Editorial
The Americans added yet another ugly boost to our contention that the country is spiraling downward on a free-fall mode. The warning that failing to meet the MCC deadline will mean a Chinese hand in the country forcing a review of American policy in Nepal only corroborates that we are smack in the middle of a Fifties-style East-West confrontation we have been avoiding through strict non-alignment since then. The Americans, by this approach, squarely prompt our leadership to chose. We have been predicting that this choice was bound to come in the milieu of partisan politics deliberately encouraged by India and the West that cannot look beyond the immediate interests of its leaders and parties at the expense of a national approach that must see to national and regional stability keeping international rivalries at bay. The change prompted by the West and India enabled a system that allowed a surreptitious agreement signed separately by leaders and governments of the current cabal in the system with an American company which seeped into the public review to the consternation of a national opinion that traditional foreign agreement channels have been flaunted in pursuit of questionable objectives that, now, the Americans admit potentially introduced the Chinese in attempts to abort it. Us the Nepali people cannot but lament at a position of choice where the Americans must play the Chinese card in the opposition to the MCC. The system they have encouraged have merely encouraged a leadership class that, each in their own turn committed to the Compact but, upon public outrage, seek questionable methods to endorse their commitments at the expense of friendly Nepal-U.S. and Nepal-China relations.
The impact on the Nepali government and system is already disintegrative, to say the least. Conspiratorially, longstanding threats against the controversial Supreme Court Chief Justice is spurted to action to enable new alignments and standpoints in the legislature to surface with the hope that MCC opposition in the House will be lured to more congenial numbers and the spider web of conflicting demands within and among the opposition be subdued to make the MCC accessible. In other words, the growing number of opponents in the streets will prove no deterrent to the House entertaining the MCC bill positively, dismissing the opposition as mere shenanigans of the Chinese lobby. This strategy, one must insist, does not bode well for a country that has traditionally aspired to keep interests inimical to non-alignment at arm’s length. It is said that American stakes in the system should have made this possible. This puts Nepali public opinion squarely against its lackeys in Nepal. That the Americans must see us as Chinese lackeys is unfortunate and unreal.
We again deign welcome charges of regression by calling that a crashed constitution where the constitutional process must be so tampered with for sake of a national agreement with a foreign company be crashed outright. State security, the administration, the heads of the executive, judiciary and legislature have all been compromised radically. The current constitution is merely being manipulated to suit select power elite who benefited from untoward commitments to foreign states that ridicule the state outright. To public exasperation, the system can only exist on public deceptions currently underway. This is why we ask that constitutionality be restored to the country. The reintroduction of the 1990 constitution can be the only option to the current malaise. At least, it has self-correcting mechanisms which the current ruling cabal debunked for their, and not the national, convenience. We ask, indeed, demand, that, for sake of the population at large, these mechanisms reassert their presence. It is unlikely that the entrenched political elite obliges the state.
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