FORMER KING CALLS FOR DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION

FORMER KING CALLS FOR DEMOCRATIC CONSTITUTION
Kathmandu, 13 April: Former King Gyanendra Friday called for a democratic constitution that reflects core values ensures interests of Nepalese people while wishing them a happy New Year 2069.
He called for proper management while ensuring territorial integrity.
TEXT OF THE MESSAGE
"On the occasion of the advent of the New Year 2069 B.S., I extend my sincere best wishes to all the Nepalese, living within the country and abroad, for happiness, peace, good health and prosperity.
"Essentially, what Nepal needs today is peace, law and order, proper management and prosperity, for which, this magnificent nation’s territorial integrity must always be upheld with the patriotic Nepalese people standing firm and united.
"One must always be mindful that the bravery and sense of national pride of our ancestors, has enabled this beautiful nation to remain independent and sovereign. The time has come for us to ensure that this great legacy remains intact and the country’s existence is in no way jeopardized. Let us also not forget that only a democratic statute that reflects our core values and national ethos can truly safeguard the interest of the Nepalese people.
"Motivating a realization of this shared goal, may this New Year inspire us Nepalese to unite under a sustainable and reliable rallying point and touch hearts of our brothers and sisters in times of distress, affliction and hardship."
"May Lord Pashupatinath bless us all!, Jaya Nepal"
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SUPREME COURT STAYS GOVT. DECISION ON MASS RECRUITMENT OF MADESHI YOUTH IN NEPAL ARMY
Kathmandu, 13 April: The Supreme Court on Thursday quashed the writ filed against the recruitment of Madhesi youths into the Nepal Army, stating that the process was in line with the existing legal provisions. The order paves the way for the recruitment process, The Kathmandu Post reports..
A division bench of Chief Justice Khil Raj Regmi and Justice Sushila Karki stated that the government decision to recruit 3,000 youths including Madhesis, Dalits and Janajatis from all regions of Hills, Mountains and Madhes based on the policy paper brought by the government in this regard doesn't contravene any legal provision. The court ordered that the recruitment be undertaken as per the existing law. The 3,000 posts are the vacant positions in the existing strength of the Army.
Arguing from the side of the defendants, attorneys had stated that this recruitment was not meant only for the en masse entry of the Madhesis into the Army, as argued by the plaintiffs. Rather, they argued the policy was undertaken as part of the inclusive plan for the underrepresented community including Madhesis. Government Attorney Yuv Raj Subedi argued that the government's policy paper intended to first empower the marginalised communities and then bring them into competition. Similarly, advocate Dipendra Jha argued the policy paper had to be seen in light of the past agreements that called for NA's democratisation. Citing some international practices, Jha argued that the Army should reflect the social and cultural diversity in a society.
On December 26, the apex court, responding to a writ filed by lawmakers from Chure Bhawar Party, had stayed the government decision arguing that its bid to recruit en masse members of a particular community in the name of inclusion was against the spirit of the Interim Constitution. Any government effort aimed at making the Army more inclusive, the court said, should ensure inclusion of all the marginalised groups, including Madhesis, indigenous community, ethnic groups, Dalits, women and other backward sections. The court pointed out that it had to intervene also because the government failed to follow the due legal procedures. As per Article 144 (4) (A) of the constitution, the government has to formulate policies to make the Nepal Army inclusive by increasing access of the underrepresented and backward communities.
The government brought in a policy paper in December regarding the recruitment of marginalised communities in the Nepal Army including Madhesis wherein they had stated that the Madhesi youths' recruitment into the NA has called for undertaking programmes that will encourage the underrepresented communities to join the national army. The policy paper also called for announcing vacancies from three places in the Mountain, five in the Hills and eight in the Tarai regions.
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OPINION

MAJESTY OF MEDDLE AND MUDDLE

Kathmandu, 13 April: Two dramatically divergent Indian expositions of New Delhi’s approach, attitude and outlook on Nepal were on full public display this week.
Indian Ambassador Jayant Prasad affirmed a steadfast policy of non-interference. “India and Nepal are equal and sovereign states, and in keeping with the spirit of non-intervention in each other’s domestic affairs, India does not have preferred electoral outcomes, preferred ruling arrangements or favourites among political parties,” the ambassador said in his address to a seminar, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook..
