OPINION Kathmandu, 18 Jan.: It’s becoming harder by the day not to feel for Sushil Koirala. Asked by the beleaguered Maoist-Madhesi ruling alliance to name a candidate for the premiership, the Nepali Congress pressed forward the name of its president to succeed Baburam Bhattarai, Maila Baje writes in Nepali Netbook. The ruling alliance probably thought that the deeply fractious Nepali Congress would have had a hard time coming up with one name. Conspiratorial minds within the party, it was probably thought, would not be able to stop pitting all those contenders off one another. That way, Dr. Bhattarai could hope to continue at the helm for a little while longer. Failing that, another communist could step in to pursue that chimera called consensus. When Sushil was nominated, the astonishment across the political spectrum was palpable. But it was almost immediately camouflaged by a bevy of excuses. He was too disinterested about everything, Maila Baje heard some said. Others pointed out that he was too ill to be able to focus on national challenges. He was inexperienced in administration, still others contended, citing his lack of an executive background. The latest count against Sushil seems to be that he is somehow against the 12-Point Agreement, the cornerstone of our hyped but hazy post-April 2006 transformation. By extension, this implies that Sushil is against India’s stifling involvement in Nepal, if not an outright anti-‘Indian’. Such talk is not new. A decade and a half ago, sections of the Indian media – inspired no less by that country’s intelligence community – had sought to link Sushil with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. The allegation that the ISI had bankrolled Sushil election campaign was exacerbated on the basis that his Banke constituency consisted of a heavy Muslim electorate. That charge did not seem undercut Sushil’s politics. (Let’s not forget that this was a time when the queen was virtually accused of masterminding an Indian premier’s assassination.) He remained active in the higher echelons of the Nepali Congress, emerging as Sher Bahadur Deuba’s nearest competitor for the premiership in the parliamentary party election following the Narayanhity Carnage in 2001. After strongman Girija Prasad Koirala’s death in 2010, Sushil was elected to the top job bolstered by much more than his surname. While nowhere near the towering personality Girija had been, Sushil has been no puny seat warmer, either. If anything, he has kept divisive tendencies within the party in rather notable check, as it ponders its future. How that anti-12-Point Agreement tag emerged, it’s hard to say. Sushil’s public pronouncements before and after the April 2006 uprising have not veered in any substantial way from established party policy. As far as his private collaborations are concerned, in all fairness, they should be as irrelevant as those of his peers. Part of the reason may be Sushil’s vociferous questioning of the Maoists’ motives in entering the peace process. But such suspicions have remained widespread from the start and have been fanned in large part by the Maoists themselves. Regardless, any impression that Sushil may be less than enthusiastic about India’s role in Nepali affairs appeared to have been negated last summer. In what seemed to be a hastily arranged visit to New Delhi, Sushil had engaged in broad-ranging consultations there. He met most prominent Indian politicians and his subsequent pronouncements did not differ from those made by his peers emerging from similar visits. So if critics believe Sushil is unworthy of the premiership, they must be able to make a more compelling case. Heck, he might even want to wear the current criticism as a badge of honor, given where we are today. nnnn FOR WHOM THE BELLS TOLL Kathmandu, 18 Jan.:Sickening as the situation is, the on-going political maneuvering, jaywalking and exercises in power-centric manipulations have borne nostalgia among the Nepali people for the years gone by. People openly and frequently talk about the need for a “dictator” to take over in order to tide over the relentless wrangling among power-brokers and the immediate beneficiaries of the prevailing regime. This speaks of their height of frustrations, Trikal Vastavik writes in People’s Review. They would willingly bear with the situation even if the script had remained the same as previously and only the characters in power changed. In drastically sharp contrast to what had been promised, they find themselves in a mess whose grave consequences threaten to eat into the very vitals of their national interests. The reason are the open, naked foreign interventions from even the moneyed Scandinavian Lilliputians and European pastors and their wards on a campaign of rapid proselytizing in what for them have become a fertile land for their propagation. When politics is mixed with such motives and missions, secular talks become a hoax. It is like a pope congratulating the head of another state for the latter’s country becoming a “secular” nation. Instead of going into the roots of the troubles today, the larger parties are occupied by either hanging on to power or, if in the opposition, climbing the seat of power whether logic stands for it or not. They have made a mockery of ethics, morality and political character. The letter and spirit of democracy in practice is beyond their intent, which