It’s June 7, 2024, and you’re reading Off the Record.
I’m Pranaya Rana and in this newsletter, we’ll stop, take a deep breath, and dive into one singular issue that defined the past week.
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Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening from Kathmandu. The results of the Indian elections have arrived and they are what everyone is talking about. That’s what this week’s deep dive is about. Let’s get straight into the news.
Nepal faces off against the Netherlands
Let’s begin with something fun for a change. On Tuesday, Nepal faced off against the Netherlands for the ICC T20 Cricket World Cup. It was Nepal’s second appearance in the T20 World Cup after 10 years and the players were raring to go. The match took place in Dallas, Texas, which is home to about 15,000 Nepalis but it looked like Nepalis from all over the USA came to support the team. The stadium was filled with thousands of Nepalis hooting and cheering, overwhelming the three Netherlands supporters. But alas.
The Netherlands won the toss and decided to bowl first. Nepal had a chance to set a nice, big target but our best batsmen were not up to the task. The first-order batsmen of Aasif Sheikh and Kushal Bhurtel both fell early. Sheikh managed a measly four runs while Bhurtel too managed just seven runs. Only captain Rohit Paudel managed to beat off the Dutch bowlers for a time scoring 35 runs off 37 balls. But without a partner, Paudel too fell. The Netherlands made short work of the Nepalis, all out at 19.2 overs with 106 runs.
When it was our turn to field, things looked just as bad. Our fielders missed three crucial catches that could’ve turned the tide. The Dutch batsmen appeared eminently comfortable hitting fours and sixes off of Nepal’s bowlers and reached the target of 107 runs easily. The lack of experience and general discomfort with the pitch and the weather was evident among the Nepali team. Nepal has faced the Netherlands a dozen times before and has even come out on top on numerous occasions. This wasn’t a time to feel pressured but it looks like that’s what happened.
Still, kudos to this very young team that represents Nepal’s broad diversity in all its glory. They have worked extremely hard to get to the World Cup and they deserve all the support and goodwill that Nepal can give them. Let’s hope their luck turns in their next match against Sri Lanka on June 12.
Sidha Kura audio faked
A few weeks ago, I devoted much space to the Sidha Kura scandal, a ‘leaked’ audiotape that claimed to implicate sitting Supreme Court Justice Ananda Mohan Bhattarai, lawyers Kishor Bista and Hari Upreti, journalist Surendra Kafle, Annapurna Media Network chairman Rameshwor Thapa, and Kantipur Media Group chairman Kailash Sirohiya in corruption over cases sub judice at the Supreme Court. The audiotape was published by Sidha Kura, an online news portal with close ties to Home Minister Rabi Lamichhane, under the ridiculous title, ‘The Dark File Part 1’. All of those implicated in the audiotape immediately disavowed it and petitioned the courts to halt its dissemination on grounds that the audio was faked. The Supreme Court duly ordered Sidha Kura to take down all the material.
On Tuesday, the Nepal Police, after a two-week-long investigation, concluded that the audiotape had been faked. The police collected audio samples from all of those implicated in the tape and compared them against the tape. None of them matched, except for the audio belonging to Raj Kumar Timilsena, the man who recorded the audio. Timilsena had claimed that he secretly recorded the audio three years ago on April 12, 2021 at 5pm but audio metadata showed that the recording had been made on the morning of April 17, 2024, the same day that Timilsena emailed the audio to Sidha Kura.
Timilsena could now be charged with multiple crimes related to spreading malicious information and hate, presenting fraudulent evidence to the police, and defamation of character. Sidha Kura will likely not be penalized but they should have utilized better judgment and done their basic journalistic homework before publishing something so suspicious.
This conclusion provides yet another reason to believe that the recent persecution of Kailash Sirohiya was just one more instance in a coordinated campaign against media that is critical of Home Minister Lamichhane.
Nims accused of harassment and assault
Last week, just as the newsletter went out, the New York Times published a damning expose of Nirmal ‘Nimsdai’ Purja, the bombastic egotistical mountain climber. Purja is accused of sexually harassing and assaulting at least two women climbers. American physician Dr. April Leonardo accused Purja of grabbing her and kissing her against her will while on an expedition to K2 in June 2022. Mountaineer and former Miss Finland Lotta Hintsa also accused Purja of sexually assaulting her at a hotel in Kathmandu in March 2023.
