I'm no longer certain...

That no news is good news. Nothing of real significance has happened over the weekend in Nepal's ongoing, slow-motion constitutional crises. If there were protests today or yesterday, I didn't see them, and it's tempting to think that we've dodged a political bullet here. Unfortunately, this country in desperate need of good government remains politically decapitated, with no Prime Minister, no ruling party, and certainly no one setting a comprehensive plan for ensuring "paani, bijuri, baaTo" (water, electricity and roads) for the 70% or so of population going without. Everyone who has a full stomach is fixated on the inter-party imbroglio; I presume everyone else is mainly preoccupied by coping with crippling fuel shortages and vegetable prices that have risen fivefold in the last month due to intermittent blockades of the trade roads to India.

So, in the absence of new news, I offer photos from last week's goofy yet absurdly well-coordinated street rallies. As I pedalled sweatily to work on Thursday the road, previously painfully thick with traffic, instead became this:



I've gradually learned that this is a bad sign during rush hour in Kathmandu, typically home to some of the worst traffic in South Asia (and by extension, the known universe). So I went wandering, and a block away found a Maoist rally, loud and surly but obviously well-disciplined and not visible hostile to my intrusions with my camera.



Police kept a conspicuously close eye on the whole process, maintaining a light human cordon around the entire moving crowd (which was perhaps five hundred people strong, though I've no real ability to estimate crowd size).



I wandered briefly alongside the crowd and then decided against making my way to work; there's no telling, on a day like that, when the return commute will be possible. En route back to my own neighbourhood, I encountered several dozen motorcycles, each carrying two men (one to drive and the other to wave the Maoist flag and yell). They'd pause every block or two to whip each other into a riotous frenzy and then continue on their way.



I have no idea what this guy said, but he really got the Motorcycle Maoists fired up.



They left rather unimaginative tags on the pavement as they paused - Y.C.L.N. is, you may have surmised, the Young Communists League of Nepak - the Maoists' unnervingly numerous and slavishly loyal youth wing.



Once the motorcyclists passed, they were succeeded by another crowd of protesters, led by two rows of shirtless YCL drones bearing (I'm told, but could not read) high-minded satire written across their chests. They flanked a wheelchair-bound effigy of the reviled (by the Maoists) Ram Baram Yadav, leader of the opposition Nepali Congress party and a focal point in the vicious debate that precipitated all this lunacy. Of the wheeled impostor, however, I have no worthwhile photos. My apologies.



I was invited to join the protest (presumably with my shirt on), but demurred. And that was my Thursday, for I shortly thereafter fled back to the CECI office and my home. That was the last protest I've seen, though I'm told many more have taken place since then. We're still on tenterhooks here, waiting the next ill portent. It's likely to be the apparently imminent announcement of a coalition government between the (ideologically opposed) United Marxist-Leninists and the Nepali Congress, which will probably exclude the Maoists from seriously power and provoke another round of anarchy. I'm not putting any money on it, though - prediction is a fool's game here.

I'm sequestered at the CECI office right now in northern Kathmandu, across town from Worldview (my more permanent employer), where I fled after the lights went out and my laptop battery died. I crossed town accidentally (and miraculously) just before the storm of the century tore loose and turned the roads into opaque rivers. If you've never heard a serious hailstorm on a tin roof before, you'll need to seek it out. This is what the apocalypse will sound like. I'm hiding from the torrent of hail and the literally endless rumblings of nearby thunders, watching my bicycle submerge in the yard outside the window, and trying to figure out how to make the 5-minute ride home without drowning.

Before the storm?

There's been an uneasy but relatively undisturbed calm on Kathmandu's streets the last two days, as the populace waits (with either trepidation or eagerness) to see how the Maoists will respond to the near-certainty that they will be shut out of the next government. One party covenant after another is underway, the Maoists have consistently disrupted Parliament from within and without, and minor protests continue to echo around the city center. But the schools are mostly reopened, the traffic only periodically paralyzed, and the reports of protest-related injuries mercifully few. Nobody really expects it to last, but one thing I've learned over the last six months in Nepal (with a real crash course in the last week) is that anyone who predicts the political future here with any certitude is a blooming fool. No one really knows what's going to happen, and we may not for months. It's almost certain, though, that something will have changed by next week; those meetings have to draw up some actual resolutions at some point, even in Nepal, and the party faithful won't wait forever for their marching orders.

Technical issues crippled my attempted uploads of rally photos yesterday - hopefully my cable modem will have ended its own protest by this afternoon and you'll have visual evidence of the oddities of the Young Communists of Nepal shortly thereafter.

It's a frustrating thing...

