For peace and constitution

Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal has finally mustered the courage to shun the rhetoric of revolt—hopefully for good— and  decided to bat for peace and constitution. This is the road that Dahal should have taken long ago and he should never have dithered. Unfortunately, since the Constituently Assembly elections in 2007 and especially after he resigned from the post of prime minister in 2009, Dahal frequently wavered between peace and revolt. And in doing so, he left his cadres in utter confusion and frustration, sent the country into instability and stagnation, and, most importantly, inflicted self-damage from which he is unlikely to fully recover. Never since the success of Janaandolan II has any other leader squandered his political capital so fast and so thoroughly and lost the confidence of the public so soon as Dahal has done.



Now that Dahal seems to have made up his mind to officially send his party’s political line of revolt into the deep freezer and work to conclude the peace process and write a new constitution, we want to congratulate him and wish good luck for his party’s successful transition into peaceful politics. Even as we congratulate, we also want to caution him against wavering again. Maoist party hardliners will surely challenge him, and they will try to pull him back to the path of violence as the means for political change. The radical faction led by Mohan Baidya has made it clear it will oppose changing the official party line of revolt decided by the last party plenum and it will probably demand another plenum. But Dahal must stand his ground and tell the radicals that their rhetoric of revolt has already done enough damage to the party and to the country, and it was high time the party discarded it once and for all.



The next logical step for Dahal and the Maoists is to come up with a proposal for the peace process and constitution writing and begin a dialogue for national consensus. The integration and rehabilitation of Maoist combatants has so far been the major obstacle. If the Maoists are ready to shun the structure of violence and make a genuine transition toward peaceful politics, the combatants issue should no longer be a problem. Moreover, the parties have already discussed the issue several times and known each other’s positions well. True, there are differences among the parties on the contents of the future constitution but we are confident these are not insurmountable differences. Once the parties are close to an agreement on the peace process and constitution writing, the present government will automatically become irrelevant, and that will facilitate dialogue for power-sharing among the parties until the next election is held.  

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