Unfortunately, there hasn’t been much noise over this story in Nepal or the Nepali mountaineering community, even though Purja’s behavior with women was widely known. One senior mountaineer had told me that Purja’s behavior with women would eventually bring about his downfall. Despite being married and having a child, Purja is infamous for pursuing women in Kathmandu’s bars and nightclubs and in the mountains. While simply pursuing women is not a crime, harassment, abuse, and exploitation certainly are. This is not to say that Purja will be charged with anything but it is a big blow to his image and could cost him future clients and sponsorship deals.
Purja has denied all the allegations and claims that they are a result of ‘jealousy’ and a campaign to bring him down. His supporters say the same, but others have been critical, saying that the allegations are just ‘the tip of the iceberg’. In Nepal, most newspapers have studiously ignored the story, despite Purja being a very public figure. One lawmaker, however, asked Parliament to ban Purja from the country, stating that he had defamed Nepal. The allegations are credible but will Purja be held accountable for his behavior? I’m not optimistic.
Mayor wants to widen pavements in New Road but locals won’t let him
Another day and another beef between the young mayor of Kathmandu and the powers that be. This past week, Mayor Balen Shah wanted to widen pavements in New Road so that they meet the width specified by the Nepal Road Standards. His attempts, however, were met with hostility and opposition. Locals and politicians opposed the widening of the pavement because the motorable road would shrink and business would be affected. This is, of course, the opposite of what usually happens when major business hubs are made more pedestrian-friendly. Research from around the world has shown that when areas are pedestrianized, business booms. This is because no one shops from inside a vehicle. To purchase something, you need to get out and walk and the more you walk, the more you see and the higher the chances that you will find something else you might want to buy.
There is also a political element here where local politicians belonging to the mainstream political parties have not taken kindly to the mayor’s diktats. Some locals had their semi-legal livelihoods destroyed when Shah removed all parking from New Road. These locals made a nifty sum charging the thousands of bikes and cars that came into New Road looking for a place to park. Irked with Shah, they’ve now mobilized locals and fed them the line that their businesses will be destroyed if the pavement is widened and the primary road is shrunk.
Into this whole mess, enter another actor — the Department of Roads. About two weeks ago, Mayor Shah had pissed off the Department of Roads by dumping a pile of dirt in front of their offices in a symbolic protest of the slow pace of work on the Ring Road expansion. Now, the department saw their chance to get back at Shah. While the pavements come under the jurisdiction of the Kathmandu Metropolitan City, the road is under the jurisdiction of the department. So on Monday, when Mayor Shah dug up the road to widen the pavement, the department immediately dispatched a team to pave over the portions that had been dug up. It was like watching a farcical cartoon play out in real life. Everyone involved in this debacle is unable to let go of their egos.
I am usually not on the same page as Shah but in this instance, I support his decision to widen pavements. I am all for a more pedestrian-friendly city and believe that the core areas in Kathmandu, Patan, and Bhaktapur must be pedestrianized and vehicles kicked out. That said, Mayor Shah has a problem with communication and consensus. Whenever he wants to do something, Mr Mayor acts like an authoritarian. He seems to believe that he knows best and that we should all be humbled and simply just accept what he’s decided. There’s very little effort spent in trying to talk to the people, convince them, and bring them on board. It’s either Balen’s way or the highway. This is always the issue with Mayor Shah, a kind of narcissism that doesn’t allow him to engage with anyone else except himself and his cronies. But this is democracy, and democracy is messy and difficult.
And on that note, let’s move on to talking about the election results from the largest democracy on the planet:
The deep dive: India as seen from Nepal
Illustration: Satish Acharya
The results are in for the Indian elections and there is a sense of schadenfreude from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s opponents and from across the border here in Nepal. Modi and the BJP had promised a thumping supermajority — 400 seats out of 543 — under the slogan ‘ab ki baar 400 paar’, but in a stunning turn of events, the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies only managed 293 seats, still a majority but not the kind of numbers that will allow Modi to run roughshod over everyone else. While Modi will likely remain prime minister, he will now do so as the leader of a coalition government in the face of an emboldened opposition in the form of the Indian National Congress and its allies in the INDIA alliance.