Working at home becomes rather less productive when there's no juice in the lines, so I attempted journey this morning across town to my office, despite foreknowledge of certain civil unrest. This voyage is harrowing and uncertain at the best of times, Kathmandu traffic being what it is, and takes a hair over half an hour. It becomes noticeably more so when roving protest gangs, ranging in size from a few dozen to a thousand or more, cheerfully obstruct traffic and quite consciously bring the maximum disruption possible to an already disrupted and inconvenient city. Today it took me an hour to give up my foolish ambition to... well, to actually get a proper day's work done, something that hasn't happened for anyone in Kathmandu since the start of this crisis. In that hour, I covered half the distance to the office, and was ultimately defeated by hordes of red-flag-waving militants and their advance guard mounted on several dozen motorbikes, all members of the Young Communist League of Nepal, the youth wing of the Maoist party. I was startled by their strict organization and near-military discipline, apparently a hallmark of the Maoists. Thankfully, none of the other parties' own youth militias appeared, and extensive conflict was forestalled.

They even (I think) invited me into the rally as I (non-belligerently, I hope) took photos from the sidelines. I think, however, that such participation violates both my contract and my ideological leanings, so I pretended the tourist and stood slack-jawed while they pass instead. I'm hearing now that the tear gas has been brought to bear by the police, and that a handful of Young Communists have been hospitalized. I'm comfortably ensconced in the CECI office down the street from my home, well away from the violent proceedings. I do, however, have a handful of photos from this morning's demonstrations, and I'll post them when I get home.

In the meantime, I'm aggravatedly contemplating the fact that it took me an hour to throw up my hands in defeat during my morning commute, and another hour to return to my own neck of the woods. Two hours to travel nowhere.

Kathmandu is a hard town if ever there was one.

Nothing moves quickly in Nepal...

...except rumours.

There are unsettling moments when, perched on my bike, I realize that the road around me has become suddenly empty, the bustle evaporated and the throngs of glossy, underpowered motorcycles abruptly nonexistent. I usually realize then that everyone else knows something I don't, and that it's time for me to get off the roads, preferably home and certainly out of the way until whatever calamity passes.

All Kathmandu feels much like that this week, and it's likely to get worse. I returned last night from a whitewater rafting adventure (which left me bruised and sore and much entertained) to discover that Nepal has entered a long-incubating political and constitutional crisis from which it's very unlikely to emerge without fresh scars. The government has fallen in all but name, and will most likely officially die tomorrow afternoon. The fallen and their opponents are all mobilizing their professional thugs to contest whatever outcome on the streets. Violence is very much in the air, and I'm more than mildly nervous.

It's worth noting early on that, reportage being the unreliable beast that it is in Nepal, and rumours so often fantastically elaborate and ill-founded, my understanding of the facts on the ground is incomplete in many places and no doubt downright wrong in many others. Here's a little background, streamlined and simplified, as best I understand it:

The Maoists, officially the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) or CPN-M, are the largest of several extreme-left parties that emerged the principal victors of Nepal's 2008 elections. Those elections were one of the steps that ended the decade-long Nepalese civil war, behind which the Maoists (but by no means only them) were a principal driving force. The Maoists formed a government in coalition with several of their ideological near-brethren such as the United Marxist-Leninists (Nepal being one of the adorably few remaining countries where the myriad flavours of Marxism are goofily thought to be practically different). Ideological opponents such as the Nepali Congress Party, which ruled Nepal none too successfully for many years, made up the large bundle of minority representation in Nepal's fragile and fledgling Parliament.

Unfortunately for the Maoists, they've had a rather unpleasant but utterly inevitable lesson, which they might have vitally learned in advance if they hadn't been blinded by discredited ideology: toppling a government and running one require radically different skill sets. Enormous rifts, which I will mostly ignore for now, opened between the ruling coalition partners, and between the government and the opposition. The most germane was regarding the Nepali Army, a well-trained, highly-disciplined and very proud force which was asked to integrate the irregular combatants of the Maoist People's Liberation Army (PLA), the fanatically dedicated but rather more ragtag guerrilla force with which the Maoist's waged their ten-year insurgency. The Nepal Army, as conservative as any you'll find (and armies are a conservative lot) chafed at the thought of inducting the tattered PLA, let alone giving them command posts. Chief among the objectors was the Army Chief of Staff, General Rookmangud Katawal, the country's top military official and one of the few people with the means to topple the government.

The Maoists, led by Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, lead instigator of the war, demanded the sacking of General Katawal, who unsurprisingly refused to step down, leading to a month or so of speculation that Katawal would simply remove the Maoists from power himself, with the loyal Army behind him. The Maoists' coalition partners, fearful of this very event, urged the PM to abandon his plan, instead allowing Katawal to serve out the remaining five months until his planned retirement. No dice. The Prime Minister unilaterally declared that the General was officially out of a job, though the authority over the Army lies with the President (who is not a Maoist and rejected the move).

Here's where things take a turn for the byzantine and the purpose of my long-winded exposition becomes clear. The Maoists have no constitutional authority to take any action without the support of their coalition partners - they simply haven't the votes, which is precisely why coalitions are formed in the first place. But, visibly indignant that anyone would doubt their supremacy, they "fired" Katawal anyways, attempting to rule by decree rather than democracy. Several things happened:

1. The President, of the opposition Nepali Congress party, told Katawal to defy the Maoists.
2. Katawal, a proud man, ignored the Maoist edict.
3. Most provocative, the Maoist's coalition partners, incensed that the CPN-M would attempt to rule by decree and override their position, abandoned the coalition, leaving the Maoists without the votes to form a government.

