UPDATE NEPAL PLAYS USA IN ICC CRICKET GROUP 4 Kathmandu, 6 Sept. Nepal plays USA Friday morning in the ICC World Cricket League Division 4 in Kuala Lumpur. Nepal had defeated Singapore, Tanzania and Malaysia in all its three outings. nnnn OPINION READING BABURAM BHATTARAI IN TEHRAN Kathmandu, 6 Sept.: When Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai departed for Tehran leading the Nepali delegation to the summit of Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), it finally seemed like he had begun to walk the walk, Maila Baje writes in NepaliNetbook. Having penned an impassioned op-ed in a leading daily days earlier on the need for Nepal to pursue a foreign policy that genuinely served the national interest, Dr. Bhattarai faced an immediate test. The Americans did not want him to go to Iran, desiring that Nepal leave its participation at the 16th summit at a lower level. Clearly, the greater the number of heads of state or government who stayed away from Tehran, the better it would be for Washington’s decades-long bipartisan campaign to isolate the Islamic Republic. Nevertheless, Dr. Bhattarai was under tremendous pressure from the other side, too. India, which has maintained its own extensive relationship with Iran seemingly without undermining New Delhi’s strategic partnership with Washington, wanted to see Dr. Bhattarai in Tehran. Since Nepal, as a founding member of the NAM, would ordinarily have been expected to attend the summit at the highest level, the Indian angle did not assume much prominence or controversy. In his speech at the summit, Dr. Bhattarai generally reiterated Nepal’s traditional stands on international issues. He spoke of the need for forging a new global economic order based on equitable distribution of the available resources in the world. “We in Nepal are in favor of open, rules-based, equitable, predictable and non-discriminatory trading as well as financial and monetary systems,” he said. The prime minister also urged the delegates to commit to make NAM “a voice for the voiceless and a power for the powerless” – hardly a departure from traditional Nepali foreign policy tenets. In signing on to the Tehran Declaration, in which the NAM countries agreed that a nuclear energy program for peaceful purpose is the inseparable right of a nation, Dr. Bhattarai, like the other signatories, reiterated common sense. Dr. Bhattarai, in his own words, had said he was traveling to Iran to project and promote Nepal’s active nonaligned policy to the world. By the time he returned home, however, we learned that he might not have quite achieved that. At the center of the latest controversy to hit Nepal’s most-educated premier are the circumstances surrounding his meeting with his Indian counterpart. Dr. Bhattarai disappeared for over an hour for what he later told reporters was a one-on-one meeting with Dr. Manmohan Singh. Foreign Minister Narayan Kaji Shrestha, a fellow vice-chairman of the prime minister’s party, had no prior intimation of the meeting. The Indian prime minister, it later emerged, had his complement of advisers and aides. Although Dr. Bhattarai briefed reporters on his talks, what the two premiers really discussed remains in the realm of wide speculation. Our prime minister’s version of the talks could not be independently corroborated, an imperative Maila Baje believes that gained much more significance in view of Dr. Bhattarai’s early insistence that it was a one-on-one meeting. All this fueled suggestions that Dr. Bhattarai and Dr. Singh may have reached another written or unwritten accord/understanding/protocol that, by the meeting’s very ostensible secrecy, might not be to Nepal’s advantage. Seeking to assuage members of his delegation, Dr. Bhattarai sought to highlight his compulsions for the apparent clandestineness. His originally scheduled meeting with Dr. Singh, after all, had been called off and the two delegations were pressed for time. Yet by failing to explain that to members of the delegation – or at least those closest to him – beforehand exposed the prime minister to much grief. Also unclear is whether Dr. Bhattarai in any way pressed his interlocutors on unnatural circumstances of the meeting and its possible fallout back home. Someone who has so recently been on the receiving end of selective and convenient Indian leaks of supposedly secret confabulations and communications might have been more careful of his actions. But Dr. Bhattarai, upon his return, has adopted the posture of someone who feels confident enough of handling his internal critics as long as his external patrons are steadfast in their support. Maybe the Americans were on to something. Nnnn STORMS GATHER UNDER THE SURFACE Kathmandu, 6 Sept.: Irony pounds daily after the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly on June 27, when the 601-member elected body failed to produce a new constitution even after doubling its tenure against the two-year stipulation the Interim Constitution so clearly mandated, Trival Vastavik writes Peoole’s Review Fed up with constant bickering among politicians of the large parties and their corrupt practices in every nook and cranny of the state apparatus, an average Nepali seems to be sighing with great relief that the over-extended CA and the antics perpetrated in its name have finally ended. Nepalis have been witness to the most tranquil period in more than six years. Most Nepalis had never wanted or anticipated the agendas that were imposed on them: federalism, secularism and a republic. By sheer force, the authoritarian three major parties led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal’s Maoist party