Editorial

The week comes when Nepali politics suits its achievement in the current constitution. Once again the week will have beneficiaries exhorting the system while the public look elsewhere. Fear exists that the anti-MCC street crowds will recede for the Congress and Communists to endorse the Millennium Challenge Compact on the sly. After all two separate Nepali ministers of different parties had signed it on the sly and the American insistence on parliamentary approval made the MCC public. Indeed one Maoist parliamentary speaker was blemished with a sex scandal and a public denuded with extreme sexual exploitation in course of the Maoist war learned more on the MCC files which speaker Mahra was sitting on and thus had to be unseated by the scandal. Mahra was no symptom. Another Maoist speaker who faces criminal charges at court is being accused as more MCC congenial if his party chairman Prachanda does not prevaricate. Again, Prachanda is not the symptom. Parliament can get the numbers to force the MCC to emerge for a vote in parliament. Prachanda or not, he can be nudged out of his proximity in government, a new Congress/UML government can be made to emerge and the MCC can be endorsed into law. Those who say that Nepali politics will rock if such legislation takes place may be disappointed. The country has seen the wonders that take place when Congress and the UML unite. MCC is just a ruse to seek such a combine. They did so many times previously. The current system is a product. The Congress and communists combined to endorse the Maoist movement, inculcated them in the political process and introduced the new constitution on that pretext. The Congress and communists coalesced before that and conducted the elections that the Maoists had been disturbing before that under the old 1990 constitution which heightened the Maoist exclusion. Indeed, the combine overcame the minority government problem in the parliament at that time. More to the point, the Congress and communists combined to endorse the Mahakali treaty which, at one sweep, endorsed Indian unilateral action on Tanakpur, defiled the sanctity of our Mahakali border and encouraged the occupation and dilution of the Mahakali source which now not only sees Nepali territory occupied, it also sees an Indian road constructed on Nepali soil and has encouraged a Sino-India treaty on a border that is actually a  tri-junction (belonging to Nepal-India and China). Indeed, the whole issue of the ‘pointed’ Nepali map or the ‘blunted’ Nepali map in the far northwest emerges from complications created by the Nepali Congress and Communist combined. And the departure from the country of visiting MCC officials from the U.S is actually no guarantee that the MCC will vanish. The streets opposing the MCC, incidentally, remain overtaken by yet other ‘left’ alignments. That this country should very calculatedly and continually challenge its own national interests and give in is symptomatic of the system. This is because the Congress and communists are old hand political actors who seek political funds and support for their organizations from outside the country and succeed very well in keeping genuine national interests at bay because of powerful foreign support. Many a critique agrees that it is the actors that shape a political system. In the Nepali case, the system feeds on the actors. It is these actors that collapsed perverted and collapsed the 1990 system; it is these very actors that brought in the constitution currently being celebrated because they have free play in perversion. It is thus that the system is at fault for the excesses since our leaders are propped under the system to serve their foreign sponsors on the strength of the popular vote for which their excesses cater.