Quid pro quo

Now that all 3 festivals are over and done with, let’s all sit back, relax and recuperate from the exertion to prepare for the next holiday.

After consuming all those water buffaloes, it is time now to burn their bones for fertiliser and spread the aroma through the city. If air pollution is an index of a country’s rising per capita GDP, then Delhi and Kathmandu are both steaming ahead to an affluent future in our co-prosperity sphere.

Those watching the body language of our politicos at various political tea parties after asain last month couldn’t help wonder why these back-slapping, jovial leaders observed laughing their heads off at each other’s off-colour jokes, can’t seem to agree on anything during closed-door meetings? And why, if the struggle for succession to replace the ailing prime minister is heating up so much, were they not stealing each other’s biscuits? Why haven’t they strangled each other yet?

In any other country, a self-respecting Communist Party never allows a power struggle go waste. The dominant faction physically exterminates the dissident faction in an internal purge long before it can even think about breaking away. Could it be that our totalitarians are less totalitarian than other totalitarians?

Those of you following the news from Washington DC these days will have noticed that political pundits have had to resort to Latin to explain the byzantine world of Trumpland. The English language just does not suffice to describe what transpired in the phone conversation about the threat to withhold US military aid unless the Ukrainians handed over dirt on Biden, Jr.

The Ass fails to see what is so noteworthy or objectionable about a quid pro quo. In fact, in Nepal quid pro quo is the modus operandi and habeus corpus of our status quo and, it goes without saying, the quo vadis, ipso facto, cum laude, and ad nauseum. We have been handing out quids for quos for centuries, and without such palm greasing, our system of government, and indeed the whole state super structure, would collapse in no time.

Take Kalapani. It was a quid pro quo between Nepal’s rulers, who wanted to curry favour with the hegemonic successors of the British Raj. We got the quid, they got the quo. Carving out chunks of Tundikhel to the Army was also a similar give-and-take to keep the generals happy.

Our landlinked Himalayan ex-kingdom where the Buddha was born, to which Kalapani belongs, and which has never been colonised by aliens had a nice long vacation and now, fully rested, we once more plunge head-first into the task of de facto prolonging the political mea culpa and sine qua non, not to mention the quid pro quo and rigor mortis.