In Fractured Nepal, Plans for National Elections Provide a Series of Subplots

  “If you read the newspapers, you’d think I was the most corrupt woman in Nepal,” said Hisila Yami, a Maoist leader and the wife of a former prime minister, Baburam Bhattarai.

Now that the Maoists have given up bank robbery, kidnapping and extortion, money is harder to come by, she acknowledged as she peeled off bills from a huge wad in her purse to give to campaign workers.

“People gave us money earlier out of fear, but they don’t do that now,” she said with a shrug. “We have to be appealing now. We have to be nice. We can’t afford to antagonize people now.”

So Ms. Yami was squinting at shadows recently as she held campaign gatherings in living rooms darkened by routine power failures. She insisted to those gathered about her feet that all the stories of hidden wealth and secret efforts to undermine her husband when he was in office were just vicious rumors.

“People think I had a lot of money, cars and homes, but that is not true,” she said, exuding an energetic charisma that lit up the room like a flashlight. “When my husband was prime minister, I tried to help him. But people think I tried to overtake him.”

After decades of political upheaval and paralysis, Nepal is scheduled to hold national elections on Nov. 19. Yet, with more than a dozen political parties — including an important Maoist group — boycotting the vote, there is some doubt that they will occur, but top officials say the country has no choice.

“There is no Plan B,” said Madhab Paudel, Nepal’s minister of information and communication. “We have no option except conducting the election.”

There is a growing consensus here that the only way to arrest the country’s disastrous economic spiral is through elections. More than 120 political parties have registered to compete, and hope — long in as short supply as oxygen on nearby Mount Everest — is flourishing. Some of the most colorful candidates in the world are now crisscrossing this mountainous nation.

Nepal, ruled for centuries by monarchs, has 125 ethnic groups, 127 spoken languages, scores of castes and three distinct ecosystems that have long divided its 27 million people into a blinding array of feuding communities, making political consensus difficult.

A 10-year civil war between the Maoists and the government ended in 2006, but the resulting Constituent Assembly spent four years trying to write a constitution without success, leading to political paralysis. This month’s election is intended to create a second Constituent Assembly to finish the constitution.

The election’s most intriguing subplot is among the Maoists, who divided last year over whether war is still an acceptable political strategy. The hard-line faction, widely referred to as Dashist because of a dash in its name (Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist), is boycotting the elections and has called for a 10-day strike beginning Nov. 11.

“Our intention is to prevent people from participating in the election,” said Pampha Bhusal, a Dashist politburo member.

Just how far Ms. Bhusal’s group will go to prevent voting is the season’s great mystery. Ms. Bhusal insisted that her party will not resort to violence again, but instead will seek to “convince” people not to vote.

“Everybody’s one concern is security, which is unpredictable,” said Ila Sharma, a commissioner on Nepal’s Election Commission. One candidate has already been killed.

And then there is Ms. Yami’s party, the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), whose nickname is the Cashist party because of the vast sums of money, cars, houses and property its leaders are rumored to have stolen during the country’s 10-year insurgency. Like rich Communists elsewhere, Cashists have become deeply attached to capitalism. “Even in China, capitalism is thriving in its own way,” Ms. Yami said.