Relief package

It’s a little insulting that the state pledges to return seized properties to the legitimate owners as a “relief” measure years after the seizures took place. In a civilized society the properties should never have been forcefully seized in the first place, and if some unscrupulous elements did just that, the state should have intervened and promptly returned them to the rightful owners. The return of seized property is, therefore, a question of justice, not a matter of relief to be doled out by the state.



Unfortunately, the properties seized by Maoist cadres during the “People’s War” have not been returned to the real owners even five years after the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) and despite three written commitments made by the Maoist party since then. The government’s announcement now to direct the local administrations to initiate return of such properties and its commitment to settle the issue within three months should, therefore, be taken with a pinch of salt.



Announcing by the government through a press conference of a “relief” program during a normal situation in itself sounds a little pompous and theatrical. Still, we are ready to judge the program on its merits. Let’s take, for instance, the youth self-employment program— this program was first announced some three years ago when Baburam Bhattarai was finance minister.



Though he had pledged to provide loans to 50,000 youths for generating self-employment, so far only 1,000 have obtained the loans. There are plenty of procedural problems involved: How to select deserving candidates (last time there were 135,000 candidates and enormous political pressure) and how effectively can they be trained (besides the question of who trains them) so that they will begin something worthwhile with the loans? The “relief program” also treads some of the same ground covered in the last budget speech, and there are other programs that have fallen by the wayside in the past. So, what’s the point?



We understand and even sympathize with Prime Minister Bhattarai’s desperation to at least announce something by way of a “relief” measure for the public when the scale of expectations from him is so high. But we also want to caution him that making promises which cannot be properly fulfilled will be counterproductive in the long run. Ironically, it is by meeting its mundane duties—maintaining law and order, upholding rule of law, curbing corruption and improving governance and delivery—that the government can best expect to bring relief to the people.



People have become desperate, even disillusioned, not because they have not received state largesse but because they’ve been denied the basic services by an increasingly indifferent state apparatus that defaults on its basic duties. We hope the prime minister will get to work on the governance and law-and-order front without compromising an inch.

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