Three years after 19 days of nationwide protests left the international community awestruck, made a senior CNN journalist say live on TV that he had never seen as many people on the streets throughout his journalistic career, and convinced everyone that the impoverished nation had finally found a historic impetus to extricate itself from political mismanagement and poverty, Nepal is again a mess.
Our political parties that suffer from a permanent lapse of reason endlessly bicker over issues that common people stopped caring about a long time ago. They do so in the name of the people, who are left on their own to deal with the real issues.
Dark wintry days are again at our doorsteps. Food prices continue to soar and a food crisis is imminent in remote parts of Nepal. Kathmandu continues to suffer from a protracted garbage problem. Drinking water crisis is getting worse. Shortage of essentials like fuel and even banknotes has become regular. It is 21st century, yet 400 people die in the west from an easily curable ailment like diarrhea. In short, the country is set to join Niger, Afghanistan and Sierra Leone as one of the most uninhabitable places on earth.
But this evidently isn’t enough. Look at what new mouth-watering excitements we have in prospect to ensure that not only do we join those countries but even surpass them in the uninhabitable list.
If ‘civilian supremacy’ isn’t upheld soon, the Maoists will wage a “decisive struggle” against ‘military supremacy’ after Tihar because our comrades have realized that they are good at waging struggle and terrible at fixing the nation’s problems. If Sujata Koirala isn’t made deputy prime minister, her father and Nepali Congress President G P Koirala will most likely withdraw his blessing on the M K Nepal government, thus restarting the game of political musical chair. And if the budget isn’t passed by the parliament in two weeks from now, the country’s economy will freeze and there won’t be any disbursements for salary and pensions to civil servants. The future couldn’t be more promising! It’s amazing how after so many existing disasters, our leaders continue to come up with novel ideas to engineer newer and bigger disasters.
The political circus is no longer amusing. It has become unpalatable and disgusting.
Therefore, it’s time to tell the political parties that we do not expect anything from them.
It is time to rewrite the social contract since those in governance have deliberately chosen to forget that we pay them taxes so that they do for us what we cannot do as individuals –build roads; take care of our water and electricity needs; ensure the supply of fuel; make sure that we can draw our hard-earned money from banks; and protect us. Taxes have risen but service delivery is getting worse. A car owner today pays 50 percent more tax to the government than he did two years ago. But he is forced to drive on roads that have twice as many potholes as they did two years ago. Evidently, the social contract is not being honored.
Time has come for all the politically-neutral citizens of Nepal to let go of the tiring pretense of having any hope on the political parties. So let’s make a fresh pledge. From now, the political parties needn’t pretend that they are working in our interest. They are free to continue with the shameless bickering for chair. We understand that if a naked man doesn’t have the sense to put his clothes on, the best thing a beholder can do to save him the blushes is look elsewhere. So we will look elsewhere, while you carry on with your shameless power games. We don’t care if Sujata Koirala is made deputy prime minister. We don’t give a damn if you produce 10 more Sujatas and let them have turns in becoming deputy prime minister. After all, it has stopped mattering to a common Nepali who becomes the deputy prime minister, or prime minister.
We will continue to pay you taxes, not because we want to, but because we know that if you don’t have the cash to support your unproductive and parasitic way of life, you will come to our homes to extort us. Therefore, we will continue to let you afford the life of irresponsibility, doublespeak, myopia and madness.
But there is a condition.
In exchange, you must leave us alone. You must not disturb us. Let us commute to office and back home without having to deal with your party workers and cadres who start burning tires for reasons we cannot understand. Let our children go to school without fearing that they might get stuck in the middle of the road for hours because some political party decides that the road belongs to it.
So, just leave us alone, and we won’t care what you do. Is that expecting too much from you?
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