Editorial
King Mahendra’s political workers found their numbers dwindling and their direction deviating each time his son King Birendra introduced innovations in course of modernization until his call that all Nepalis were panchas and all panchas Nepali was summarily dismissed by the Congress and the communists and, at flagrant Indian instigation these political organizations displaced the panchas altogether. By this time, the newly educated that entered the political and employment market was recruited at school levels with the belief that the panchas were the kings’ lackeys and the king was a feudal power grabber. Deliberately or otherwise, much ostracization after 1990 found it convenient for the political parties to inculcate former panchas and those who found this akin to desertion regrouped themselves into the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party. A monarchy that, as a leader, gradually distanced itself from the workers through repeated experimentation, found that distance costly, ultimately, during King Gyanendra’s direct rule when the party did not endorse the King’s move although preferring, instead, to cooperate indirectly by silently sustaining the move by silently tolerating the King’s inculcation of its party members in his cabinet and lower wrung of government. After the monarchy’s abrupt removal from Nepal’s constitution, the party has been wavering between its support of a constitutional monarchy and the republicanism of today’s constitution as a result of which their representation in parliament has been reduced to a single seat of UML accommodation.
The party, blessed as it is with the oldest bottom-up organizational cadre (since its roots are in panchayat days) will continue to suffer desertions in forthcoming local level elections unless it asserts its identity as the party of cadre with monarchical beliefs. It is unlikely that their choice of a conservative identity will alone suffice in sustaining them at the hustings where local leaders must make concrete worker choices. A shrinking electorate will demand that RPP cadre assert their identity and supporters of the constitutional monarchy since that is their cadre base. Doing this at this late stage electioneering would be pretentious in the context of the party leadership’s behavior in the past years of republicanism. Given the growing public conscientiousness of the monarchy’s role in the preservation of the nation and the unconstitutional manner with which republicanism was introduced, that too with foreign prompting, in the country, RPP rank and file are being seen in almost every splinter street movement demanding the removal of the constitution. Strangely, the RPP has been a reluctant critic of the constitution and, instead, is a docile participant. Given the growing discontent among its workers, the wanton search for options by members of its competition, it is high time that the party leads and join hands with opponents of the current system who grow from strength to strength on the streets. By doing so the RPP will not only have seized a rare opportunity of heading a movement that is the only constitutional option to the present anarchy, it will have proven itself an organized catalyst for the change that an increasingly restive population seeks. Indeed, as local elections approach and as more indiscrete problems arise from within the system such as shall we say, the MCC, the long-awaited movement against the system will have been given a real organized option. If that is, the RPP acknowledge their mistakes and stick to their actual agenda as prescribed in their party statute.
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