No time to waste

There is now just a month left for the latest extended term of the Constituent Assembly (CA) to expire. But, sadly, once again, the parties have not made much headway on settling major contentious issues. The problem prior to the previous extensions was primarily between Maoist and non-Maoist parties. Right now, however, the key knot is within the Maoist party, which is deeply polarized between the Pushpa Kamal Dahal-Baburam Bhattarai faction on the one hand and the Mohan Baidya faction on the other. The ability of the Dahal-Bhattarai duo to convince the Baidya faction and how much flexibility the latter group is able to show will largely determine the course of Nepali politics in the coming days.



The danger presently unfortunately is not only limited to the consequences that will follow if the peace and constitution writing processes do not make significant progress and the people reject the idea of another extension. The looming question currently is: What if the Baidya faction rejects to budge from their stance, break away from the mother party and possibly go underground? Since an insurgency once again is the last thing that Nepal needs, Dahal and Bhattarai have a historic responsibility of convincing their hardline faction. That is not easy. Prime Minister Bhattarai Saturday told Speaker Subas Nembang that he would do ‘something’ by Monday. He gave this statement after meeting Baidya. We can only hope that the premier was able to convince Baidya to display some degree of flexibility.



By now, one thing is clear: That we will again miss the November 30 deadline of concluding the peace process and writing the statute. And another extension, though not impossible, is very difficult without making some headway in the next one month—something concrete that political parties can show to the people. (The people calmly accepted the last extension as it happened soon after Dr Bhattarai, who has huge public appeal, was made the prime minister.) But for any progress to happen, the Baidya camp has to be taken into confidence. That is going to be the toughest test for both Prime Minister Bhattarai and Chairman Dahal in the next few weeks.



There are a lot of commentators and political analysts who argue that if political parties once again fail to reach consensus on crucial issues, the people should not support the extension of the CA. That is easy to say but to operate outside a political framework under which we have been operating since 2006 is going to be one tall order. The best solution, therefore, lies in all the political parties and all the different actors in it doing their bit to make things work under the existing mechanism. Anything outside is uncertain and possibly catastrophic.

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