Kathmandu: UML’s strongman, Madhav Kumar Nepal is pretty angry with the King.

His “blind” followers in the party and elsewhere say that when Madhav does so, he has reasons in his own right.

Sources close to Madhav Nepal, the UML leader, say that the veteran communist leader had been “assured” by the constitutional monarch that he would make him the Prime Minister on two separate occasions. However, as the luck would have it, Madhav Nepal was denied twice the prime ministership of the country barely in a short span of nine months. This remain yet to be substantiated nevertheless.

Understandably, the last jolt Madhav Nepal received from the Palace was when he “applied” for the post of the prime minister attached with the unconditional support from the rest of the agitating four parties grouped in the alliance but yet the constitutional monarch considered him unfit and elevated the ranks of a political personality who didn’t enjoy the alliances’ support. The members of the big-5 say that when they had met the King last time, Thaps’s name had not even figured in the talks at the palace.

RPP’s old-horse and an established leader of the country who plays conspiratorial politics with proper finesse, Surya Bahadur Thapa, broke the dreams of Madhav Nepal. Thanks the timely intervention of K.V.Rajan, former Indian ambassador to this country, it is widely talked and believed.

Political observers fail to guess as to what might have transpired in between the monarch and the UML leader in the past in their private conversations, but the manner Madhav Nepal has gone all and all out against the monarch in his fresh speeches does hint that some thing very exclusive must have been in between the two political personages which when denied could have irritated the firebrand communist leader to the extent that the latter opted to pose a challenge to the monarch suggesting the monarch that if he “wished to play politics, he should constitute or float a political party”.

In effect this is what Madhav Nepal said of the monarch in his Monday speech in front of his own cadres in Balkhu.

Madhav Nepal went to the extent that he hinted that his party now could think of turning Nepal into a “republican” state.

This threat apparently hints at the leaders’ mercury going up in the barometer which if not brought under control might really be a problem to the monarch ultimately. Good or bad, Madhav Nepal is the leader of a party that possesses enormous strength at the national level. Concurrently Madhav Nepal must also not forget that the people on whom he trusts that he can mould their opinions in the course of their making republicanism a political agenda might not digest his agenda for some time to come.

Nepali society is a traditional one indeed. The monarchy as an institution is deep rooted in the given scheme of things in the country and hence to expect that the people will throng against the monarch at Madhav Nepal’s call or for that matter on Koirala’s call will boomerang.

Be that as it may, Madhav Nepal’s anger is genuine or not is not of much concern to the political analysts. However, what is important to the national population is whether the King’s decision of denying the prime ministerial post to a consensus candidate was a right or a wrong move?

Analysts say the King’s move was wrong in many more ways than one.

Firstly, Madhav Nepal was a common candidate of the now agitating political parties.

Secondly, good or bad, it is these political parties now in opposition who have given a shape and continuity to the system now in place.

Thirdly, Madhav Nepal, comparatively speaking, is less a harmful person than Surya Bahadur Thapa or any one who could have been picked up by the King other than from the agitating political parties.

Fourthly, if Madhav Nepal would have been allowed to function as the nation’s prime minister, the agitation would have come to a grinding halt and the nation’s derailed democracy, as they claim, would have been back on the rails.

Fifthly, Madhav Nepal’s choice would not have been that objectionable to the outside world, mainly the Western democracies and the neighboring India, for analysts opine that Madhav Nepal represents a party that is left with only a hammer and sickle in the party’s flag and hence nothing left to get frightened. Conscious citizens in this country and the international community consider the UML as a namesake communist party. The fact is that it is a party more capitalist than the congress.

Sixthly, Madhav’s appointment as Nepal’s prime minister would have diluted his party more for understandable and obvious reasons.

And finally, Madhav Nepal’s choice would have been an opportunity for the King as well on how to cope with the RED Communists.

All said and done, analysts wish to pose a question to Madhav Nepal. The question is “how long president Koirala would have tolerated Madhav Nepal being on a chair which he likes most?