When we reflect back on the whole MRP saga, it is still agonizingly painful how successive governments failed to initiate the process to import MRPs in time though the International Civil Aviation Organization had imposed April 1, 2010 as the deadline to introduce MRPs five years ago. And when this government finally took the initiative, though it was already too late, to meet the deadline, it did such a shoddy job. The competitive bidding process was started late and was scrapped in a rush without enough clarifications. Looking back at the scale of controversy the whole MRP issue has now landed into, the foreign ministry’s explanation that the bidding was canceled at the eleventh hour due to time constraint doesn’t sound convincing enough.
It has now come to the fore that the competitive bidding process was aborted after the Indian government entered the scene. On Dec 4, 2009, Indian Ambassador to Nepal Rakesh Sood wrote a letter to Foreign Minister Sujata Koirala offering to print the MRPs in India at Rs 200 apiece. The competitive bidding process was scrapped on Dec 15.
While canceling the competitive bidding process and offering the award to India, the government seems to have made a serious legal error and may have also overlooked the security aspect. The Public Procurement Act allows procuring goods at the government-to-government level, but for that a special committee headed by the chief secretary of the government needs to make recommendations to the cabinet justifying the need and rationale for a procurement at the bilateral level. The government did not form any such committee and the agreement took place without fulfilling this basic legal requirement. Besides political pressure from within his own party, UML, this legal lapse on the part of the government was also one reason why Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal reached a conclusion to scrap the deal a day before it was supposed to defend it before the Supreme Court.
But there is an even bigger blunder in missing to see the security interest of the Indian government in this whole episode. As we see it, some of the security concerns attached by some security experts to the MRP being printed in India were exaggerated. However, the country deserved to know what Indian ambassador meant when he had put in writing that printing MRPs in India would “address some of the security concerns [of India]”. Nepal has and must remain sensitive and try to address the legitimate security concerns of both of our neighbors – India and China. But a vital question here is whether the government knowingly or unknowingly undermined Nepal’s own security interests and sovereignty while trying to address Indian security interests. The government owes a candid clarification and an honest explanation to Nepali people on this.
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