IMPLEMENTATION OF FIVE-POINT AGREEMENT NOT SATISFACTORY

IMPLEMENTATION OF FIVE-POINT AGREEMENT NOT SATISFACTORY

Kathmandu,11 Aug.: Implementation of a five-point agreement tripartite agreement between the Big Three parties to complete and peace process and draft a constitution by 31 August is unsatisfactory.
This was the conclusion of a parliamentary committee led by Speaker Subash Nemwang that held a review meeting, NC member of the committee Bimalendra Nidhi said. Thursday.
Ailing Prime Minister Jhalanath Khanal didn’t attend. the meeting.
Khanal said he’ll resign Friday if peace process implementation isn’t satisfactory.
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YOUTH FORCE WITHDRAWS CLOSURE OF MORANG

Kathmandu, 11 Aug.: UML Youth Force withdrew its two-day closure of Morang Thursday.
The youth body of the party leading the government was demanding release of activists charged for attempt murder of a journalist.
It was demanding withdrawal of murder charge against another organization member,
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NEA CONTINUES TO DISCONNECT POWER SUPPLY TO GOVT. OFFICES

Kaathmandu, 11 Aug.: Nepal Electricity Authority (NEA) Thursday continued a campaign to cutoff electricity to government office not settling their electricity dues.
Power supply to government offices were cutoff Thursday morning.
Altogether Rs 165.327 million dues from government offices were settles from government offices until Wednesday after a campaign. NEA said.
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19 CONTESTANTS IN MISS NEPAL 2011

Kathmandu, 11 Aug.: Nineteen contestants aged between 19 and 25 years have been short listed from 53 candidates for miss Nepal 2011 contest on 26 August at the secure Army Officers’ Club, Bhadrakali.
Maoist-affiliated women groups have disrupting the contests previously held at hotels.
Hidden Treasure Pvt. Ltd. and Unilever Nepal Ltd. are sponsoring the 16th pageant.
The winner will collect a Rs. 50,000 purse while the first and second runner-up will get Rs 35,000 and Rs.25,000 respectively
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OPINION

DAHAL CHARTS A MIDDLE PATH

Kathmandu, 11 Aug.: Pushpa Kamal Dahal the geo-politician has consistently made far greater sense than he has as a politician. Look at how he sought to brush aside the stubbornly sticking pro-Chinese tag the other day. “If you recall, when I was prime minister, I had mooted the idea of an east-west railway,” Dahal said in remarks to a daily newspaper before his departure for Kuala Lumpur. “That process is still on. Does that give me a pro-India tag?” Dahal’s comments came in response to his increasingly active involvement in the Asia-Pacific Exchange and Cooperation Foundation (APECF), an organization widely projected by the Indians and their Nepalese protégés as a front for the Chinese government, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.
In the past, when Dahal left to attend APECF sessions, he sparked fierce speculation on which ranking Chinese official he was actually meeting with and what new twist he would then give our hopelessly contorted politics.
When APECF proposed a $3 billion project to boost Lumbini as the equivalent of Mecca for the world’s Buddhists, Dahal’s involvement became even more headline grabbing. Then when it emerged that former crown prince Paras Shah, like Dahal, is a co-chairman of the foundation along with eight other individuals, heads started spinning faster. (Dahal never said he would pick and choose his associations with Nepalese commoners, so Maila Baje thinks he owed no explanation there.)
The announcement in Beijing last month that Hu Yuandong, head of the United Nations Industrial Development Organization’s China Investment and Technology Promotion Office, and Xiao Wunan, Executive Vice-Chairman of the APECF, had signed a formal agreement pertaining to the Lumbini project split our republican establishment right across the middle.
It took several weeks for an official response to come. The configuration of the ruling political alliance must have deterred an immediate response. One civil society luminary, flustered by China’s assertive intentions in post-monarchy Nepal, urged Beijing not to trust the Maoists. He coupled that assertion by explaining to us that the Chinese were only looking out for themselves in Nepal.
As the din of the collective ‘duh’ permeated the Nepalese ambience, the government secretary responsible for Lumbini’s development criticized the agreement, saying Nepal had not been consulted. Ordinarily, such a caustic remark would have sounded the death knell for the project. But in these extraordinary times, this bureaucratic appeal to our patriotism fell flat and the hapless official was forced to resign.
If news of Dahal’s departure to Kuala Lumpur gave a gripping headache to opponents of the Lumbini plan, just imagine how they must be feeling that he is scheduled to return home accompanying a senior delegation to discuss the details of the project. The team, led by senior Chinese leader Zhou Yongkang, serving as special envoy of Chinese president Hu Jintao, will hold discussion on conducting a feasibility study for developing Lumbini – and not just as a pilgrimage but a much broader special development zone.
“The birthplace of Lord Buddha is important for Nepal with regard to our economic prosperity and cultural development,” Dahal said in his newspaper interview. Officially still a confirmed atheist, Dahal would have a hard time peddling the four-fold noble truths in defense of the project. So the commercial aspect has come to the forefront. Yet there is more than a whiff of the spiritual in Dahal’s espousal of the middle path between our two neighbors.
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FROM MUSTANG TO LUMBINI

