FIUVE SURVIVE AIR DISASTER

Kathmandu, 6 Feb.: All five passengers and crew of a Makalu Air aircraft survived when an aircraft wheel burst and lost control at a remote hill airstrip in the far-West while landing Sunday.
The aircraft took off from Surkhet with goods as well.
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20 KG HASH RECOVERED IN TWO RAIDS

Kathmandu, 6 Feb.: Twenty kg hashish concealed in handcraft items for export was recovered by drugs enforcement officials in raids on two houses it te capital and Lalitpur Saturday.
A couple in Lalitpur and a man were arrested in Syambhu were arrested following raids and recovery of concealed drugs.
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STORM IN UML OVER DEAL WITH MAOISTS

Kathmandu, 6 Feb.: Thursday’s seven-point secret deal between CPN-UML Chairman Jhala Nath Khanal and UCPN (Maoist) Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has brought serious rift in the UML, The Himalayan Times reports.
As many as 20 UML leaders and lawmakers including K.P. Oli and Bishnu Paudel thronged Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal’s official residence at Baluwatar tonight (Saturday) to discuss their concerns.
UML leaders claimed senior leader Bhatar Mohan Adhikary was told to draft the agreement but those in which the signatures were put was different from what Adhikary read out at the UML meeting.
They have objected to the third, fourth and sixth points of the seven-point deal.
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NC FALYS MAAOIST-UML DEAL

Kathmandu, 6 Feb : Nepali Congress (NC) has taken strong exception to the so-called seven-point agreement between the UCPN (Maoist) and the CPN-UML in which the two parties agreed to form a separate force either of Maoist combatants alone or of Maoist combatants and members of government security agencies combined, Kosh Raj Koirala reports in Republica.

NC said that an agreement between the two parties to create a separate force goes against the spirit of the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA). The party also maintained that integration of Maoists combatants should be strictly on individual basis and all combatants aspiring for integration should meet the standard norms of the security agency concerned.
NC parliamentary party leader Ram Chandra Paudel said NC will never accept such an agreement between the two communist parties. “The so-called agreement goes against the Comprehensive Peace Accord. Nowhere does the CPA mentioned anything about creating a fifth security agency,” he said.

NC argued that such an agreement with the Maoists also goes against the stance the CPN-UML itself has long been taking over the integration of Maoist combatants. “There can´t be a separate force. Integration of Maoist combatants should be on individual basis and all those opting for integration should meet the standard norms of the security agencies concerned,” said another NC leader Bimalendra Nidhi .

“Integration means neither unification nor creation of a new force,” Nidhi further said. “The CPA does not provide any ground for creating such a force.”

The two communist parties, in their seven-point accord reached just before the election of Jhalanath Khanal as prime minister on Thursday, agreed to lead the new government on rotational basis and maintain longterm partnership between the two parties. Among other things, the two parties also agreed to go forward along with all leftist, patriotic and democratic forces.

NC alleged that the UML has tried to create a leftist polarization by breaking the existing left-democratic alliance. “The UML will have to face the consequences of this. This polarization will not deliver peace and a new constitution to the country,” warned Paudel.

NC said the agreement between the Maoists and UML to head the future government on rotational basis and maintain long-term partnership does not leave any ground for the politics of consensus. “This is not desirable especially at this critical juncture in history. It will help deliver neither peace nor a new constitution to the country,” Nidhi further said.

All leftist parties except Nepal Workers Peasant Party had voted in favor of Khanal in the prime ministerial election Thursday. Most rightist parties except a few splinter Madhes-based parties decided to stay in opposition.
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HOT-AIR BALLOON BLASTS QUICKLY

