FURTHER DETAILS OF PM ELECTION

FURTHER DETAILS OF PM ELECTION

Kathmandu, 25 Aug.: Parliament meet later Thursday will endorse recommendation of the business advisory committee for the prime ministerial election Sunday.
A candidate will have to secure 258 votes for election.
Nominations have to be filed until five in the afternoon Friday.
UML and a front of five Madeshbadi parties haven’t decided whether to vote for Paudel or Bhattarai yet.
Their meetings continue.
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OPINION

THE LAST HOPE OF OUR REPUBLIC/

Kathmandu, 25 Aug.: The time have come to rally around Baburam Bhattarai as premier. And no, it’s not because he remains by far the most popular among the leading contenders, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.
Over the past three years, Dr. Bhattarai has remained unabashed in claiming personal credit for turning Nepal into a republic. To the extent that any single person could claim ownership over that endeavor, Dr. Bhattarai may even have a point. But the self-assertion has lost none of its arrogant ring.
Yet you have to acknowledge that the United Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist vice-chairman might be able to give a semblance of sanity to this whole peace process precisely because of the personal stake he presumably sees involved here.
Then there’s that other reason. Dr. Bhattarai insists that he doesn’t want to become prime minister just to add one more portrait on that illustrious wall inside Singha Darbar. This means he comes to the job with a sense of purpose, regardless of how hazy that might sound to the rest of us.
A few months ago, he claimed to have started the process of developing a new model for Nepal, equating the country’s precariousness to that which Bhimsen Thapa had faced. He can’t be forced to show his hand unless he becomes prime minister, can he?
Our most favorite Maoist across the southern border is not anathema to the north. A visiting Chinese dignitary had bestowed on Dr. Bhattarai the title of Nepal’s Deng Xiaoping. Forget the layers of disparate meanings associated with the Great Mandarin’s pronouncement because there is a more important message. To the best of Maila Baje’s knowledge, the Chinese epithet has not provoked the slightest trace of derision from the Indians.
Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal will have to work the hardest to swallow his pride. Without the arsenal of Dr. Baburam Bhattarai’s vocabulary, Dahal knows he would have had long lost his war on the battlefield. Mohan Baidya, too, crossed the rubicon when he joined hands with Dr. Bhattarai against Dahal. He can just as easily begin collaborating with Dahal in undermining Bhattarai once again, but not before the latter takes the oath of office and secrecy.
By blaming the Nepali Congress’ “recklessness” for King Mahendra’s takeover in December 1960, Dr. Bhattarai seemed to have imperiled his position within our top democratic party. His lament that fake republicans were dominating national politics by sidelining the real ones, too, was a thinly disguised attack on the Nepali Congress.
The CPN-UML, too, will be hard-pressed to go along. Bringing Madhav Kumar Nepal into the Constituent Assembly, overruling the people’s mandate, was the greatest mistake of the Maoists, Dr. Bhattarai once lamented. He also had called the CPN-UML under Jhal Nath Khanal as a band of eunuchs.
Yet this is a time for the other parties to show magnanimity. If Dr. Bhattarai were to seek another extension of the constituent assembly, the people might actually turn out to be more sympathetic. If things are really so hopeless as to defy even Dr. Bhattarai, then Nepalis might be more inclined to look for reasons not necessarily related to the political class.
It would perhaps be too much to expect Dr. Bhattarai to acknowledge failure in formal words, should it come to that. His resignation would say it all. But would it hurt to expect him to succeed?
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BP LOST IN NEPAL FOUND IN RPP-N