Kathmandu, 11 Aug.: Since a couple of months now, reports that China is taking initiatives for launching a massive project involving $3 billion for a Lumbini development project through the Asia-Pacific Exchange and Cooperation Foundation has set off hectic rounds of inquiries and analyses in the Kathmandu grapevine and some media. The amount of money mentioned for the development zone is huge and, if it materializes, that part of western Nepal can expect highly significant transformation, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review.
Such a project would have strategic importance for Beijing. Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha, will be known by more people across the world at a time when some foreign thugs in the neighborhood have from time to time tried, and failed, to raise a controversy over the “actual” birthplace of the light of the world who made his physical presence more than 2,500 years ago.
Lumbini’s cultural and historic importance is obvious but some Indian writers pretend to think otherwise. Fortunately, the rest of the world elite are well versed with the fact. Earlier, whenever some Indians wrote or spoke of the birthplace being not in Nepal but in India, there used to be a chorus of protests in Nepal. So ridiculous is the claim that it hardly makes news ay longer.
Nepalis are aware of the case of Tenzing Norgay in whose name instant songs of praise were penned and sung in Nepal back in 1953 when he and Edmund Hillary became the first men to set their feet on the world’s highest snow-clad peak, Mt. Sagarmatha. The manner in which Norgay began living in India while his mother for years refused to leave her birthplace in Nepal makes a long story for contemporary world and posterity to refer to.
It is strange that the late Norgay hardly gets any mention in his chosen home country, except when the Sagarmatha conquest stories mention the first duo to be atop the towering peak in the Himalayas nearly 60 years ago that he is hurriedly mentioned. He was hired by a prominent hotel in Kathmandu in the 1980s to make appearances for the benefit of hotel guests at dinner time, wearing daura-surwal and dhaka cap. Neither the Nepali press nor the Indian media have bothered to recall his story. They prefer to highlight Hillary’s story instead. Hillary visited Nepal regularly in his social work for the benefit of the communities in the Himalayan region.
The case is a bitter lesson that some people seem to forget. But the simple tale carries a more complex history of how conspiracies worked in the past. Anyone with some sense of learning from the past can make out what happened and why it happened. Fortunately, people are now better prepared to assert their treasures and dump any black sheep.
The prospect of Lumbini getting the sort of attention that China is reported to be giving would augur well for Nepal. It would also boost the international political profile and economic profits for Beijing, which has finally come to the conclusion that the United States and its allies find Nepal the best route to create trouble for the communist regime via the “Free Tibet Issue”.

The Christian world sees Tibet and China as a mouthwatering opportunity for religious conquest. For more than 60 years, particularly during Chairman Mao’s rule, the Communist Party of China treated religion as the “opium” of the masses. As a result, the new generations of the 1.3 billion Chinese in large numbers have turned away from religion. If “democratic” reforms could be introduced in China, as per Western definitions, the world’s most populous nation would become a fertile land for Christianity, with the hope of China becoming a Christian majority country within a few decades. Evangelists, who preach secularism basically in nations where Christianity is a minority religion, are eagerly waiting for the day when they could pump in money and definitions of democracy and inclusiveness for spreading Christianity for China with a population double that of the whole of Europe.
Unlike the world’s first communist country, the Soviet Union, which disintegrated 20 years ago, China continues to be ruled by the Communist Party while most communist rules have ended since the 1990s elsewhere. As the world’s second largest economy, China naturally takes precautions for her security. In the last three years, she has stepped up her preparations.
The Lumbini project would be coup against China’s detractors considering that Lumbini is to especially Buddhists what Mecca is to the Muslims. The project, if it does take off, should enable Beijing to earn significant propaganda points while also serving as center for gathering information of its strategic interests, just as others, notably India, are doing.
Beijing is well aware how India signs agreement with District Development Committees in Nepal’s hill areas near the border areas with China. In Mustang alone, India is assisting in about ten projects. Only recently, a deal was signed with the DDC in Mustang for a support of Rs. 37.3 million for the preservation and upkeep of the Mustang monastery. Such projects give plenty of scope for intelligence work in collecting information, spotting people for recruitment and ensuring regular supply of information and action in areas considered sensitive by foreign missions. The many projects in the northern districts give enough work for the five Indian intelligence agencies represented at the sprawling Indian Embassy in Lazimpat.
Beijing is letting all and sundry know that it is not sitting idle. China’s state-owned radio has acquired “downlink” permission to rebroadcast its programs across Nepal. The China Radio International began rebroadcasting its programs through Maitri FM radio in 2008. It plans to expand the reach to more districts in Nepal. So far BBC is the only international radio broadcasting service that has extensive reach among Nepali listeners. China Radio seems keen to be not far behind in the days ahead.
Such activities have limited impact, unless supported other major undertakings. The proposed Lumbini project is an idea with potential for rewards to Nepalis as well as China. Although the Government of Nepal is silent and the bureaucracy reportedly unaware of the development, China could not have mentioned it only to unsettle India and the US. Beijing knows which side of the bread is buttered. If it comes to Nepal with large investment plans, it is sending its own message to its opponents in the international arena. And Nepal is not its opponent. (The writer can be reached at: trikalvastavik@yahoo.com
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