KIRAN PANDAY
However one views the Maoists' holier-than-thou attitude when it comes to the poor and downtrodden, there's no getting around the fact that they did put Nepal's poverty on stark display on the streets of Kathmandu for six long days.

True, thousands of poorly dressed, ill-fed, sick and confused-looking villagers trucked in from various parts of Nepal could have been brainwashed and coerced or paid to be in Kathmandu. True, they might have known but not cared much about how their hopes for a better future were being cynically abused to serve the power lust of their fire-breathing, mustachioed leader, whose Jekyll-and-Hyde persona is deserving of psychiatric analysis.

True, with the rally against the banda over, and with the netas now busy seeking forgiveness and redemption from the usual civil society partisans, it's tempting to shrug off the Great Banda as yet another political nightmare that middle-class people across urban Nepal had to suffer through.

But that would be wrong. What if Nepal's poverty – about one third of 27 million Nepalis live below the poverty line – comes back to disrupt the comforts of the middle-class again and again, either through the Maoists or through other potentially violent political forces? Besides chanting platitudes about peace and consensus, are there specific roles for the business promotion groups and entrepreneurs?  

Despite wavering in the beginning, FNCCI ended up doing a good job in co-organising last Friday's rally. But its language stayed insular, and its tactics were diffident: good only until the next banda. Over the years, it has repeatedly failed to present a publicly convincing case for the role of private enterprise in Nepal's economy.

A thriving private sector rather than a ballooning cabinet and oversize parliament is what creates jobs for our youth, so they can be in factories and at work desks rather than on the streets. Private enterprises pay taxes, which help pay for expanding water and sanitation coverage, education, healthcare and the like. Private enterprises compete, and competition allows them to bring innovations and cheaper goods and services to both the rich and the poor.

Sure, these could be interpreted as textbook-friendly statements. But here the FNCCI and other business promotion bodies should borrow the tactics of the Maoist leaders: repeat such self-serving statements many times in public with vivid and verifiably true examples drawn from Nepal's economy so that some Maoist adherents start doubting the very ideology that's been fed to them.

The point is not to challenge Maoist thought and get into a verbal morass out of which there's no escape. Especially for non-Brahmins who are not fluent in the sort of politically charged Nepali language in which you get to make all the right noises and mean absolutely nothing! The point is to steadily offer convincing and easily repeatable alternative sound bites that chip away at the dominant and true-sounding dogma that holds that private sector capitalism is inferior to public monopolies. Eventually, a tipping point can be reached, and this helps recast, say, a banda not as the usual peace-and-consensus issue, but as something that destroys jobs, incomes and taxes – harming all  Nepalis alike, from vegetable farmers in Palung to lodge owners in Bardiya.

Given our large and growing population base of unskilled youth, and given the visible disparity between Kathmandu and the rest of Nepal, business promotion bodies and business leaders should come out of their narrow confines, and start playing a more positively influential role rather than leaving it in the hands of narrow-minded politicians. After all, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, if our society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

READ MORE:
Television politics - By CK Lal
Letting go- By Prashant Jha
Wanted: leaders - By Krishna Khanal
Less revolting - By Kiran Nepal
Relief and despair - Publisher's Note
Proximate breakthrough