I n d e p t h A n a l y s i s
Kathmandu: Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba will have come to a decision on elections this week. His partner parties in the cabinet have promised him of their respective central committee decisions on this agenda this week. On the streets, Girija Koirala has, only expectedly, declared that his party will not contest elections if unilaterally declared by the government.

In effect, His majesty King Gyanendra’s singular effort of the past two years to cobble together a national government composed, in the least, of a majority of the parties in the dissolved parliament to cope with the constitutional crisis appears now to be purposely threatened. With the Girija congress not participating and Deuba’s partners vacillating on whether they can cope with the elections, Deuba’s election agenda is threatened from within and without at the very outset. To boot, Deuba’s own party now appears divided on whether they should attend to the rival congress opinion that parliament be restored. In the UML, this opinion has already assumed a major component of a sizeable section, which threatens to be a majority.

In effect, thus, it gives the UML the opportunity to throw one more bargaining chip for the UML to support the government agenda. The UML’s Madhav Nepal has asked Deuba to execute the original agreement forming the coalition, namely, the reinstatement of the local level bodies and the Upper House.

These public discussions only underscore the continued partisan trend at advantage gaining. While it is evident that Deuba must avoid the reinstatement of the dissolved parliament to prevent a slide of his remaining parliamentary support towards the Girija congress who have not been included in the cabinet, Deuba can’t allow the reappointment of the UML predominant local level bodies simply because it is actually redundant in the face of the Diaspora from their constituencies because of Maoists persecutions.

It is clear that the political parties each continue to seek partisan advantage at the expense of the system despite the continued encroachment of the Maoists on that account.

What is clear thus is that the use of the Article 127 to bring about the logical need of a united systematic response to the Maoists challenge is gradually exhausting itself. Options thus can’t but be sought.

As yet, His Majesty has played with the parliamentary options while the parliamentary parties aware of this have played with the democratic royal intent at the expense of the monarchy. Whether the monarchy can continue to sustain this organized attempt to erode the royal intents is what must be seriously mulled over.

Clearly Deuba’s mandate will prove elusive since the Maoists are not going to talk peace with him as long as his parliamentary rivals continue to undercut him. Again Deuba’s elections will undercut itself if his competition refuses to participate. The difficulty of conducting the elections is another matter altogether. The revival of parliament has already been demonstrated to have constitutional limits and the politics of such a revival covers up the simple fact that the dissolved parliament had already proven its redundancy regarding the Maoists problem.

In this background, the onus of a productive solution to the national crisis shifts again to the Monarchy. It is clear that the major parliamentary parties remain part of the problem as they have been all along.