DPM SHRESTHA UNDERGOES OPERATION IN JAPAN

DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER SHRESTHA OPERATED IN JAPAN

Kathmandu, 19 Jan.: Deputy Prime Minister an Foreign Minister
Narayan Kazi Shrestha Thursday underwent an operation at Hokkaido University Hospital in Japan.
He’ll have to spend two weeks in hospital, Radio Nepal said
Shrestha was suffering spinal and neck problems.
A published report said he was suffering degeneration of the bones.
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OPINION

CHINA PLAYS NEPAL CARD


Kathmandu, 19 Jan.: One striking aspect of Premier Wen Jiabao’s abbreviated visit to Nepal was his professed expectation that Nepal’s relations with India would continue to grow in the days ahead, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.
To be sure, the assertion was revealed to the public indirectly. But since it has not been contradicted, the sentiment can be assumed to be one both Beijing and Kathmandu want disseminated in the aftermath, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook.
At one level, you could argue that such a candid expression of goodwill on Wen’s part would be conducive to boosting the kind of stability that has eluded Nepal for a long time. Moreover, no country would question another’s sovereign right to conduct relations with a third nation as it wished.
And have not we heard countless Indian leaders go on the record that they were entirely satisfied with Nepal’s growing relations with China?
The Chinese have been particularly adept in transforming this accepted practice of international behavior into a tool of foreign policy. It is not hard to see how the longer the Indians and others are preoccupied with deciphering the motives and intentions of the Chinese in Nepal, the better it is for the mandarins up north.
You do not have to be an incorrigible cynic to see the depravity inherent in Beijing advising a government led by a party that has so strenuously flaunted its northern tilt with abandoned while spewing anti-Indianism for several years now to pursue greater ties with India. One can only imagine the heartburn among the hardest liners among the Mohan Baidya camp.
The circumstances and schedule of Wen’s visit amply underscore that it was one the visitor was anxious to make. That he was intent on doing so to send a message to audiences beyond Nepal was equally clear. Normally, visiting Chinese dignitaries have included Nepal in a wider regional itinerary or in terms of countries with which they believe they share civilization or traditional ties. From Beijing’s perspective, it suffices that the visit took place at all.
The pledges of Chinese assistance that made international headlines may be of limited purposes here. Foreign assistance that comes with no strings attached – touted as the singular tenet of Chinese benevolence – tends to cuts both ways. The donor can delay projects or disbursements or quietly pull out altogether on grounds that may not be anticipated or often explicable to the recipient.
What Nepalis and others should perhaps focus on is the basis for pursuing bilateral relations that Wen’s visit has provided to the next generation of China’s leadership, which is to begin ascending power at the party congress later this year.
Many key factions – including the ‘princelings’ (scions of former PRC leaders and officials) and the ‘neo-comms’ – are likely to bring a neo-Maoist approach to the helm over the ensuing years as they continue to dominate the levers of power. The Communist Youth League led by President Hu Jintao is unlikely to be able to challenge any broadening of such an alliance. The voice the People’s Liberation Army has acquired in China’s policies concerning its periphery has been ringing a disproportionate echo on matters concerning Nepal.
Those dwelling on – and denigrating – Nepal’s brazen flaunting of the so-called China card always sought to deny the fact that any game by definition requires a full-fledged partner willing to play on the established terms. Today those critics find themselves forced to contend with the meaning and motives of China’s Nepal card.
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MESS, CRISIS AND WORSE