And so: The Maoists no longer lead a majority coalition. The Nepal Army is openly ignoring their commands. A non-confidence vote is expected tomorrow to formally strip the Maoists of their government status.

In most Western countries in this state, we'd see a flurry of furious politicking and horse-trading as all concerned scramble to form a new government. But this is Nepal, and the Prime Minister has previously said that if the Maoists ever lose power by legal means, they'll simply pick up their guns again and reclaim it the way they prefer. It's a credible threat; ever since the war ended, many of the Maoist's grunts have been visibly itching to get back to guerrilla combat. They've discovered, as I've previously mentioned, that tearing around the country blowing up government offices, robbing villagers and taking potshots at soldiers is a great deal more fun and sexy than the drudgery of actually writing and implementing policy. Many are simply looking for an excuse, and they've got one now.

Scattered protests broke out around Kathmandu yesterday while I was riding white water in the North, and the soot from burnt tires was thick on the streets in front of the colleges that I passed on the way to work this morning. By 11AM, it became clear that worse was likely to come this afternoon, and with the rapid consent of my employers I decided to go home rather than try to cross the city during protests. As I rode through unnervingly thin traffic, Nepalis on the sidewalk moved with uncharacteristic speed and purpose, and many clustered in anxious knots around radios or people professing new knowledge of the unfolding situation.

I passed groups of surly but so far nonviolent moving rallies, a few hundred strong each, waving red Maoist flags. By the time they converged on the centre of town, they were numbered at least three or four thousand, growing angrier and visibly seeking provocation. I passed them and went quickly home.

The Maoist Prime Minister is scheduled to address the nation right now - I'll know what he says when the first English translations appear online. I'd love to believe he'll urge calm or even resign, chastened, but he's never seemed the sort. He considers himself proudly forged in war; his self-granted nom de guerre, Prachanda, means "The Fierce One". I don't believe he's ever marshaled his considerable charisma in service of peace rather than conflict, and I have no good reason to think that, with the power he so long craved now slipping from his grasp, he'll embrace reason and calm.

There are innumerable rumours flooding around Nepal, so quick and scary and of such uncertain origins that I won't begin to list them here. I am, all things considered genuinely nervous about what's to come; street violence is almost certain and days of unrest seem unavoidable. I am, however, also safe. I have days' worth of food and fuel at home, and I won't be going to work if it's dangerous to cross the city. I'm reasonably well plugged in to the legitimate news of the country, and I work for an organization with a excellent protection plan honed by a decade of continuous and successful operation during the war. I'll be evacuated if necessary, but I expect it won't be.

But there's no denying that I am nervous about what's next for Nepal and for my time here, particularly if the war begins again. I will be blogging as honestly and as often as safety and technology allow.

This will surely be interesting.

Blowing stuff up real good...

I had many menial errands to run on Thursday; a bicycle to buy, a barbershop to find, self-medication to perform. None of it happened, because a Nepal has an odd tradition called the banda, which I’m told it shares with much of the Indian subcontinent. A banda is a particularly obnoxious variety of street protest wherein the aggrieved consider that they have the moral right to demand a complete shutdown of the entire bloody city. In this particularly obnoxious form of dissent, a mob of several hundred or more snarling citizens roams the street and, among other behaviours I don’t yet fully comprehend, ransacks any business or working vehicle that has the audacity to disrespect the banda by disregarding the general strike.

My employers at CECI send out a mass text message on Thursday morning saying that a banda had been called for the entire Kathmandu valley, and that those of us with long commutes should stay put and avoid the madness. I wasn’t working that day, but was a bit under the weather, and so I didn’t leave the hotel until 11 or so, camera in hand. The fun had largely petered out by then, but I still passed a public bus thoroughly wrecked by the angry mob, and the streets were littered with fragments of masonry. Kathmandu’s ample supply of tottering brickwork provides ready ammunition that presumably rained down upon riot police for much of the morning. Traffic was unsettlingly sparse, as only a handful of motorcycles and no cars plied the streets. Late in the day, hundreds of armored cops manned major intersections. A few wore a curious scarab armor that brought to mind feudal Samurai, but they rebuffed my requests for snapshots. I later snuck a few surreptitious shots of their less exotically attired colleagues, which will be e-displayed as soon as I have functional bandwidth.

My taste for urban chaos is well-known, and I briefly cursed my inertia for depriving me of a first-hand taste of Thursday’s banda. However, I’m new here, and it’s likely better that I avoid such lunacy until I’ve the local knowledge to safely navigate it. Bandas of one variety or another are reportedly a regular event, though this was (I’m told) one of rare intensity. There’ll be another for me to enjoy sometime tolerably soon.