Kathmandu, 6 Feb.: After creating a lot of hullabaloo, the jumbo-size 601-member Constituent Assembly missed its two-year deadline last summer for formulating a new Constitution. The very ones responsible for fixing the deadline arrogated for themselves the right to extend the deadline by another one year, promising to accomplish what they could not in the previous couple of years. Now they are talking of yet another extension, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review.
Subhash Nemwang, who chairs the CA, cried hoarse day in and day out that the Constitution would be ready on time. However, he changed the tune and shifted the tongue a few months before the arrival of the deadline, saying that the task could be completed “if the major political parties cooperated”. In the process, he began to carry drastically less weight than previously. Some of his own party members at CPN (UML) have been critical of him.
An undertaking like the drafting of a Constitution, at a time when political leaders are promising everything to everyone inclusively and exclusively, the going is not going to be great. Some party leaders are already expressing their doubts over the Constitution-making task being able to meet the revised deadline. The late Laxman Aryal had declared that a Constitution could be drafted within 15 days. He did not mention that amendments to such Constitution could be effected within weeks after weeks. In the past two years, there has been an amendment to the Constitution every four months or so.
Little wonder then that the past has been pulverized, the present is being cheated in the name of transition where impunity rules and the future is rendered far worse than earlier suspected. Most worrisome is that there is little room for space for free, independent and extensive discussions in the cross-section of society to echo public voices and reflect their aspirations. Today, the country is heading towards the very direction that the major parties had vowed to avoid. Nepali had been promised restoration of law and order; revival of peace; and effective control of corruption. The actual product has been painfully different, and things are heading back to square one.
The much-touted secular, federal and republican nature and structure of the state of Nepal risks being grounded to a halt for all practical purposes, i.e. if the major parties (Maoists, Nepali Congress and UML) do not introduce a drastic change in their style of operation that reeks of constant scheming focused on sheer power.
Federalism, in practice, constitutes a combination of unity and diversity seeking to address issues raised in a country with deep-seated cultural, religious and linguistic differences. Although it pledges to main a harmonious balance between local autonomy and national unity, its record of maintaining equilibrium is mostly poor in developing countries.
Nepal’s 1990 Constitution, formulated by representatives of almost all the existing major political groups, was scrapped in the manner of Chengiz Khan’s marauding hordes that swept away everything on their path in the less civilized age. A non-elected parliament—it was “revived” by a monarch denigrated and demonized by the parties clamoring for an Interim Constitution—issued a dictat to its successor, but elected, parliament for abolishing monarchy and announcing the state as secular and federal. The unjustified and unseemly rush with which work was subsequently carried out opened a Pandora’s Box, whose repercussions were immediate and threatened to sustain for generations to come.
The method employed in announcing changes in the structure of political system simply to serve the personal prejudices of some individual politicians and extraneous interests sowed the seeds of discord. It was open invitation to chaos and prescription for creating a grave vacuum. This explains why constant compromise is sacrificed for the benefit of expediency. Militant outfits in the past four years have had an upper hand on numerous occasions, as impunity gained ground all over. The burden of the excessive baggage thus piled up is bound to take a heavy toll, sustaining as it does self-inflicted wound, fallacies and political paralysis.
Political scientists upholding pluralism recognize political parties as an essential instrument of democracy. The United States Constitution drafted by the Philadelphia Convention 225 years ago, when Prithvi Narayan Shah the Great was vigorously well into his national unification campaign in Nepal, is hailed as a model of draftsmanship, of linguistic elegance, of brevity and of high grade clarity. Envisaging unity into diversity of the nation, the 4,000-word document promoted, as defined by Abraham Lincoln, a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Nepal’s experiment takes a different course that brooks no decent discourse.
Federalism requires a democratic culture for success. Most countries do not have a federal system and many of those that went for it had to regret bitterly for taking the plunge without giving due thought to its pros and cons. Dr. Bhimarjun Acharya, a republican to the core, has raised a series of issues concerning federal structure that some INGOs are keen to bury under the weight of agenda pushed through the NGOs that they patronize so lavishly. A number of INGOs, investing billions of rupees, are sore with the most prominent constitutional expert in the country.
One, therefore, cannot effectively question the validity of RPP Nepal’s campaign that collected two million signatures in support of its proposal for a referendum on whether Nepal should be a federal republic and secular or a constitutional monarchical Hindu state.
In Nepal, we have charlatans who pretend to possess expertise on federalism and all such features that have succeeded in a few countries, failed in most countries that went for it and got rejected in most parts of the world. A few Tribhuvan University teachers, never known for taking regular classes, are going around wearing the tag of experts on federalism. One has only to go through the M.A. Political Science course of study for an indication on the extent of the so-called expertise the chaps have actually acquired on federalism.
But then all their sponsors and patrons want is a front for pushing dubious agendas through puppets that become pliant for a pocketful of dollars they could not dream of earning from their university jobs. This does not explain why the Central Department of Political Science, desperate for a decent number of student enrollment, has waived the earlier stipulation that only students with political science as a major at the Bachelor’s level, become eligible for the course and candidates with third division in M.A., too, can apply for Ph.D. study!

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