With the president directing the Legislature-Parliament to initiate the procedure for a majority government, will the country get a new prime minister? Do we even need to have one if it is all about having a majority government? Logically, it does not make any sense because Madhav Kumar Nepal’s government is already a majority government. It is altogether a different thing that MKN’s government is full of fraudulent individuals that do not even hesitate to submit fake travel documents for reimbursement. But fraudulent behavior of cabinet members alone cannot be a sufficient reason for replacing a government, can it be? If fraudulence were to be the sole criteria for dismissal, what could be a bigger fraud than getting paid and not discharging your duties? Yes, you guessed it right, I am referring to the parliamentarians who are getting paid the third year in a row for drafting the constitution and who are almost sure to miss the new deadline as well.
One of the many reasons why aid-dependent economy like ours does not develop is that when you get habituated to having fish caught by someone, you do not care if your recklessness is rotting some of the fish handed over to you. A poor nation like Nepal needs to become fiscally conservative and socially liberal in order for it to really develop. It is the other way round in Nepal. Nobody cares, at least not the politicians, even when scarce resources are being thrown down the toilet.
One good thing about the repeated failure of the past prime ministerial election is that it has to a large extent desensitized those that were obsessed with “consensus politics” for whatever reason it might be. We live in a society, where popularity of the nuclear family is on the rise. It may be in part because of the increasing wages earned by the middle class and women’s empowerment but breaking down of consensus among them is also one of the contributing factors. Trying to achieve something, which is breaking down at household levels, at a national level is quite unrealistic. Besides that, in politics, for consensus to occur, there has to be a compulsion, which is not the case in our political space.
Jhala Nath Khanal plays his “neutral” game because he can afford to do so. Dahal has mastered the art of turning incompetent but ambitious politicians of the Nepali Congress and CPN-UML into useful idiots. Forgetting how Dahal skillfully lured Girija Prasad Koirala with the presidential lollypop and made a complete U-turn, the likes of Shekhar Koirala still think that letting the Maoists to lead the government is no big deal.
There is no doubt that there is no option but to engage with the Maoists. But what is also equally important is to remain aware of the Maoists’ track record of not abiding to past commitments. Unless a clear precedence of the Maoists sticking to democratic principles is established, it would be suicidal to get excited by a mere fact that they allowed the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to come under the supervision of the special committee and let them lead the government. A single positive move alone is not a good sample size to have confidence in the Maoists. And, if anything, what options did the Maoists have in hand other than agreeing to let the PLA be monitored by the special committee? They did everything in their power from threatening with violence to writing a letter to the United Nations Secretary General in order to have United Nations Mission in Nepal stay.
There are very little chances that the upcoming election will be successful in giving the nation a new prime minister. One of the reasons why it is very unlikely that the country will have a new prime minister through the upcoming election is that the new parliamentary regulation has a “carrot” but not a “stick,” which is what is needed to make Nepali politicians more functional. The new regulation requires that the election for a new prime minister be carried out in maximum three rounds, with the candidate needing to clinch a clear majority of the total existing seats in parliament. And, what happens if the House fails to pick a prime minister after the completion of the third round? The election procedure has to be started afresh. Genius, isn’t it?
The outcome of the process would have been guaranteed had the amendment been more forceful about a positive outcome. Had the amendment made it absolutely clear that the failure to elect a prime minister even after the three rounds of election would automatically lead to the dissolution of the House, the chances of having a new government would have been 100 percent. With hundreds of thousands of Devi Prasad Regmi’s out there, politicians definitely want to keep their cotton-soft chicks warm with a tight slap.
When it comes to dealing with parliamentarians, the president so far has been acting like a guardian of decent, well-educated, and well-behaved kids, which is not what most of them are. What this has done is that parliamentarians that are supposed to look up to him for guardianship have started taking him for granted. He should not be telling the likes of Dahal that he would not intervene no matter what, which he did to Dahal, a couple of weeks ago. Such a revelation would further encourage Dahal, Khanal and others out there to hold the political process hostage. Sometimes, it is good to keep people guessing.
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