Editorial

Last week exclusionary media designs were defeated amply by street shows covered well in the social media which overwhelmed the official attempt to observe the anniversary of the promulgation of the current constitution. Indeed, on almost all occasions the street was thronged by enthusiasts who reveled in tearing up the current constitution and burning copies. Somehow official coverage was ignored and the presence in these demonstrations overwhelmingly of youths has been a remarkable trait to make the establishment wary in more ways than one. The fact that these demonstrations were led by political aspirants yet to establish themselves as believable competitors to the current crop of establishment leaders is not lost on the public. The establishment leaders though are aware that the participants are the actual targets of their competitive efforts at cadre building. Somehow the streets have swung the crowd away from the parties and are demanding a change. This time the demand for the re-establishment of the 1990 constitution was, significantly, uniform. In this sense, long emerging street opposition to the 2006 agitation and the change it wrought as evinced in the six-year-old constitution is now evolving into a coherent demand for the replacement of that constitution with the constitution it displaced. There is this concern that the programme could not reach out to more participants still awaiting in the sidelines because of exclusionary strategies used by those with reach to ‘higher places’. The lurking suspicion that parochial designs still mar the movement at the top is also given credence by the insistence on part of many to conduct their own shows differently, suggesting that theirs was a movement not diluted by apolitical patrons who would want to run their own show at the expense of a movement that must involve all. Indeed, it is this apolitical conduct that contributed to the monarchy’s failures since the eighties. We have a whole class of popular politicians attracted to nationalistic politics by King Mahendra gradually sidelined and disgraced until their effects on society were gradually made redundant and replaced by self-aggrandizers willing to kowtow to high placed manipulators utterly removed from real politics. As a result, a palace-oriented political class was waylaid by party politicians who turned the tables on the Nepali monarch. The revival of demands for a leadership role for the monarch thus comes with reservations from quarters that the revival does not mean the same apolitical-top-heavy and bureaucratic manipulations. The fear is genuine as last week’s fractious demonstrations indicate. In this sense, the movement needs be refined with a healthy dose of politics that convincingly mobilizes the spontaneity latent in this, otherwise attractive trend for change. No wonder, thoughts turn towards the late Mahendra who ensured he was in direct touch with personal private meetings of his workers, crosschecked with his participation at group meetings of these workers and controlled through rigid man-management and rewards and punishment. Mahendra was aware that, otherwise, it would be his nears and dears that would control him and his workers and doom him to failure.