So we are no longer capable of integrity in camera. Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal blamed the lack of honesty for the failure of the two-day secret talks among top leaders of the major three parties at Hattiban.From the accumulated wisdom available to us, you could commiserate in Nepal’s ostensible naiveté. What power can arise or hold its own without hypocrisy, lying, punishments, prisons, fortresses or murder? (Leo Tolstoy) Or is our honorable gentleman outright uninformed? It is not power that corrupts people but fools who get into a position of power that corrupt power. (George Bernard Shaw).
However untrue everyone else may have become, Prime Minister Nepal does not seem to have lost his own candor. He wanted the premiership so bad that he moved destiny. Once there, he started radiating so much triumph over common sense that everyone else felt impelled to ask him to quit. He did so on his terms and is set to become the longest caretaker head of government in the world. Contentment was bound to run out. Regardless of particular status in power, the man knows that the country wants him to take care of them.
But the Maoists won’t allow him to present the budget in the legislature because they believe he’s going to interpret approval as a regularization of his government. Premier Nepal so detests the comparisons with Nagendra Prasad Rijal that he wants to hand over the reins to President Ram Baran Yadav. No one, with the ostensible exception of Nepal Workers and Peasants Party President Narayan Man Bijukchhe, likes that idea.
Might Nepal’s candor help the country get a new prime minister? The three parties were mulling the prospect of a rotational prime ministerial system before that secret conclave. Even though the current legislature has barely six months of life left, this Back to Village National Campaign central committee-style collective leadership still sounds interesting. It would allow the rival aspirants within each party, too, to deliberate on how they might take turns. Through last-minute consensus, the assembly could be extended again, legitimized by, if not anything else, precedent. But here too the Nepali Congress, which wants the first crack at it, is playing the spoiler.
So Prime Minister Nepal will probably want to continue until the alternative arrangements U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon spoke about after UNMIN’s departure. The government would perhaps delay responding to the Indian government’s allegations that Nepalese Maoists are training their Indian counterparts on our soil – or at least waffle.
With the dawn of the New Year, all the three major external players will have been at their seats on U.N. Security Council. The unstable tripolarity on Nepal can then be expected to enter a new phase of instability. Prime Minister Nepal, no doubt, knows that Nepalis do not have a monopoly on perfidy.
