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Editorial

Personalizing this editorial is tempting. In actual fact, every single citizen of this country will by now have defined his or her relationship with that Nepali institution which for over a decade and a half since its ouster remains very much under political focus to the embarrassment of a polity that insists on functioning without it. Old and new republicans in Nepal would have had their political philosophies and strategies well-served had the king obliged and left the country lock stock and barrel as all three Rana hereditary rulers had done in course of the democratic revolution. Critics of the oligarchic politics don’t hesitate to point out that Chandra Shamsher’s design had been fulfilled by the time his eldest son Mohan Shamsher usurped the mantle from his elder cousin Padma. His brothers shared the majority of top Rana rolls, he and his brothers had divided among themselves the virtual treasury of the country equipping them with unchallengeable political money to take on any competition and he himself alone had the singular experience of deputizing as closest assistant for his father who was the longest Rana ruler in the country. The collapse of the Rana at such an advantageous peak cannot just be accounted to the foreign climes, therefore. So, too, can the collapse of the Nepali monarchy just be brushed aside as a product of international politics. The bulk of the population concurs that Nepali politics found it convenient to edge the monarchy out because of bad politics on part of the monarchy. It is another matter that the populism of partisan politics was any better. The fact that efforts to extricate the individual from the partisan mess leave the individual citizen isolated on the streets leaderless and directionless is an experience that calls for a collective approach to opposition on the streets make redundant on their own. The fact is that the king’s regime failed. That it was made to fail from within also cannot be forgotten if one is to analyze the non-Congress and no-communist politicians whose support for the king was at best opportunistic as was evidently the inculcation into the king’s camp of the Congress and Communist supporters.

What matters though is that the population has for over a decade now been gradually calling the political establishment’s dare. This has more or less alerted the polity’s foreign sponsors and embarrassed the political establishment. This was to be expected. The lay public is flustered however at the inability of the option to emerge from the rabble of opportunistic demand-mongers who are hardly competition to monopolistic cadre-based and facilitated street wise workers of the political parties. There is agreement across the board that unhealthy resource and approach greed that collapsed the monarchy then remains a divisive factor the king found beyond reach to control then and the case remains visible still. After all grasp of political problems facilitated by grassroots proximity and trust remains confusingly distant in the midst of middlemen seeking to benefit from the leadership vacuum. There is also the lurking doubt, when it comes to a crunch, any movement will be swamped by the shortage of resources which will perhaps be pilfered by the middlemen to the detriment of the movement. A homegrown movement for political change, it appears, has been so asset-stripped that I the individual citizen or us the clamouring street crowd are being played with dangerously in our search for the leadership institution we see in the king and the national resources that can emerge from it when it is allowed to do so politically. In a way, the King is being kept away from us, as the republic would want it to be and so the effort at allecting ourselves to the ‘us’ status is being undermined by our own to the extent that it must still be the king and I. It is as if we are working against ourselves and the doomsday results of such excesses approach.