repressed the general feelings. It was nothing but organized terror whose repercussions are bound to strike hard and harsh in the days ahead. Prime Minister Baburam Bhattarai told journalists soon after the CA met an inglorious death that “Nepali people seem not to want a new constitution. Just see the quiet all around after the end of the Constituent Assembly.” Bhattarai was not clear whether he was complaining that the people did not raise a banner of strong protest in the streets. Or he might have felt relieved that they did not mind the dubious manner in which he and his party boss Pushpa Kamal Dahal engineered the elapsing of the CA even as its members were not in the know till the dying minutes of before midnight that fateful June 27. The problem is that Bhattarai, Dahal and Maoists in general have not changed. They are what they always were. It is only those who wanted to believe that the Maoists had changed express surprise that they have been misled and driven into a cesspool of uncertainty while having already adopted the agendas set by the former armed rebels on whose heads NC government had placed bounties. NC and CPN (UML) adopted the Maoist agendas on federalism, secularism and republican system lock, stock and barrel. At no one time during the signing of the Delhi-brokered 12-point accord in 2005 and during the initial months of questionably revived House of Representatives in 2006 had they mentioned the removal of monarchy. They did not dare to even agree to voices that called for a national referendum on the Maoist-dictated agendas set under the threatening shadows of the rebels from the war-zones, YCL and European religious groups moving about deceptively and influencing their front organizations surreptitiously or otherwise. The naked dance choreographed by a giant, intreferring neighboring country shames all but the Nepali version of Quislings. Indian Prime Minister’s former foreign policy advisor Shyam Sharan and Prof. S.D. Muni have disclosed that the Katawal incident in Nepal was not the independent decision of President Ram Baran Yadav but a move executed at New Delhi’s behest. Publicity-seekers at Yadav’s office, who hunger so much for giving the public an impression that the president is very active and busy, have done nothing to respond to such allegations. Bhattarai, Dahal and Mohan Baidya, of the breakaway group of Maoists, have not uttered a word on the statements by Sharan and Muni regarding the Katawal incident and a letter Bhattarai wrote to the Indian government during their “People’s War.” How are we ordinary folks who are neither “civil society leaders,” “human rights activists,” “Prof.-Dr.” or “former ministers” or “experts” to take the serious charges? Sharan and Muni do not make statements off the cuff unless approved by their government. Muni is by no means any influential person in India. Even a junior joint secretary at South Block’s dismisses him contemptuously for trying to give the impression that he is what he actually is not. Muni is a front used as a courier carrying trifle messages as a prelude to other emissaries with specific details. The highly over-rated Muni has far too disproportionately more influence in sections of the Nepali political spectrum and the news media than in his own country even when discussing issues concerning Nepal-India ties. Most large media in Nepal have kept themselves at a distance from commenting on the issues. The weeklies have taken positions along party lines. Communist leaders Chitra Bahadur K.C. and Narayan Man Bijukchhe, and monarchist Kamal Thapa have one common area of agreement. They are against federalism. While K.C. and Bijukchhe want federalism to be simply scrapped from the yet-to-be-formulated constitution that has deluded us so long, Thapa has a better option: national referendum on key controversial issues, including federalism. K.C. and Bijukchhe have not formally joined hands with Thapa on the issue of federalism of being placed before a referendum for a clear verdict from voters. On the other hand, other “mainstream parties” either pretend not to have heard of it or reject it altogether without any convincingly effective defense. On such issue, how do we describe the three leaders? Politicians often would term them Leftists, rightists or reactionaries? On the issue of the Maoist agendas, the three politicians have serious differences. They have let the same to be known to the public and political parties. Confident in their conviction, they have had the backbone in them to bring up issues voiced by most Nepalis. Their stand is taken with dislike by extraneous forces bent on pushing forth the agenda but without referring it to the Nepali people in a national referendum. Political leadership, in government or outside of the corridors of power, can command success on a sustained scale only through qualities like vision, command and control. Our politicians, at the top of their organizations or when at the helm of the state affairs, are either authoritarians in their parties or chicken out in the face of tough talk by party peers. They fail to maintain a balance between accommodation and decisive measures without being authoritarians. Put under pressure or in the line of fire, they surrender “gallantly,” they hide their tails between the legs tamely and without qualms. Their big boasts are without substance. With Delhi’s fingers in so many factions here, Nepal faces its worst crisis in more than 150 years, which is why a storing storm is gathering just beneath the surface. Were it to burst, the Gates of Heaven will not open. (The writer can be reached at: trikalvastavik@yahoo.com) nnnn