is why they pass the blame-buck from post to post in a merry-go-round that never stops. Hence the Nepali people have been subjected to excuses galore that highlight perfidy at its worst by worthless, characterless politicians. These politicians and their organizations have ruined the prospects of generations to come, unless, of course, the tide of erosion is turned for the better by radical measures. First it was “sishu prajatantra” (infant democracy) right from the time of the revival of the multiparty system of government in the spring of 1990. Nepali Congress and CPN (UML) leaders spoke of “sishu prajatantra” day in and day out even if people began to see in it a ruse to not work and not deliver results of high rhetoric and bombastic promises made. The “infant” democracy to “transition period” argument has been used and abused to hoodwink people over and over again. Next came the “transition period” theme to defend their utter failure to maintain law and order, and bring in the reforms in all sectors that they had promised against the previous systems. What next? Nepal is in need of a radical measure, which would include rolling back what the existing “Big Parties” cast away in their deference to their foreign patrons and their own individual ambitions to grab power, reducing democracy and good governance to mere slogan with neither the competence nor any desire to fulfill. Little wonder then that extraneous series of agendas got inserted left and right in the name of Nepali people and “New Nepal.” The Nepali Congress and the CPN (UML) were dead against the Maoist rebels who had taken to arms. However, abruptly, they changed course 100 degrees and adopted the very agendas they had rejected all along when more than 15,000 Nepalis lost their lives and numerous others were displaced and suffered horrendous trauma. Subsequent events showed a pattern that firmly indicated that these parties would rely on blaming the “30 years of panchayat autocracy” to defend what they could not perform. Nearly a quarter of a century later, what have we today? As far as development works, stability, and law and order are concerned, the panchayat years proved to be better than the 1990s and after. However, the biggest drawback of the panchayat proved to be the ban on political parties. It was unfortunate that the draft constitution prepared by the late Shambhu Prasad Gyawali got buried before King Mahendra, who commissioned him the highly respected senior advocate to do so, could go through it at length and restore a multiparty system of democracy. For reasons not clear, rather not explained, King Bierndra did not take cue from his father’s course planned for accommodating the demand for lifting the ban on political parties. His 1979 announcement of a national referendum for a year later was a statesmanlike. It was a move that enabled fresh strands of political reforms to be introduced on his idea of gradual democracy. The gradual road to full-fledged multiparty polity attracted many sections from communist factions and the Nepali Congress to join the “panchayat with suitable reforms.” But by the late 1980s, the time for multiparty polity had clearly come. It had to come but the method and foreign assistance mobilized for the arrival had long-term implications, constantly overstretching the finer points of national sovereignty and integrity. The Maoists, aided and abetted by elements whose identities are by now well known, took to arms, introducing politics of violence. New groups have, too, learnt from the Maoists what and how to extract results they want. The predictable outcome is the current political paralysis that has rendered Nepal on the threshold of a failed state. The popular response to the Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal (RPPN)’s 18-distict, 10-day “Rath yatra” traversing hundreds of kilometers of roads in December proved to be a forum for the hundreds of thousands of youth and others to express their dissatisfaction with the so-called “gains of Jana Andolan II.” Millions of people lined the long route, expressing their solidarity with the motto and message carried by the campaign calling for reinstalling the provision of Nepal as a Hindu state in the constitution. The presence of so many youth made the leaders of other larger parties to assess the fallout for them and their organizations. Janakpur, as the starting point, was not without meaning. President Ram Baran Yadav, who hails from the area, closely followed the “yatra” trail just as the local cadres of the big parties did. Many leaders in the Nepali Congress and the CPN (UML) have begun to sit up and take active notice of the gathering momentum of a party that had only four members in the Constituent Assembly that never worked and was forced to exit after unilaterally doubling the mandate of its tenure from two years to four wasteful ones. NC and UML headquarters are reported to be receiving reports and complaints from their workers in the districts that they found it hard to defend the “secular” and “ethnicity-based federalism.” Their assessment is that Chitra Bahadur’s Jana Morcha is respected for consistently taking a stand against federalism and Kamal Thapa for an exemplary tolerant Hindu state instead of a secular state that allows aggressive proselytizing on the strength of foreign currencies. (The writer can be reached at: trikalvastavik@yahoo.com) nnnn