editMainstream politics and their extension in the media have deliberately excluded actual blow by blow accounts of the events leading to the current malaise. We are made to forget the call attention letter to parliament by late King Birendra querying the nature of the Maoist armed movement -- political, economic, social or security -- which was drowned out by charges of the constitutional king dabbling in politics, charges that left the timely royal injunction virtually unanswered and unattended to. We are made to forget that the national security agency, constitutional the foremost institution looking after national security, was left virtually un-composed until the Maoist movement took insurgency proportions requiring a national security response and even the parliament had to be cajoled to arrived at a consensus in declaring a national emergency in order for the country to take a non-partisan official standpoint in coping with the Maoist ‘revolt’. We are made to forget that the parliament was dissolved for elections primarily because of the in-party squabbles of the Nepali Congress, namely Girija Koirala vs Sher Bahadur Deuba, and the presiding prime minister, Deuba, asked the king to assume his constitutional role because of the ensuing constitutional crisis. Charges of a re-politicised monarchy drowned out the fact that the king, after having failed to receive parliamentary cooperation in the formation of a government from the dissolved parliament (recall the charges of the king issuing ‘tenders’) , ultimately asked for cooperation from the political stakeholders in a government chaired by the king for the restoration within two years of the constitutional process by restoring the election process beginning with the local elections at the municipal level long disrupted by the insurgency. It took the success of Janaandolan-2, ultimately partnered by the revolting Maoists and the parliamentary parties that had declared them terrorists, for Maoist chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal ‘Prachanda’ to reveal publicly how Congress President Girija Prasad Koirala had cajoled the Maoists to violently target participants in the elections conducted by the Royal government at the municipal levels to fail that legitimate democratic concern for the restoration of the elected local levels. The fact of the matter is that the people at the local levels had been robbed of their periodic right to elect their local self-government which was merely conducted twice during the first decade and a half under the previous constitution that saw three elections to parliament and umpteen changes in government. This and the manner of conduct of the second elections to the local levels actually fuelled the Maoist insurgency because of much widely felt exclusion. The fact of the mater is that the country has been deprived of its local leaders for the past decade since the change and this has been done so with the convenience of the locally elected being replaced by local partisans and their appointees who have been casually robbing the state of local resources. It is in these circumstances that the sitting government now is in haste to conduct the local level elections citing the absence of the locally elected bodies for over a decade. It is not hidden to the public though that the haste is in not reviving locally elected governments but in implementing the constitution which remains in limbo after its hasty, parochial and partisan introduction. In doing so, government is mocking the state and its people. Basic constitutional issues must be addressed first in order for the local levels to function as elected bodies. That schedules have already been set mocks the state further.