Kathmandu, 25 Aug.: This is the Year Six of Nepal’s New Dark Age, which some with an axe to grind at the cost of the vast majority of people call “modern” Nepal! First of all, we are in strange times. We are no longer Nepalis but Bahuns, Chhetris, Gurungs, Trikaal Vastavik writes in People’s Review.
Madhesis, Magars, Newars, Pahades, Tamangs and more than 80 such other divisions that till a few years ago used to sound as if they were first Nepalis and then the respective communities they belonged to.
Well, now, “loktantra” has delivered our “true” identities and “transformed” us beyond recognition. The virus of division and discord threatens to set in deeply and extensively. The Nepali Congress and the CPN (UML) never tire of gloating over the philosophies of the late B.P. Koirala and Pushpa Lal Shrestha as their respective perennial sources of inspiration.
If Koirala or Shrestha were to return from the ghats where their physical remains had been consigned to flames decades ago, they would not be able to identify the country they had left behind in the hopeful trust of their one-time keen followers. Many Nepalis do not remember them much and recall what they said even less often. A large number of Nepalis not yet 40 do not know much about Koirala or Shrestha because the latter’s followers themselves have made only ritualistic tributes to them, usually once a year on the occasion of the duo’s anniversaries.
Koirala was a fervent exponent of constitutional monarchy. Shrestha was deadly against the type of federalism his supposed followers are championing for today. Both would equate federalism with seeds of discord and disintegration. Koirala himself was secular but he never spoke of declaring a predominantly Hindu state “secular” against the wishes of the people.
NC and UML, therefore, do not wish to embarrass themselves by invoking the names of their famous leaders who laid the solid foundations of their parties more than 60 years ago and yet their thoughts and ideologies have been consigned to the dustbin by their own “followers”.
NC has in the past five years not been able to say much on Koirala except that he made “great sacrifices” for the cause of democracy. When it comes to his 1976 mission in “national reconciliation”, his party people have proved fair weather followers who have deserted his philosophy without the slightest qualm. Those were the decades of the 1960s through the 1970s and 1980s when some hard core panchas treated B.P. Koirala as an anti-national. Today, a group of former panchas have undertaken the task of raising the late Koirala’s banner of “national reconciliation” whose two pillars were constitutional monarchy and multiparty democracy.
Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal is the only organization today that has demonstrated courage in upholding the “national reconciliation” philosophy that its one-time arch-opponent enunciated at a time when East Pakistan, with open support from India, broke away and had emerged as an independent Bangladesh (1971), the independent kingdom of Sikkim was annexed in India (1975) and New Delhi was marking Nepal for extracting excessive “concessions” pertaining to coherence in defense policies between the two capitals and “synchronization” in foreign policy matters.
The communist groups during the 30 years of panchayat accused NC of selling out national interests to India. Koshi and Gandak projects, both signed during NC rule, were cited as examples. During student elections at the university or campuses, NC was presented as an “anti-national” organization that “served more of India’s interests than those of Nepalis”. The communists used to praise King Mahendra for developing the concept of zonal divisions and the construction of East-West Highway. They also praised the propagator of the partyless Panchayat for giving the green signal to Chinese assistance in constructing the Arniko Highway linking Nepal with China notwithstanding the grim faced New Delhi. The communists were one voice in lauding the contributions made by Prithvi Narayan Shah for the unification of the country and also liberally quoted Mahendra’s reply to those who feared that the road would lead to communist rule in this country, “Communism does not travel in a taxi.”
The same communists and NC activists were the ones who in recent times destroyed the statutes of King Prithvi Narayan Shah the Great and King Mahendra who did so much for the establishment of the Nepal Academy named after him. All along, the NC and UML have followed the NCP (Maoist) agenda. Republic, secularism and federalism were not NC agenda. For that matter, much of it was not even UML’s agenda. The coattails of the Maoists did the trick.
It was NC’s Girija Prasad Koirala and Sher Bahadur who were at the forefront in calling for “strong action” against the “Maoist terrorists”. They successively headed the government and blamed King Birenadra and later King Gyanendra for “putting obstacles” to their plans for military action against the “terrorists”. Today, Nepalis have seen that those who championed for “democracy”, “progressive development” and “revolutionary changes” for years have succeeded in improving their and their near ones’ lifestyles beyond imagination while miserably failing to lift the quality of life for an average Nepali.
Someone whose family has been living in terai for over a century is known as a “pahade” while another person from across the border who came with trinkets to hawk his trade in Nepal a few years ago is a “Madhesi” citizen of Nepal now. A central working committee member of NC the other day pointed out that the Koirala clan would also be categorized as a “pahade” in Biratnagar even if it has been there since more than 125 years.
How the federal republic of secular Nepal will develop is anyone’s guess. We have lost stability, law and order, harmony and the credibility of all “senior” political leaders who have amassed wealth, concentrated power, favored their relatives, loyalists and their party members. The overwhelming majority of Nepalis who do not belong to any political party are treated as merely “subjects” as used to be the case when colonial regimes subjugated and ruled other territories and local populations who were not given the privileges and freedom the people of the “mother country” enjoyed.
The vacuum created since the abandoning of the 1990 Constitution has brought about confusion and instability, chaos and rampant corruption. The change in 1951 did not last because the related agreement was brokered in New Delhi. The 1990 change fared well because King Birendra and the movement of multiparty democracy leaders reached an accord in Kathmandu. The 2005 accord was concluded in New Delhi and we are paying for it.
As a result, B.P.Koirala’s “national reconciliation” plan is lost in Nepali Congress but found in RPP-N.
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