Professor Sukh Deo Muni, a veteran Indian scholar on Nepal, gave a sharply contrasting view. Diving straight into a subject of current curiosity, Muni emphatically ruled out the possibility of the restoration of the monarchy. With far greater confidence, Muni predicted that a new constitution – in one form or the other – would be promulgated within the May 27 deadline.
Ambassador Prasad’s remarks do not merit too much space here. As his country’s top diplomat in Nepal, he could have said little else on such an emotive issue for Nepalis.
At one level, Professor Muni’s assertion, too, should not arouse too much attention. By most accounts, he was among the prime drivers on his side of the border of our 2006 political change. As such, he could scarcely acknowledge the failure of that enterprise.
Muni has spent a lifetime studying and explaining Nepal. There was a time he could be seen spending hours in and around Panchayat-era official media institutions, where many chiefs complained of being badgered by his incessant albeit probing inquiries. For some, it became natural to wonder whether there might have been more than met the eye to his role as an academic.
Years later, when Muni ended up serving as India’s ambassador to Laos, there were many Nepalis who speculated on the many calculations that might have gone on in avoiding his posting in Kathmandu.
Muni’s views on the Nepalese monarchy have changed with the times. His chapter “The Dynamics of Foreign Policy” in Nepal: An Assertive Monarchy, published in 1977, paid glowing tribute to King Mahendra’s practical achievements on the front, while recognizing the “evolutionary” contributions of B.P. Koirala.
In his 2009 book, India’s Foreign Policy: The Democracy Dimension, Muni gives a candid account of how India sought to overcome its monarchy-versus-Maoist dilemma, influenced no doubt by his own advocacy of turn Indian policy subsequently took. (One does sense in some of Muni’s recent pronouncements an abiding personal admiration for King Mahendra.)
In period since April 2006, Maila Baje understands that Muni has been under much pressure from powerful quarters in his country to explain how his analyses and assertions about the Maoists, particularly vis-à-vis their attitudes toward New Delhi, could have been so off base. In a sense, this is a do-or-die time for him.
The hubris with which he approached his mission this week has been breathtaking. He invoked the Indian government, bureaucracy and the people in opposing the restoration of the monarchy, almost expropriating to himself supernatural powers that even his mystical surname would barely entitle him to.
Apparently, Muni seems to know everything that transpired during the latest series of meetings between former king Gyanendra Shah and Indian leaders. Essentially, he seems to have read the mind of every personality and institution involved in every level of official deliberation on Nepal. And he seems to have read the mind of every Indian, religious, secular, culturally attuned or strategically minded. Indeed, whether the monarchy will ever be restored in Nepal is something that the country’s own domestic realities and its geo-strategic imperatives will determine – something the former king as well as the people fully understand.
What tops everything, however, is Muni’s assertion that a constitution of some kind will be promulgated within the deadline. That might be the case, but to what effect? At a superficial level, it would vindicate the stand taken by Muni and his ilk. But a constitution delegitimized by a dubious process unable to address an expanding sense of real and manufactured victimhood can hardly be to the benefit of Nepal or its neighborhood.
It is perhaps this realization deep down that explains Muni’s harsh words for our current political leadership.
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THE MISERY OF THE LOST SIX YEARS

Kathmandu, 13 April: Whenever the topic of social welfare and democracy crops up, the consensus in the comity of nations is that representative government, equal opportunity, social justice and national dignity are among the chief characteristics. Such fundamental qualities of a functioning democracy are something Nepali people dream of but are years away from actually experiencing them, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review..
We go to a museum for certain items and artifacts to view and study, to a zoo for animal and bird watching, to Paris for the Eiffel Tower, to New York for the Statue of Liberty, to Rome for an ancient amphitheatre or to Agra for the Taj Mahal. For proper representative governance, equal opportunity, social justice put into practice and national pride are held high. To see how they work, Nepalis have to travel to other parts of the world. A poorer option would be to read, surf the net or hear from second hand sources.
The edifice of hopes and promises came crashing down long ago. Sentiments, arguments and traditional hopes no longer work when a few enjoy great luxuries in the name of the people while the people in general suffer horrendous misery. Nepal’s existing conditions are far worse than what things were six years ago or earlier. That is why even the flip-flop former Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba has begun suggesting that the 1990 Constitution should “do” if a new Constitution is not prepared within the latest deadline.
