Diary of a nation

This is the 400th edition of Nepali Times. Flipping through the back issues in our electronic archives (nepalitimes.com/archive.php) is like reading a nation's diary.

When the first issue of this paper hit the stands in 2000, King Birendra was on the throne, the political parties had already lost their way, there were general strikes every other week and the Maoist war was intensifying. Fed up with political instability, royal hardliners were pressuring Birendra to be more assertive.

The newly-elected Prime Minister Girija Koirala was off to Delhi and his main job was to restore ties with India that had soured after the hijacking of IC814. The page one story on our #1 issue of 6 July 2000 was Koirala's India wishlist. It looks oddly familiar today: renegotiating the 1950 treaty, hydropower, signing an extradition treaty. Despite all the changes of the past eight years, we see how little has changed.

The reports, columns, editorials speak of opportunities squandered. Whenever there was a chance to do the right thing, our rulers did the wrong thing. The media analysed, interpreted and dispensed advice, but leadership was trapped by greed, political ambition and inflated egos. We never had illusions that the media could change much, but the past eight years showed the limitations of media in improving governance.

The 100th issue in 2002 warned about climate change melting the Himalaya. But there was no time to worry about global issues: the royal family had been butchered, and the conflict had deepened as the army got involved in a dirty war. The issue of 4 July 2002 carried an interview with the British charge d'affaires in which he said Nepal shouldn't be allowed to become a failed state. He prescribed better delivery of services, governance, strong political leadership and a crackdown on corruption as the best way to combat "terrorism".

King Gyanendra was in a vain quest to make his creeping coup work, and famously said: "Those who are loyal are not competent and those who are competent are not loyal."

Soon, he started clamping down on the media, and we wrote in the 200th issue: 'Banning the truth doesn't make it disappear. Free speech is not truly free if you are only allowed to say nice things. The government may not like what the media says, but it must protect our right to say it.'

The warning went unheeded and the February First coup blacked out the media with direct military censorship. After that, it took only 14 months for the whole authoritarian edifice to collapse and Gyanendra to fade into a lingering limbo.

By June 2006 parliament was restored, the parties worked on an interim constitution, the Maoists joined the government, left and joined again. The whole process took twice as long as it should have, the Maoists found it difficult to make a smooth transition to mainstream politics. We in the media were too mesmerised by squabbles in the capital to correctly gauge the anger and despair in the rest of the country.

In his State of the State column in issue #300 CK Lal wrote: 'Unless we find jobs for this restive and angst-filled generation, it will be impossible to establish sustainable peace. Many are internally displaced by the insurgency and counter-insurgency. They have no family, no jobs and no hope. Now they have no cause either. The deprived have no stake in stability.'

The political parties didn't see the writing on the wall, they carried on with business as usual and got swept away by the Maoist storm surge. Has our leadership learnt its lesson? Going by the wheeling and dealing this week, it doesn't look like it. We hope the Maoists will not fall into the same trap, nor go off on vain attempts to enforce utopia.

One lesson from the past eight years is that the Nepali people will not tolerate totalitarianism even if it is justified by the promise of "fast-track" development. For every successful Singapore model in the world today there are disastrous Burma or North Korea models.

Let our future rulers be warned: don't mistake your electoral mandate as a right to trample on rights.