Focus on PLA

A sense of relief, at least for now! For the next two weeks, there would be no futile rounds of elections in parliament to elect a new prime minister. In between, Dashain will come and go. And, hopefully, with Dashain blessings, our leaders will become wiser and when they come back they will engage in fruitful rounds of substantive negotiations to end the political impasse before it mutates into a full-blown, intractable crisis. More than 100 days have been lost for nothing since caretaker Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal resigned to “facilitate formation of a national government”. On the contrary, his resignation seems to have only complicated the situation: Now there is neither a government with full authority nor is there a new one in sight. If the deadlock is not broken in the next couple of weeks, and the budget does not get endorsed in parliament, the country will face a budgetary crisis that will strike a bloody blow to an already ailing economy.



So the situation is pressing enough. But urgency is nowhere to be seen. And there are some troubling indications—that the leaders now seem to be losing faith in their own ability to come together to find a solution. That pessimism and hopelessness needs to be quickly supplanted with renewed belief in each other. One glimmer of hope amidst this despair is that the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) and Nepali Congress (NC)—the largest and second-largest parties in the Constituent Assembly—have agreed to hold bilateral talks to see if they can make any headway. It is true that, at the end of the day, the UCPN (M) and NC, as the two major stakeholders of the 12-point agreement and the current peace process, will have to decide whether they earnestly want to take the peace process to a logical end and write a new democratic constitution. If each of them is honest about the end goal, they will, willy-nilly, find a compromise on the nitty-gritty of the agreements. If not, we are headed for yet another round of conflict.



We still hope that both the parties understand that conflict is in no one’s interest. If the NC and the UCPN (M) find it difficult to reach an agreement on all substantive issues, they should focus on the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) issue first. Irrespective of whether they will reach an agreement or not, the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) is going to pack up and go in less than 100 days as per the mandate of the last Security Council meeting. If the parties fail to address this issue before UNMIN is gone, the peace process will start to unravel very fast. On the contrary, if they successfully sort out the PLA issue in the next 100 days or so, they will have addressed the most contentious issue of the peace process and renewed the trust between them. The rest will be easy to handle.

Related story

Former Maoist rebels: Who took the cut from our salary?