Kathmandu: The King is not going to budge. For the past sixteen months he has been saying that the solution to the current constitutional problems is a government that is also representative of the dissolved house which will parley unitedly with current systemic challenges including the Maoists and thus conduct elections to restore parliament.

This consistency frustrates the major political parties. They want the dissolved house to be restored, this judiciary in an amicus curie has asserted not legally possible but our partisan press has downplayed it in contrast to the wide coverage that news of the judicial review was highlighted.

The parties’ then want a government of their own making. In this they are no longer united. Girija Prasad Koirala will not support it if the government is not to restore the house.

In this sense, Madhav Nepal’s roadmap is close to a compromise. The party has finally acknowledged the possible utility of an “all-representative” government recommended also by the five agitating parties.

Curiously, the continuing republican standpoints of the agitation the parties lead, is a matter to be distanced from by the leadership of the agitation. In this sense one is made to conclude that the anti-monarchists approach is to be made a threat by the parties’. The King is supposed to budge under this threat. He has not.

This is the curiosity piece of the current problems. Political parties which are the sole repository of political organizations of Nepal threaten to oust the King. The King is greeted by hundreds of thousands of people and applaud his remonstrations defying both the Maoists strictures against participation and the active non-cooperation, indeed, opposition, of the political parties to the King’s active ventures into the Nepali mass.

Not surprisingly, the by now routine allegations against the King’s public ventures have been part of the expected party reactions. This time the King has gone further. He has voiced the public frustrations at the performance of the past decade and he has underscored his constitutional right to speakout against constitutional impediments.

In doing so, the King has turned the tables on the political parties who try and cash in on his use of article 127 as unconstitutional. For the Maoists-plagued terror stricken mid-western region where the presence of the political parties is restricted to select urban areas, the King’s presence and his defiant speech comes as solace. This reaction is in utter contrast to that of the partisan preferences of urban intellectualism where the speech provokes vocal fears against an assertive monarch.

Clearly, something must budge somewhere. When and how defies analysis.