Pushpa Kamal Dahal loves to flaunt his rhetorical flourishes. Baburam Bhattarai has scholarly explanations for everything, and can pinpoint cause and effect in an academic manner. Chairman Dahal turns the elucidations of his deputy into melodramatic soundbites that the media laps up hungrily.

 Unlike his supreme leader, Nanda Kishor Pun aka Pasang is rather soft-spoken. He has earned credibility through his exploits during the armed conflict, so doesn't really need to show off his oratorical skills. Even so, Pun has proved that he is as adept at manipulating political rhetoric as he was at mounting armed attacks.

Early this week, Pun insisted that Kali Bahadur Kham (pic), the absconding Maoist commander of Shaktikhor camp, is innocent until proven guilty by law. Kham had earlier been accused of torturing and murdering businessman Ram Hari Shrestha, and more recently of looting a Chinese trader. But Pun's statement is an artful dodge from the charge that former insurgents are not helping the police with investigations. The Maoist commander created a second line of defence in his next sentence by claiming that the party shouldn't be held responsible for the misdemeanours of its members. In a manner of speaking, he told the press that he believed Kham to be innocent, but if he was found guilty, that would be his problem, not the party's.

 The Nepali media, however, has ceded the moral high ground to the former insurgents due to its own obsession with hype and feeding frenzy. Journalists do not seem to be able to restrain the urge to pounce upon Maoist-related incidents and turn them into controversies.

 The police's allegations against Kham are just that: mere allegations, until investigating agencies collect evidence worthy of scrutiny in a court of law. Trial by the media is an inappropriate way of securing justice for victims or ensuring punishment for the guilty.

 The fallibility of the media was also exposed when the abductors of Dr Bhaktaman Shrestha were found to be hardcore criminals. Even when his family paid a huge ransom to secure the release of this highly regarded physician, the media continued to harp on the Maoist connections of his suspected abductors. It was only when the Judicial Commission suspended the judge who had released Dr Shrestha's abductors earlier on bail that the media allowed the controversy to die down.

The metropolitan media fails to find favour with its critics, like Pun, for yet another reason. The Maoists believe, and perhaps rightly so, that the media tries to hang them for the misdemeanours of their wayward combatants but allows for similar transgressions on the part of the security forces with no more than a rap on the knuckles. In 2007, prosecutors charged Major Niranjan Basnet and three other Nepal Army personnel with the illegal detention, torture, and murder of Maina Sunuwar. Kavre District Court issued an arrest warrant and summons. The army acquitted Basnet of all charges. The media greeted the news with a wall of silence.

Similarly, the heart-rending story of two Dalit women and a child, allegedly raped and murdered by Nepal Army personnel in Bardiya National Park in March this year, disappeared from the headlines as if by magic. When journalists treat government forces with kid gloves and pounce viciously upon former insurgents, the Maoists are emboldened enough to question their impartiality.

Pun may have his prejudices against the free press. He may even be unwilling to cooperate with the police. Investigative agencies can call his bluff by coming up with irrevocable proof against the accused. But the media would do well to refrain from publicising unsubstantiated allegations as open-and-shut cases. The law needs to be allowed to take its own course. Media is politics, but it works best with pretensions of impartiality.

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