I won’t try to analyze the hows and whys of the election results. People far more knowledgeable than me have already done so and you can read them here:
Devesh Kapur in Foreign Policy
Dinesh Kafle in The Kathmandu Post
Rohit Kumar in The Wire
Interview with Yogendra Yadav on India Today
Let me instead provide the view from Nepal.
Modi is a right-wing majoritarian leader, that much is not up for debate. His rise in Indian politics was always seen cynically here in Nepal, especially from the more liberal bent. But Modi is also a very charismatic man and on his first visit to Nepal, he charmed everyone into thinking that he might not be as bad as everyone made him out to be.
It was 2014 and Modi had just been elected prime minister for the first time. As part of his ‘neighborhood first’ policy, Modi made it a point to visit Nepal early. The visit was symbolic; despite talk of ‘cultural and religious ties since time immemorial’ no sitting Indian prime minister had visited Nepal for 17 years. The previous visit had been in 1997, by then prime minister IK Gujral who coined the farsighted and fair-minded ‘Gujral doctrine’ which states that India, as the regional power, should not expect reciprocity from its smaller neighbors and should accept what it can in good faith.
In Nepal, Modi went on the charm offensive. He exited his motorcade to shake hands with ordinary Nepalis, leading them to wonder why their own political leaders never did the same. He addressed the Constituent Assembly/Legislature-Parliament, which was in the midst of writing the country’s new constitution, speaking in Nepali and emphasizing that ‘Buddha was born in Nepal’, a particularly touchy subject for Nepali nationalists. When he left, Nepalis were swooning.
That infatuation didn’t last. Just over a year later, India, dissatisfied with the new constitution, imposed an unofficial blockade on Nepal, leading to a mass shortage of fuel and foodstuffs and bringing the entire country to a grinding halt. India’s humanitarian aid during the massive earthquakes just a few months earlier was quickly forgotten. Instead, Nepalis began to see Modi and the Indian establishment as just as cruel and vindictive as they’d always suspected them to be.
Although Modi visited Nepal four more times — again in 2014, twice in 2018, and in 2022 — he was never able to garner the same kind of public support that he did during the first time. Nepali politicians rolled out the red carpet for him each time but the public had turned. Things only got worse with Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli, who capitalized on the anti-India sentiment of the blockade to cultivate China openly. Oli signed petroleum import and trade agreements with China and even visited frequently. In 2020, Oli went further and royally pissed off the Indians by releasing a new map of Nepal that incorporated areas that India claims as its own.
From here on, the Indian establishment began to freeze out the Nepalis. Nepali Ambassador to India Shankar Sharma spent nearly a year in Delhi without meeting Modi. And although Nepali prime ministers continued to make their pilgrimage to Delhi after getting elected to pay obeisance, it appeared that Modi himself was no longer as interested in the neighborhood and had broader, more worldly ambitions. But Modi’s disinterest meant that other Indian actors were more than willing to fill in that space.
Modi had always been a Hindu majoritarian but after being elected prime minister a second time, divisive politics began to become a marker of his government. Muslims and minorities began to face increasingly hostile policies as saffron-flag-waving Hindutva became the ethos of the Modi government. Yogi Adityanath’s elevation as chief minister in the bordering state of Uttar Pradesh was yet another cause for concern as the self-styled godman had a long and troubled history of anti-Muslim hate speech. Under Modi, India began to attempt to erase large parts of its Muslim history while championing ancient Hindu texts as visionary documents that predicted everything from airplanes and rockets to cosmetic surgery and genetic science. Modi himself, most recently, even expressed the belief he was sent by god and that his energy was not ‘biological’.
All of this emboldened conservative elements here in Nepal. There was a rise in parties and individuals advocating for a return to the Hindu monarchy. These elements found tacit support from the BJP and its functionaries, who began to invite Nepali politicians over to India. Along Nepal’s border with India, communal clashes began to erupt. These clashes had happened before too but they now began to take on a different color with Muslims being told to ‘go back to Pakistan’, something that has been in vogue among radical Hindus in India. Last year, the US State Department’s International Religious Freedom Report said:
Civil society leaders said influence from India’s ruling party, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), and other Hindu groups in India continued to pressure politicians in Nepal, particularly the RPP, to support reversion to a Hindu state. Civil society leaders said what they characterized as right-wing religious groups associated with the BJP in India continued to provide money to influential politicians of all parties to advocate Hindu statehood.
