Kathmandu: What happens if elections do not take place? What happens if people’s representatives are not elected to parliament to form a people’s government? Quite obviously the answer is a non-elected government, which unchecked by a popularly elected opposition can border on “authoritarianism”. When cornered with these questions at a private media gathering called by the Communications minister Dr. Mohammad Mohsin, the Kantipur publication’s representatives eked out the obvious answers from the cabinet spokesman.

The question is not why Dr. Mohsin made the statement. The question is rather why the publication chose to highlight this answer? The contents of the major part of the press tête-à-tête on the current situation in the country remained uncovered by this media. The coverage regarding the obvious answer provided grist for a controversy that evidently was deliberate and slanted.

Dr. Mohsin, a chairman of the now defunct Upper House who was the only Speaker in the past decade of the multi-party parliament to resign from his party, the RPP, in order to assume this essentially non-partisan constitutional post democratically is the only non-party member of the current government. Inordinately, the partisan media highlighted his inclusion in the cabinet as an evidence of Palace hand in the making of the current cabinet. It was forgotten in the process that his inclusion in aministerial post, a peg down from his elected constitutional stature, makes an attempt at representing the near defunct Upper House in what is supposed to be the nearest thing as yet to a national government genuine.

Dr. Mohsin is being portrayed more as a Palace spokesman that the cabinet spokesman for reasons thus that are all too obvious.

Particularly one major stream of the mainstream parties denies the possibility of the elections taking place in the current situation. This major stream sees no alternative to the revival of the dissolved parliament for the restoration of their notion of democracy. It is not altogether hidden that this notion of democracy demands that Supreme Court edicts against the revival of a duly dissolved parliament can be overturned by the King on the pre-emptory plea of democracy. What is hidden however, the leadership of the parties making this claim have never succeeded in winning governments democratically without a sitting government. Moreover, Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba if allowed to preside over the elections will ruin the chances of his congress rivals to woo back disgruntled workers currently with Deuba with the fruits of government.

Clearly, the desperation increases. Increasingly the government will be made to have authoritarian designs. And the media will be a willing tool.

What Mohsin said was the obvious. Without elections, the authoritarianism that will creep in should provoke elections. What is happening in the guise of democracy though is that elections are being opposed. Directly by the Maoists no doubt but indirectly by the democrats too. This is the Nepali irony.