Audacity of an old man

Octogenarian leader Girija Prasad Koirala (GPK) had his final wish granted: Sujata Koirala, whose only qualification is that she happens to be the daughter of GPK, has become deputy prime minister (DPM) of Nepal. She is the second Nepali woman, after late Shailaja Acharya, to get the coveted post. Her anointment as the DPM sums up the sorry state of Nepali Congress (NC). But it also says as much about the present state of Nepali politics: A father, in his late 80s, hell-bent to soar up the political future of his undeserving daughter, prevails against the ‘resistance’ by the prime minister (PM) and his own party. PM Madhav Kumar Nepal and NC, especially its senior leaders, cannot escape the blame for this indignation thrust upon the country.



PM Nepal may have initially tried to avoid promoting Sujata to the post of DPM but he certainly didn’t resist as much as he should have. If he had taken the stance against her promotion, there was nothing GPK could have done since his own party was also against it. The PM could have easily used the opposition within the NC as an excuse to deny her the promotion. But PM Nepal was eventually guided by two considerations: First, he wanted to return the favor to GPK for proposing him as the PM while the more natural choice within the UML would have been Jhala Nath Khanal. Second, he was more concerned about the survival of his own government, and mistakenly calculated that Sujata’s promotion would prolong its life.



If PM Nepal was driven by his self-interest and greed (to remain in power), the NC was paralyzed by the lack of guts to confront GPK and tell him that enough is enough. NC should have stopped Sujata when she was nominated by her father as a foreign minister to lead the NC ministers in the cabinet. At an informal meeting held at the party office, the senior leaders of NC had then decided that a senior leader, not Sujata, should lead the party in the cabinet. But when it came to delivering the message to GPK, no one was willing to bell the cat. Finally, Sushil Koirala called GPK’s secretary, Shekhar Thapa, and asked him to convey the message. The same story repeated this time around. On behalf of the party, NC parliamentary party leader Ram Chandra Poudel called the PM just before Sujata’s swearing in to lodge the party’s protest but neither he nor anyone else mustered courage to call GPK and tell him to stop his antics. Why would GPK have to consider the opinion of leaders who don’t even have the guts to meet him and speak out about their reservation? He didn’t.

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