BIKRAM RAI

Hopes ran high when the top guns in the political parties signed an agreement to breathe new life in the peace process last month. The cynics among us said they only did it out of a sense of guilt for having wasted five years in senseless bickering. We said this was to appease a thoroughly disillusioned public so it would agree to another extension of the CA term on 30 November.

All that is probably true. The public perception of the nation's elected leaders is at an all time low. The current bloated cabinet is proof to many that politicians are only interested in a division of the spoils. Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai has inexplicably shot himself in the foot by not just tolerating and coddling crooks in his cabinet, but by pro-actively seeking a presidential pardon for a colleague who is a convicted murderer. Bhattarai is in danger of squandering most of the brownie points he earned for integrity and austerity.

In times like these, it is best to distil everything down to the bare essence: finding a leader who is partly clean. Little in Nepal these days is black or white, there are no absolutes. So, we in the media look for the relatively honest police chief, the bureaucrat who is comparatively less corrupt, the minister who shows a hint of honesty.

Call it "harm reduction". A political party may have not done much while it led a coalition, its ministers may have been involved in graft, the prime minister himself may have distributed cash from his relief fund to party cronies, but it may still do less harm than the one that openly uses threats, extortion and violence.

Nepal now needs a political evolution of the constitution process so that we conclude the disarmament of Maoist fighters, and move towards a pluralistic, democratic society that can bring social justice and economic progress.

This is the reason for the impatience about the political deadlock of the past five years. Nepalis want their politicians to get on with peace and constitution so that there can be a stable government that can deliver. Public opinion polls have repeatedly shown the peoples' main concerns are inflation, lack of basic services, shortage of jobs, and security. What we are dealing with, therefore, is a serious mismatch between the preoccupation of politicians and the expectations of the citizens.

The last five years since the signing of the CPA has been a case of serial failures of the political leadership to see the larger picture and respond to the popular will. The first ray of hope in a long time was the Bhattarai government, which is why he needs to get the ship of state back on track and restore his image and moral authority.

At an interaction in Kathmandu last week, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and former Guatemalan democracy activist, Frank de la Rue, said there are lessons Nepal can learn from Guatemala. Peace-building, de la Rue pointed out, is as important as peace-making. Guatemala suffers from the same post-conflict ills Nepal faces now: the rise of impunity, the politicisation of organised crime, the replacement of war violence with criminal violence.

The only way to deal with this in the short, medium and long term is by stabilising the politics with a new constitution. For that we need closure on the provisions of the Comprehensive Peace Accord signed this week five years ago. The goal is to address the violent legacy of the war and bring a party that formerly believed in violence into the political mainstream to guarantee sustained peace, justice, and development. Only with a strong and stable state is all this possible.

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The 1 November agreement breathed new life into the Comprehensive Peace Accord five years after it was signed.