P Kharel

Democracy defining machine, in its traditional run, is crackling. In international affairs, the very issues disparaged as figment of imagination might actually be under deep planning. This is how conspiracies are cooked behind closed doors. The route and timing of the scheme determines its actual impact. Disinformation doesn’t buy any longer. Discretion should not desert politicians, and biases should not derail fair conclusions. Politics in pure terms is an aspiration to serve society and should not be treated like a profession in commerce or a short-cut route to pelf and position.
India’s Pioneer newspaper not long ago said in an editorial that the United States was concerned about China catching up to elbow it out as the world’s No. 1 nation. It elaborated: “US President Joe Biden’s harp on Beijing is not different from his predecessor’s Donald Trump stance. Biden has said that China’s ambition of becoming the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world is ‘not going to happen on my watch’. He vowed to outspend China on innovation and infrastructure to prevent the communist nation from surpassing the US to become the world’s most powerful country.”

Changing scenario
That is precisely the crux of issue triggering the on-going slanging match initiated by Washington and matched by Beijing. Since quite some time, as I have regularly mentioned, South Asia could be a hot spot for big power politics to flare up. Groups of retired army personnel have been briefing their successors and governments on the new developing scenario. Legislators and lawpersons are worried about national security and other core interests being affected by political perfidy and cultural decimation. Just as each independent country circulates its own currency even if the currency value is not the same everywhere, internationally acclaimed scholars worry about democracy of devalued denomination.
Various developments indicate that democracy might be dying. The very countries tagged as frontline democracies have frittered away the prospects for the cause and good conduct of democracy. When jobs are hard to come by, when there are multiple educated members underemployed or unemployed in a family, scavenging for odd jobs under strenuous conditions, what chances are there for the nation thus affected to achieve peace and prosperity? Bhutan’s textbook ethnic cleansing did not prick the conscience of the self-claim of being big democracies. With India overshadowed by China, future conflicts could drag on in Asia-Pacific and not the Atlantic that is relatively a safe harbour for the West.
Intellectuals and civil society members, if sedated by easy funds and stage-managed commendations, become a conduit for sinister games. Politics of misinformation and intrigue aims at incitement against legitimately established governments or political parties, which remains the ideological signature of disorder designed to push forth the sponsor agency’s hidden agenda. The rest gets treated like a roadside use-and-throw bin. Intentional bias and international blindness double the troubles of the tormented.
No overemphasis is required on partisan practices of the media. China and Iran on March 28 signed a 25-year agreement on bilateral cooperation in a reminiscent of the Indo-Soviet 20-year treaty in 1971, months before the Indo-Pak war over the emerging Bangladesh as an independent state. Soviet communism was distinctly different from Yugoslavia’s under Josip Broz Tito. Fidel Castro’s legacy in Cuba has another variation of communism as does Vietnam with its own. Soviet collapse did not arrive in a day. Its decay and decline was steady culminating in the 1991 collapse that was celebrated by its vehement ideological opponents in the industrial West, while the rest of the world by and large stood as silent observers.
Marx envisaged a communist system in an industrial country. But the world’s first communist system was introduced in the overwhelmingly agrarian Soviet Union in 1917. China, too, was not an industrial state when the communists led by Mao Zedong came to power in 1949. Celebrating 100 years of its founding on July 23, the Communist Party of China governs the world’s most populous country. In three years’ time, it will have overtaken the length of time the Soviet communists were in power.
The COVID-19 pandemic narrates a running story of challenges, preparedness and success in controlling it. World Bank and IMF expect the largest communist dispensation to overtake the US as the world’s biggest economy by the year 2028. Iron curtains were rung down from within the communist camp through the character in Mikhail Gorbachev whose ironic tale of being praised as an icon of reform by arch communist critics but bitterly reviled by his own compatriots. His glasnost and perestroika (openness and restructuring) presaged the empire’s end. He threw his hat in the ring for presidential election in the shrunk form of Russia, only to hand out a humiliating defeat obtaining less than 1 per cent of the votes cast.
The one-time communist elite during the Soviet decades, Boris Yeltsin outpolled Gorbachev but he mishandled — some say, betrayal — the opportunity to govern Russia. Putin not only brought normalcy to the chaos wrought by hyperinflation and cleptocracy but put Russia back to the international map of superpowers. Yeltsin’s two terms in office proved to be a haven for corrupt practices, embezzlement of state funds and other resources and the rise of profiteers and influence peddlers in high places.
On the eve of the new millennium, Yeltsin calculated that his future was too uncertain given the nationwide revulsion against his corrupt regime. So he stepped down when a year remained for his tenure to end but only after extracting a pledge from Putin to grant him and his family member immunity from any state investigation.

Strands of socialism
Marx might yet bounce back in different incarnations, notably socialism, fair distribution of wealth and social welfare schemes. In the world’s “largest democracy”, India’s communists, today, are weak with relentlessly eroding base to the brink of becoming irrelevant. Their presence in the West Bengal state, where the CPM ruled for 34 consecutive years, is dismal.
CPM denied its stalwart Jyoti Basu the opportunity to lead a coalition government at the centre and the party, thus, let go off the chance to make a mark like the Manmohan Adhikary-led nine-month minority government in Nepal did in 1994-95. Eight governments have been headed by communist leaders in Nepal — a record for communist leaders functioning in a multiparty system.
In a one-party communist rule, China, the “bamboo curtain”, has chosen to consolidate its position with an approach sharply different from that of the Iron Curtain that is the Soviet Union. It rejects ideological export but leaves no stone unturned for economic thrust and advantage whenever and wherever it sees a potential for a toehold to be gradually expanded.

(Professor Kharel specialises in political communication.)