President Ram Baran Yadav finally decided to act, and not a moment too soon. After caretaker PM Baburam Bhattarai sounded a defiant note in his address to the nation on Thursday, repeatedly insisting on his personal achievements, and putting all the blame on the opposition parties for the prolonged impasse, the President was left with few options; and thus his call for a new consensus government on Friday. He seems to have been waiting for Bhattarai to make way voluntarily, but since the incumbent PM gave no such hint in his Thursday address, the President’s hand was forced. Make no mistake. We are firmly against the idea of an activist President and believe he can, at best, play only a secondary role to the political parties in deciding the country’s political trajectory. But given the ruling coalition’s resolve to hang on at any cost, a move like Friday’s had been in the offing for some time.
President Yadav made the formal call for a national consensus government within seven days’ time as per Article 38 (1) of the Interim Constitution, following the repeated failure of political parties to agree on crucial constitutional and political questions as well as on new CA polls. Now the important question is what happens if the parties fail to arrive at consensus in the next seven days. The most likely course would be for the President to invoke Article 38 (2) for the election of a prime minister “by a majority of two-thirds of the members of the Legislature-Parliament.” We believe the political parties should pull up their socks and work at war footing to present a consensus candidate within seven days’ time and preclude the possibility of the President having to invoke Article 38 (2), which is a legal minefield in the absence of the Legislature-Parliament.
We have long been advocating for a national consensus government and for the caretaker prime minister to put in his papers at the earliest. As we saw it, that would have been the most legitimate way to force a breakthrough. But instead of heeding the President’s repeated calls to work at forging consensus, the ruling alliance seemed hell-bent on prolonging its tenure, thereby threatening to hold the country hostage to political indecision for the foreseeable future. President Yadav’s Friday call has precluded that possibility, by setting a fixed deadline for the caretaker government to make way. But we don’t completely absolve the opposition parties for the inordinate delay in breakthrough: NC could have made a persuasive case for its government leadership if it had been able to present a unified front; CPN-UML too failed to make a strong case for Bhattarai’s replacement. But given the government’s failure to honor its Nov 22 election pledge, the onus was clearly on Baburam Bhattarai and UCPN (Maoist), which led the ruling coalition, to voluntarily make way. In light of Friday’s developments, rather than get into useless recriminations, we hope the political parties will be able to close ranks and settle on a consensus candidate as well as new election date. The country has lost enough time. The major parties should realize that for once they should focus on the greater national interest rather than their partisan gains, if for nothing else, than for their own continued legitimacy and survival.
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