The next few days are crucial. The three major parties have suspended the proceedings of the Constituent Assembly, which had been the main demand of the protesting Madheshi and Tharu forces. This is a welcome gesture and if the two sides are committed to peaceful settlement of the constitutional dispute, this is the time to prove it. But there will be no shortage of spoilsports. It is now clear that criminal elements have infiltrated the ranks of protesters in the Tarai belt. The National Human Rights Commission has now confirmed the presence of former Maoist combatants among the protestors in Kailali who, on August 24, killed nine police officers in cold blood. In a separate incident on Friday, protestors in Mahottari district pulled out an injured Assistant Sub-Inspector of Armed Police Force, Thaman Bahadur Biswokarma, from an ambulance and lynched him alive. The nature of the twin crimes suggests that those involved are in no mood for peaceful settlement any time soon. Their only intent seems to be to perpetrate the vicious circle of violence and take security situation in the Tarai to a point of no return.The presence of such extremists and criminals among the protestors is all the more reason for the two sides to get talking in earnest. Such a dialogue is important to isolate these criminal elements whose only intent is to disrupt the constitutional process and continue to play in the resulting vacuum. So, now that the three big parties have offered an olive branch, the Madheshi and Tharu activists who have over the past one month been organizing protests, which have often turned violent, must unconditionally come back to talks table. If they are serious about meaningful dialogue, the government will also feel more comfortable lifting the curfews that have been imposed in various places and returning Nepali Army to the barracks, as the agitating parties are also demanding. Again, the current situation is dangerous because the protests in the Tarai belt do not seem to be entirely under the control of the political parties who called for them. As things were starting to get out of their control, many Madheshi and Tharu leaders, it seemed, were looking for a safe-landing, not entirely out of self-interest. They also feared extremist elements could completely hijack the peace and constitution process in which they had staked so much.
The lull in the constitutional process offers that rare hope that, perhaps, there is still a peaceful way out. But for meaningful negotiations both the sides will have to be ready for some hard compromises. As we have said before, while restructuring the old unitary state, only the country should be indivisible; the boundaries of all the other administrative regions should change as per the country's changing needs. But even then there will never be a federal formula that is acceptable to everyone. No matter how the federal question is settled, there will always be pockets of discontent, somewhere. The secret is to come up with a formula that is acceptable to a broad section of Nepalis and is in keeping with the spirit of change heralded by the 2006 Jana Andolan. Hard, yes; impossible, certainly not.
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