The tongue-tied Deuba was the one who split his Nepali Congress before returning to the mother-fold. He was the one who exercised his constitutional right as an elected prime minister to dissolve the House of Representatives. He was the one who agreed to serve as the nominated premier of King Gyanendra who he likes to revile without rhyme and reason these days. He was the one who demanded that the dissolved House be reinstated. He is also the one aspiring to the prime minister’s chair for a fourth time, notwithstanding his extremely poor performance during all his previous stints.
But Girija Prasad Koirala was even worse, treating the Nepali Congress like his fiefdom and getting preoccupied with self-centralism. Indeed he led the 2005-6 movement whose slogan to restore the dissolved House got somehow transformed into several other agendas that were never made earlier. How the movement gathered momentum and who all had their hands in it are not too obvious to elaborate here any further, contrary to Koirala’s posture and his loyalists’ claim that it was leadership that inspired the entire movement.
The Nepali Congress under Koirala and the CPN (UML) under Madhav Kumar Nepal did not get a clue as to what was happening while they continued accepting and pretending to be among the “initiators” of the Maoist-led agendas one after another. They acted in haste and confusion; they now live to painfully regret in leisure and painful clarity. In the past six years, the Maoists have taken all vital initiatives and yet NC and UML never let a day pass now to condemn them. The three and a battery of Terai-based groups have monopolized the billions of taxpayers’ rupees through the “local mechanisms” they created in lieu of local governments.
The Kathmandu-centric civil society “leaders”, including “human rights” activists, most of them clearly tilted toward one party or the other, got engaged in antics of expediency and partisanism aimed at promoting their own personal agendas and ambitions.
They never spoke a word against attacks on former panchas and those who they considered to be pro-monarchy groups. The houses of the Keshar Bista’s, Kamal Thapa’s and Shrish Shumsher Rana’s were sought to be disfigured. Independent individuals with faith in constitutional monarchy were ostracized and publicly humiliated. Many of those, who held important positions and with long experience, were shunted out, be it in the university, the academy, the corporate sector or the bureaucracy. They were replaced by incompetent people in a highly charged political atmosphere.
Devendra Raj Pandey, Daman Nath Dhungana, Padma Ratna Tuladhar, Sundar Mani Dixit and many a riffraff paraded to hog the civil society “movement” which degenerated to such as extent that many other Asian and African countries have learnt valuable lessons from our misery as how not to let loose foreign money and forces through puppets created by foreign funds.
RPP-Nepal’s Rabindra Nath Sharma was attacked at various places since his party called for a referendum on the issues of monarchy, federalism and secular state. The former panchas who for long supported the ban on political parties and since 1990 accepted multiparty polity were not allowed to campaign freely. Their meetings were disrupted and their cadres intimidated, threatened or beaten black and blue. Former Jimmy carter, who was so humiliatingly rejected by the American voters in his bid for a second term in office, endorsed the conduct of the 2008 polls as fair even before the polling stations were several hours away from closing.
If the Maoists, NC and UML, among others who are responsible for the existing mess, had full faith in the voters and confident of the outcome, they would have agreed to put the issues raised by RPP-N’s Kamal Thapa and millions of other Nepalis to a national referendum and settle the issues of the “federal republic of secular Nepal” once and for all.
Some Terai leaders have begun accusing the Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal of playing a dual role over the Terai demands. If there is any ground for the complaint, so what? It is only one group complaining against another. There is no sympathy for those who do not hesitate to spin duplicity with the Nepali people.
In the agony of deprivation and bluff, people’s disenchantment is surging by the day. The Maoists’ penchant for brinkmanship and regular backslides took the mask off showing them as those quick with the tongue and quicker with the gears for abrupt U-turns.
Disgusted and demoralized, an average Nepali is waiting for the day to cast the doom on the devils. Political parties should do well to make sincere efforts at calming the disenchanted public. For Consistent incompetence and relentless misery provoke people to extremity whose direction and consequences is as uncertain as the whims and fancies of the political parties. The bottom line is that the existing state affairs cannot go on for any longer.
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