AT LEAST 50 INJURED IN CHITWAN BUS ACCIDENT

AT LEAST 50 INJURED IN CHITWAN BUS ACCIDNT

Kathmandu, 2 Sept.:: At least 50 passengers were injured in a bus accident at Kahare in Chitwan Friday evening.
The bus was heading for Narayanghad from Pokhara.
Rescue and search teams have been mobilized
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OPINION

CONSPIRATORS IN CIVIL SOCIETY GARB

Kathmandu, 2 Sept: A scribe not long ago raised a very valid issue in an English broadsheet daily: “The ‘civil society’ we are talking about now in Nepal was artificially created by the media... However, because it was artificial, it was bound to fall…these individuals representing the civil society in a certain period of time have no civic constituency of their own other than being public intellectuals.”
It is true: many characters are projecting themselves as civil society leaders, carrying hidden foreign agendas, including disintegration of the social fabric for religious proselytizing. INGOs, infested with intelligence agencies, are pontificating on agendas supposed to promote Nepali people’s welfare. Indeed, “welfare” is what they recite so loftily, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review,
Their idea is to first ensure that the social fabric loosens and disintegrates for the hidden agendas to be pushed through. The very agencies that pontificate so relentlessly on transparency and good governance never raise the question of INGOs operating clandestinely after failing to be registered formally here.
“There are about 50 such agencies that are actually doing intelligence work. The situation is so bad that nothing can be done against them. Party workers are recruited to lucrative posts and their ‘gurus’ are commissioned well-paid consultancy work that prevents investigations and action against the illegally operating agencies,” said a highly placed security personnel.
Scores of MPs and their family members operate “NGOs” that are regular sources of foreign money. These NGO members double as “opinion leaders” and “civil society leaders”. Their lifestyles have changed dramatically through the “non-profit making” nature of their NGOs!
So low has the reputation of civil society “leaders” dipped that they do not make any impact any more, exposed as they are for having not only failed and faltered but for also ducking and dodging issues in a calculative manner to be on the popular side of the mainstream, i.e. political partisanship with one group or the other. Their performance was neither civil nor society-centric but self-centered.
As a consequence, even well-meaning people are finding it hard to retain their credibility. Two years ago, Dr. Sunder Mani Dixit, of the “Citizens Movement” rued that foreign missions did not meet people like him. Peeved at not being invited to any meeting with the visiting US Under Secretary Robert Blake in June 2009, Dixit said that the “deliberations here with different leaders could have been better balanced had he also met people involved in the civil society movement and others who are actively involved in the process of change. No doubt, the impressions he got will influence the Nepal policy of the new US administration.”
Dixit, ever keen to be in the limelight but finding it frustratingly painful at being ignored, failed to feel the pulse of the public and foreign missions that lay down their own priorities. For individuals who overestimate themselves and nurse an illusion that they hold the whole around under their thumbs, indifference from others become excruciatingly painful. Dixit is not an exception, though he should have known his ground well when Girija Prasad Koirala rebuffed him rudely when the medical doctor began rambling about good governance to the Nepali Congress leader who had entered Baluwatar residence for the umpteenth time after the political change in 2006.
Then there are people like Dr. Devendra Raj Pandey who dare not name names concerning the corrupt not because out of probity but because of expediency. They would not dare raise the issue of Maoist leaders involved in corruption but they make great haste in insinuating others that are perceived to be weak muscle-wise, money-wise and power-wise.
Dr. Bekh Bahadur Thapa is a no longer relevant. He could have carved a good role for himself but he has been seen over the past four and a half decades as a man who made the best of opportunities without calculating the long-term consequence on his own credibility. The man who was supposed to be an “exceptional” talent at the declared age of 27 or 28 and handpicked by King Mahendra for top jobs has been reduced to such a state that he cannot pronounce the names of his benefactors.
There was this “carpet scandal” in the mid-1970s that dragged in the names of quite a few prominent names, Dr. Thapa. Even before he was cleared of the scandal, Thapa was nominated ambassador to Washington. Those were also the times when economists-cum-civil society leaders would frown at someone like Dr. Harka Gurung when King Birendra appointed vice-chairman of the National Planning Commissioner. They were against “a geographer” being given such responsibility were seen campaigning for and succeeding in having another geographer, Dr. Mangal Siddhi Manandhar, to the same post more than 20 years later!
With such bickering, foreign intervention at every stage of governance is not surprising. If things continue as they are, popular outrage will also not be surprising. What could, however, be extremely surprising at the turn of events and the consequences inflicted.
Nepalis can be made only if Nepal is made, and Nepal can be made by Nepalis themselves. Unfortunately, corruption is rampant at every stage today. Would anyone like to differ over a conclusion that corruption in Nepal today is the highest ever in the last 60 years, from the multiparty years of the 1950s to the Panchayat period of the 1960s through the 1970s and the 1980s, or the “world best political system” in the 1990s and after as well as the “loktantric” democracy “in transition” since 2006?

There have been 20 governments in 21 years! The frequency in the change of government could rise even more speedily, given the talk of political ambitions to have individual portraits of “former” prime ministers at Singha Durbar that Maoist leader Dr. Baburam Bhattarai first spoke of before betraying his own ambitions for the same.

Will the new government prove any different? If you forget history, it might seem probable. But if the past is any guidance, there will be no substantive change, what with faction-fighting aggravating intraparty wrangling in most parties. With opponents within, no one needs to take the trouble of looking out for what opponents from other parties are aiming at.

Meanwhile, where have gone the promises of new life, triumph of human ideals for which much blood had been sacrifices for a new order in a New Nepal? Decisions should not be based on transitory passions but on the calculation of permanent wisdom. And this cannot be fulfilled by the present crop of the so-called civil society leaders.
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