KIRAN PANDAY

The Maoists in government are showing themselves to be crisis-prone. Why would they want to destabilise their own government by bringing these crises on themselves?

It is misleading to think of the Maoists as being split between moderates and hardliners. They are split between hardliners and even more hardliners. Prime Minister Dahal has no time for anything else but to deal with the crisis of the week: the judiciary row, army recruitment, Pashupati, attacks on media, the wholesale shutting down of industry. What's next week's crisis?

The Kharipati National Convention of his party decided to pursue the 'people's republic' and Dahal got a handy message to threaten his coalition partners with: look, you better support me because these guys are even more hardcore.

After every crisis when people with grievances go to Baluwatar to complain, they come out exclaiming, "What a swell guy our PM is, we had completely misjudged him, the problem is the party, not the chairman." It is now time to judge the prime minister by his actions, not by his words. Also, we need to force him to take responsibility for the actions of his cadre, whether they are sanctioned or not.

For a while, it appeared that Dahal finally got his comeuppance with the Pashupati row. But he managed to sail through even that one. The Indian priest is headed home, the Maoists have managed to appear 'nationalist' and personally reclaimed the moral high ground by promising to abide by the decisions of Supreme Court.

The responsibility of a head of government, however, goes much beyond plotting and implementing survival strategies. The prime minister needs to extricate himself out of the self-defeating game of fooling all of the people all the time and concentrate instead on winning the confidence of his coalition partners and Nepali Congress stalwarts.

At the end of his term, Dahal will not be judged by his Machiavellian tactics but by whether or not a truly inclusive constitution is written in the stipulated timeframe.