That’s a fair question. The Supreme Court frees a former deputy inspector general of police sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his wife. The President invites a group of journalists, opens up and bids them goodbye telling them everything she said was off the record.
The prime minister’s loquacious legerdemain has been exacerbating our inability to focus on the issue of the moment. Legislative sessions have ceased to evoke public interest beyond who’s snoozing, yawning and gaping there.
The ruling party doesn’t know how long it can maintain the fiction of unity and is worried about running out of excuses. The main opposition party expels longstanding leaders on the flimsiest of allegations but is eager to welcome people breaking away from all kinds of other parties.
Having exhausted every political experiment, the people are understandably downhearted. It’s not that we have run out of alternatives to the status quo. No single one commands enough support to bring people onto the streets. For the first time since Matrika Prasad Koirala held that official title in 1950-1951, ‘dictator’ is beginning to acquire some positive connotation in the popular imagination.
The post-2006 political leadership, to be sure, has benefited from this apathy and could continue doing so. But it seems to have lost patience. The inevitability of collapse makes the wait more excruciating.
From the outset, the notion of a ‘new’ Nepal was too nebulous to work. Since it was a collective enterprise pushed by dominant internal political players carefully anointed by geopolitically attuned external stakeholders, the quest could carry particular momentum.
The script, moreover, could change with such great convenience because arbitrariness was camouflaged as compromise. A decade down the line, the new constitution stood on the three pillars that were not part of the agenda of ‘People’s Movement II’.
If anything, the outcome has been dear and dreadful. New taxes have been levied to fund and facilitate additional layers of the federalism-driven political/administrative machinery, with little to show for the people. Secularism is being promoted as affirmative action for a religion that has been the farthest from our roots. Republicanism has spawned neo-royalism with a pomp and splendor beating the ancien regime.
In retrospect, the political class made a shrewd bet. Since the Nepali people went along with each compromise made to uphold the main – albeit tenuous – 12-point compact, they, too, became stakeholders. Ordinarily, corruption may be a bad word, but in context, its institutionalization is what lubricates the state machinery in a resource-strapped economy. Nepotism, too, is part of the manifestation of newness with Nepali characteristics. After all, preserving hard-won gains requires us to make hard choices.
But, alas, the world around us has a logic of its own. When they made investments, each external stakeholder was benign in its intention. When the time has come to claim their return, they have turned bold in their expectations.
The political class is anxious to hasten what is considers an inescapable breakdown. Since no one is prepared to take the fall individually, they seem intent on collective responsibility.
