By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
No one less than the respected and progressive Nepali Congress leader Dr. Shekhar Koirala has expressed his frustration over the country’s sickening and disgusting political situation.
In a discussion with intellectuals in the capital last Saturday, he was overwhelmed and almost shed tears feeling sad about the country’s dismal situation (TRN/The Rising Nepal, Aug. 20).
Dr. Koirala said the country was passing through an incurably difficult situation: “Scam after scam is exposed, but it ends without proper investigation and logical conclusion. In this situation, what answer do we have for people,” he asked dejectedly.
The Nepali body politic is without doubt terribly sick, but the situation is not yet quite that hopeless. Someone has to radically eradicate all cancerous growth and stop any chance of the cancer metastasizing.
The intellectuals advising him took the easy way out by suggesting that the Nepali Congress pull out of the present government as it was making unpopular decisions.
Unfortunately, the NC is part of the problem and not the solution.
The NC leadership is hand in glove with the Maoists and is not interested in solving the country’s self-generated problems and scams.
They are more interested in ‘making hay while the sun shines’.
The various schemes for making illegal money is still ongoing. And the ringleaders and masterminds of the various scams will never be brought to justice because the government is using all the tricks of the trade to delay, avoid, dodge and sideline the investigations, e.g. by transferring the relevant police officers.
They are successfully leading us up the garden path. It is all a question of ‘smoke and mirrors’.
Quite unknown to us, the government is pursuing the greatest scam of all: ‘fooling all of the people, all of the time’.
If Dr. Koirala is really that concerned about the miserable state of the nation, he should abandon the current NC and form a breakaway ‘Social Democratic Nepali Congress’ and take a sizable chunk of like-minded progressive NC-members with him.
He should then forge an alliance with forward-looking, dynamic and patriotic forces like the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) and the Rashtriya Swatantra Party (RSP) to explore ways and means to topple the present useless government.
The final aim is to strive for a complete rejuvenation of the nation in which all Nepalese of goodwill participate.
Clearly, we need to fashion a new system of good governance in which corruption is reduced to a minimum and accountability is entrenched at all levels – from the community level to the central government.
[Editor’s note: During his student years in Calcutta, 1959-65, the writer was the P.A. of General Subarna Shumsher, then the supreme leader of the Nepali Congress in exile during the Panchayat era; and assistant editor under NC leader D.K. Shahi, editor-in-chief of “Nepal Today”, the English organ of the party].
The writer can be reached at: shashipbmalla@hotmail.com
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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