Kathmandu, 19 Jan.: Most large political parties face a crisis of credibility atop a crisis of confidence. This explains why they are scared to hell as to how voters would receive them the next time they go pleading for support, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review.
Nowhere in the world has a Constituent Assembly’s tenure been extended. Noted constitutionalists in Nepal have been speaking against the extensions that the CA has been seeking and getting despite the fact that its tenure expired nearly two years ago.
Power and only power is the target of the major political parties that are responsible for the mess that the country is in today. We have had five prime ministers, from Girija Prasad Koirala to Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Madhav Kumar Nepal, Jhala Nath Khanal and, currently, Babu Ram Bhattarai.
They came; they chaired; and they left, leaving behind most unremarkable legacies and yet angling for another round at the post of power. If noted at all, it was for the unbridled impunity that has engulfed the entire nation as a gift of the new dispensation.
The commonality among them was that they all promised many things to many people in “New Nepal”. They also shared another common feature: they could neither ensure law and order nor check rampant corruption, earning for the republic of Nepal the most unenviable tag of “South Asia’s second most corrupt practices”.
Foreign heads of government and state do not pay visits to this country any longer. More foreign dignitaries visited this country during the bad old days of the partyless panchayat years than in the post-1990 period. The last six years have witnessed a virtual draught in this respect.
Queen Elizabeth paid a state visit in 1961, shortly after King Mahendra’s “coup”. A quarter of a century later, she again paid a state visit in 1986 when the pachas were celebrating the silver jubilee of the partyless polity.
Both King Mahendra and King Birendra paid state visits to many foreign capitals, including all the five Veto Powers of the UN Security Council. US President Lyndon B. Johnson and Lady Johnson received King Mahendra and Queen Ratna whereas President Ronald and Rosalyn Reagan received King Birendra and Queen Aiswarya. King Birendra was the foreign head of state to China who paid the highest number of visits by any foreign head of state to that communist country.
The foreign policy success was also indicated by the fact that 116 countries supported King Birendra’s Peace Zone proposal. It is a sad commentary on the existing state of Nepal’s foreign policy conduct. With the present crop of democratic, progressive and revolutionary leaders, Nepalis do not need other detractors to shoot down the country’s international image.
Surely, people had expected the republic of Nepal to achieve much more than what the now-discounted monarchy had achieved all along. It all began with utter failure to win a seat on the Security Council as an elected member, something Nepal had accomplished during the bad old days of “autocracy”.
Then there was this worthless exercise in trying to get an ex-UN bureaucrat, who spent all his prime working outside of Nepal, elected to preside over the UN General Assembly. Any sane mind could have seen the situation loud and clear except the candidate and his blind backers. The result: a drubbing from whose sting any Nepali with pride is to fully recover from.
Why is it that the first president of the republic of Nepal does not get invitations to prominent world capitals? Why is it that the five premiers of the “New Nepal” never got any notable invitation from abroad, except from our traditional friends on the south and north? Even here, things have gone amiss. Jhala Nath Khanal, of the UML, could not pay pilgrimage to New Delhi, despite his desperate efforts. Making and official trip to Beijing has also proved to be an arduous proposition.
For decades the Nepali Congress, CPN (UML) and UNCP (Maoist) in their various incarnations used to speak of the derailment of their efforts at formulating a Constitution by a Constituent Assembly, their actions in the past three and a half years have clearly shown that they neither have the vision nor capacity to render the very task they themselves vowed to get accomplished for more than 60 years.
Talking is one thing, doing is something else. Although the late Rishikesh Shah contributed to the drafting of the panchayat Constitution that went on to create a partyless polity which lasted for almost 30 years, he changed his attitude toward monarchy when things did not go the way he perceived. In the 1980s, he began exhorting people who called on him at his residence: “We should finish off the Thakuri rule.”
Some in the audience used to remind him that he, too, was a Thakuri after all. Shah used to grudgingly laugh the comments away but developed the habit of repeating the same especially in the course of the 1989 movement for restoration of democracy.
Shah had aspired for the prime minister’s chair, which he never got. King Birendra found the mercurial scholar/politician/human rights activist “unreliable” for his purpose and concerns. During King Mahendra’s rule, Shah’s “Heroes and Builders of Nepal” found its way as a compulsory English textbook. Most people have never heard of the book that was hailed at one time and is not even mentioned for the last 20 years and more.

Flip-flop is the trade mark of Nepali politics. Initially, some NC leaders were for a confederation with India and some of its leaders had even suggested that India should handle Nepal’s defense and foreign policies. The party that boasts of having led “all democratic” movements in Nepal was also responsible for banning Nepal Communist Party in the 1950s.
It was Tanka Prasad Acharya, whose government introduced public service commission, initiated periodic planning and saw Nepal’s formal entry as a member of the United Nations, that the ban on the Communist Party of Nepal was lifted. Instead of reconciling to the move, NC B.P. Koirala and his party members saw it as a “palace move to use the communists for its own interests”. They also saw it wrong that the communists held their first major gathering after the lifting of the ban at Fora Durbar. The ghost of Damodar Shumsher bears witness to this.
With such background and consistent pattern like a leopard never changing its spot, these parties do not learn and Nepalis continue to burn their fingers as a result. The worse is, therefore, yet to come.
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