 MIN RATNA BAJRACHARYA |
If Nepal's political process were not so distressingly moribund, it would make for great satire. Entertainers would be hard-pressed to improve on the comedy of errors that is the Nepal ship of state.
More than five months after the CA was dissolved, that ship is leaking and rudderless, drifting into uncharted waters with a lameduck prime minister, caretaker government, no parliament, no constitution, no general or local elections, and now, no budget.
The parties that were elected in 2008 to take the peace process forward, write a new constitution, and ensure stable government and economic development are hopelessly tangled in a zero-sum game. In trying to keep rival parties and rivals within parties out of the power equation, the current cast of political characters cancel each other out. They had the holidays to strike a deal in informal meetings, they squandered that too.
Had successive heads of government behaved more like statesmen, instead of petty party bosses, we might not have got bogged down in this morass. If the opposition parties had publicly acknowledged, even indirectly, that it was their malgovernance over the years that contributed to the current crisis, and if they had fielded untainted, younger and more dynamic leaders, we wouldn't have hit rock bottom.
The only way out of the current crisis, as we keep saying here every week, is to go for fresh elections. What is holding things up is that just about every political party and their discredited leadership are terrified of facing voters.
Hence the hand-wringing, the delay tactics, elaborate legalistic excuses, and using the budget as a bargaining chip as everyone jostles for advantage to be incumbent in an election government. That is what it has always been about: since no one is prepared to face free and fair elections, they all want to be where there is power and money, to gain an unfair advantage.
The Maoists have not given up their goal of a one-party state. This is not fear-mongering, they've repeatedly said so themselves. The strategy is to wait till they are sure they can command a two-thirds majority in the next CA or parliament by using money, state security, coercion, and identity politics. No doubt, political exclusion of marginalised ethnicities needs to be addressed, but only fools would trust centralist Maoist communists with that agenda. The Maoists would have gone for elections by now had the party not split, seriously undermining their chance of gaining a two-third.