By L.D. Pulami
Things cannot get more worse than this for the country. The political leaders who always speak of ‘loktantra’ and other things which they will do for the welfare of the people are actually pushing the nation to the brink of disaster. They seem to have no feelings for the common citizens of this country as long as their own needs for power, post and money are fulfilled. This atmosphere of conflict between the political parties themselves has raised the concern of the people who were already worried by other woes they were facing in their day-to-day existence.
The politicians are only spouting slogans which seem attractive to the masses, but just the developments we have seen in recent months, are enough for even the most naïve person to realize that the leaders are only lying and fooling the people and indulging in corrupt activities.
The nonchalant attitude of Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal is also irking many close observers of the way the government is functioning. He waved away a question asked by journalists regarding the arrest of a prominent person who is the head of the Kantipur Media Group after he was taken into police detention following an accusation of holding two citizenship papers. The PM offhandedly said that it was a court case and so much noise should not be made about this. This attitude of the leaders now in the government is pathetic, but so is the tendency of the local NGOs to invite foreigners to tell the government what it should do.
Have these same foreign ‘good doers’ said anything about the carnage the entire world is seeing in the Gaza Strip where the majority of the Palestinians live? Or have they spoken about what is happening in Ukraine where thousands of people are suffering and the Western powers led by the United States are pouring in billions of dollars worth of arms and ammunition in the name of bringing peace to that troubled country?
At the same time, it would not be being partisan if we reminded those up in arms now about the ham-handed manner in which the publisher of this media house has been arrested, it should first be clear that this man is not the ‘messiah’ of a free press, as he claims to be. He was a small businessman who got involved in the media sector sometime in the Nineties and rose to become who he is now. He bought the total rights of this media group by shunting aside the original owners of Kantipur, Shyam Goenka and later a former civil servant named Hem Raj Gyawali. It would not be proper to ask about how Gyawali was able to start this multi-million rupees project, as he has already died.
But to come back to the issue of foreigners coming to Nepal and preaching to the citizens of this independent country and also its government, this attitude of the foreign INGOs must be taken as direct intervention which has contributed to bringing political instability and social disharmony in diverse, but tiny in size Nepal.
There are many examples of foreign governments through the ‘good intentions’ of the INGOs working to disturb the government here, creating a situation of conflict among the political parties and also differences among the people who once lived peacefully with one another. There are many other issues which the Nepali people could have resolved themselves. Of course, such foreign interference has not become possible without a few cunning leaders within the country, like persons who head certain local NGOs, people who like to say they are leaders of the ‘civil society’, politicians and others who do as foreigners tell them to do, who actually are further weakening the state. They do this for personal gains in their greed for dollars and other foreign currencies.
At present, the major political parties are at a deadlock in carrying on the regular works of the parliament, with opposition parties led by the Nepali Congress on one side and the newly formed Rastriya Swatantra Party, the Maoist Center and the CPN (UML) who all share important portfolios in the present hastily cobbled government led by Pushpa Kamal Dahal of the Maoist Center on the other side.
The Nepali Congress and other opposition parties are demanding a parliamentary commission to investigate the cooperative scam, where the present Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister Ravi Lamichhane is allegedly involved. Heated accusations are being hurled by the leaders of the pro-government parties and those in the opposition benches. But some issues were tabled, though mostly MPs of the Nepali Congress were shouting slogans and surrounding the well of the House of Representatives (HOR). Though PM Dahal has said that there will be a breakthrough in this deadlock before the budget is announced, till the time of writing this piece, there were no positive developments and it was expected by observers that like in the past few days, the government would bulldoze its way to present the budget, even if the opposition MPs have to be surrounded by the Marshals in the HOR.
This stand-off and southing of accusations at one another definitely indicates that most of the leaders are directly involved in different corruption scandals and as pointed out by an analyst, the present deadlock continues because all of the leaders know about the nefarious activities of one another and they are afraid of being exposed in the eyes of the people. Of course, one easy outlet for the parties and their leaders is to jointly blame the former King and as always give the excuse that ‘loktantra’ and the present republic system are under attack by ‘regressive’ forces. As said by a priest when former Crown Prince Paras visited Lalitpur to offer puja for forgiveness as one part of the chariot of Lord Machhindranath was damaged, the political leaders have done nothing for the nation and the people and they are afraid that the former King may come back to power. As mentioned earlier, this attitude of the top leaders is only pushing the country to a dangerous brink, where we all can expect only political instability and even an armed conflict, like the one started by the Maoists some decades back, which brought the Maoists to power but destroyed the nation in many other ways.
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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