Nepali Congress, the main opposition party, started its long-delayed Mahasamiti meeting on Dec 14. The four-day event was supposed to end on Dec 17. Yet after acrimonious exchanges among top leaders and pressure from the grassroots for a change after the party’s humiliating defeat in the 2017 elections, the jamboree of 1,600 delegates from all over Nepal concluded only on Dec 23. While top leaders tried to present a united face at the end of the gathering of the party’s second most powerful decision-making body, Congress is anything but united as rival factions constantly search for a leg-up ahead of the 2020 general convention, the most powerful body.First, some positives. From now the party will elect 13 of its 14 office-bearers, with the party president getting to pick only a treasurer. Until now the all-powerful president could pick more than half the number of office-bearers at his discretion. This alone would go a long way towards establishing internal democracy in the Grand Old Party.
In another positive, among the 14 office-bearers, seven will be elected from seven ethnic clusters as provided in the national charter, while one will be from the marginalized community. This should help the party shed its image of being an ‘exclusive bastion’ of Khas-Arya.
Yet even more meaningful are the vital things left out of the final memorandum. For instance, the debate between whether the party should have only one kind of membership, instead of the current ‘active’ and ‘general’ members, remains undecided. Interestingly, around 43 percent of the 1,600 delegates at the Mahasamiti were in favor of reinstating the country’s Hindu status. The memorandum is silent on this too. The memorandum expressed concern over the government’s ‘indifference’ to implementing federalism, its ‘authoritarian’ ways and its ‘institutionalization’ of corruption. Yet there is nothing to suggest that Congress, itself packed with leaders of dubious probity, can mount a strong challenge against the government on these fronts.
That, in any case, may not be the focus of its top leaders as they jockey for advantage ahead of the 2020 general convention. It was partly to accommodate all the competing interest groups that the number of office-bearers, as well as the size of the central working committee, had to be more than doubled. With many delegates at the Mahasamiti meeting wanting to turn the clock back to the pre-2006 dispensation, the party’s commitment to ‘socialism’ and ‘democracy’ also appears increasingly dubious. The ills that afflicted the party during the 2017 elections are far from healed.
