expelled ex-speaker Krishna Bahadur Mahara was from the faction, and Dahal insists Agni Sapkota, another old Maoist stalwart, should replace Mahara. As the speaker and deputy speaker cannot come from the same party, by asking Tumbahamphe to hang on, Oli is putting pressure on Dahal and ex-Maoists to give up speakership in favor of Subhas Nembang, Oli’s own pick as the speaker.

There is also a geopolitical twist to the speakership saga. By preventing another Maoist from becoming the speaker, PM Oli wants to guarantee a smooth passage of the American MCC compact in the parliament. Former speaker Mahara had famously declined the tabling and voting on the MCC bill. The ex-Maoists suspect the MCC is a part of the American ‘military’ Indo-Pacific Strategy brought with the sole intent of countering China’s rise in Nepal. But as much as he is beholden to China, PM Oli, as government head, also wants to safeguard old relations with the US.  

This disturbed dynamics of a single party have left Nepal without a speaker for three months. The House has been repeatedly obstructed. In the past 30 years of democratic exercise, the country has had to pay dearly for past feuds among ruling parties, contributing to the collapse of successive governments and creating perpetual instability. The political parties seem to have learnt little. The ruling party should be mindful. The short-sightedness of its leaders could open up new fissures in the NCP and push the country into another vortex of instability and corrosive big-power rivalry.  

The federal government has been loath to devolve power and resources to the provinces and local bodies, in a clear violation of the spirit of federalism. Of course, the picture is nuanced. Members of the provincial assemblies, for instance, are constantly looking for guidance from the center, as they struggle to settle even petty provincial agendas. But, again, this is to be expected as they don’t feel empowered enough to make crucial decisions like deciding on the name and capital city of their province.

A curious spectacle is now unfolding over the naming of Province 3 and the selection of its capital. The nine-member Nepal Communist Party Secretariat has issued a diktat to its Province 3 assembly members that the province should be named ‘Bagmati’ and its temporary capital of Hetauda should be made permanent. The constitution clearly states that the twin duties fall on the provincial assembly. Yet when members of the NCP parliamentary party in Province 3 could not come to a consensus, they brought the issue before the party secretariat. The assembly members who were all along for Hetauda as the permanent capital supported the secretariat directive, while those pitching for alternative places decried the ‘interference’.

As the NCP has 80 seats in the 110-member Province 3 Assembly, the parliamentary party had enough votes to push through its recommendations. And yet they were bitterly divided. In this situation of a deadlock, it may seem natural for them to look up to their political masters for guidance. Yet the NCP secretariat offered not so much its guidance as settle the matter altogether. Federalism works only when the provinces and local bodies feel adequately empowered to take important decisions and settle differences on their own.

If top party leaders were serious about federalism, they would have better trained representatives of the provincial and local governments to expect and handle such problems on their own. There would have been greater debate on the suitability of certain provincial names and capitals. The kind of administrative federalism that the central-level leaders seem keen on, with decision-making still centralized in Kathmandu, is token federalism. Some friction was to be expected in the implementation of federalism. Our political leaders’ fecklessness has greatly increased that friction.