There was thus no doubt that the BJP and its mother organization, the proto-fascist Rastriya Swayamsevak Sangh, were very much interested in seeing Nepal go back to being a Hindu state and it was willing to open its vast coffers to Nepali actors willing to undertake that task. The Hindu state rhetoric became so effective at marshaling people that in February, disgraced businessman Durga Prasai brought thousands into Kathmandu for a rally ostensibly to bring back the Hindu monarchy. In reality, he was more interested in upsetting the power balance and getting out of bank loans. His rally succeeded but his ambitions failed.
This long history brings us now to present day, where the BJP has been beaten back but is not quite in retreat. Modi will be prime minister again but has lost support in crucial areas, particularly Uttar Pradesh, once a BJP stronghold and the state with the largest number of MPs. Out of the state’s 80 seats in the Indian Lok Sabha, Akhilesh Yadav’s Samajwadi Party won 37 seats while the BJP pulled in 33 seats. In the 2019 general election, the BJP had won a whopping 62 seats.
Earlier this year, Modi had made a grand show of unveiling the newly built Ram Mandir in Uttar Pradesh’s Ayodhya. The temple, built on the ruins of a mosque destroyed by Hindu fanatics, was supposed to signal a triumph for Modi’s brand of Hindutva. But voters in the area rejected the BJP and Modi, voting instead for the Samajbadi Party, which championed a ‘PDA’ approach targeting ‘pichhda, Dalit and alpsankhyak’ (marginalized, Dalit, and minorities) population. The approach paid off, with 86% of elected MPs from Uttar Pradesh belonging to OBC (Other Backward Caste), Dalit, and Muslim communities. It also didn’t help that in constructing the Ram Mandir, the Modi government had bulldozed thousands of homes and businesses of locals, leading to great resentment even from Hindus.
These results will shake the foundation of Yogi Adityanath’s BJP administration in Uttar Pradesh. Adityanath, who has ruled the state with a combination of Hindutva and strongarm law and order, will possibly be a scapegoat for the BJP’s losses, even though the central party leadership rejected the candidates he had chosen. He might even be removed as chief minister, as Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had predicted earlier. Amit Shah, Modi’s deputy in the BJP, has not been pleased with Adityanath’s rising popularity. Shah is attempting to scuttle the yogi before he rises any further within the BJP ranks.
Uttar Pradesh is not the only state that matters to Nepal, though. Bihar is the other consequential state that Nepal shares its border with and here, the BJP has managed to maintain its hold. Out of 40 seats in Bihar, Nitish Kumar’s Janata Dal (United) won 12 seats and the BJP won another 12. Both are allies in the NDA alliance. Along with N. Chandrababu Naidu of the Telugu Desam Party, Nitish Kumar, who has close relations with many Nepali politicians, now holds significant sway over the direction of the next Modi government, given that their support is crucial to the BJP obtaining a majority in the Lok Sobha. Nitish Kumar’s newfound clout could be to Nepal’s benefit, if Nepali politicians know how to play their cards right.
More broadly, what the Indian election results show is that democracy is definitely not majority rule; democracy must also work to protect minorities from the majority. Authoritarian, majoritarian rule cannot continue indefinitely, no matter the development gains they might bring. Alienating entire sections of the populace will never be a winning formula and politics based on hate and division has no place in a multicultural, multilingual, multireligious country like India — or Nepal.
Perhaps the biggest lesson for Nepal is that strongman politics have a limited shelflife. Whether it is Mayor Balen Shah in Kathmandu, Mayor Harka Sampang in Dharan or Home Minister Rabi Lamichhane in Singha Durbar, a cult of personality only goes so far. These new politicians take pride in bulldozing their way through established processes and democratic practices to ‘get things done’. Their supporters cheer their authoritarian tendencies and their contempt of other politicians, the state, and democratic norms. But they too will learn, as Modi has, that democracy might be messy but it is the only way to bring together countries as diverse as India and Nepal. Those who have been so far unwilling to engage in the kind of deliberation, debate, and diversity that makes up the bedrock of democracy will eventually learn the hard way to play consensus politics.
That’s all for this week. I will be back next Friday, in your emails, for the next edition of Off the Record.
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The Deep Dive is good.