Kathmandu: Kamal Thapa, senior most minister in the Surya Bahadur Thapa cabinet during the Prime Minister’s current absence let the cat out of the bag at a reporters club gathering by hinting that he would favor a split in the RPP rather than have his Prime Minister bow to party demands that he resigns.
This gives credence to unsubstantiated rumors that the insistence on forming a small cabinet of Surya Bahadur Thapa colleagues in the RPP was designed, rather than to invite participation, to build the Thapa potentials within the party. If Chand was the sole RPP member in the previous government, the Thapa cabinet distinguishes itself by being fully RPP. If outside the other mainstream parties, the large Chand cabinet had pointedly inculcated other participants. The Thapa cabinet is solely RPP. If Chand resigned acknowledging inability for wider participation, Thapa refuses to do so even when the party reminds him of his wider responsibilities in which he has starkly failed.
To boot, Surya Bahadur Thapa who opposed the Chand appointment on grounds of his version of democracy now says that he is responsible to the King and not to the party which he helped found. Unwittingly thus, he has now set the ground rules for his own departure. It will be the King who must fire him for his inability so that a cabinet more forthcoming in representation may preside over the elections in order to kick-start a constitution which is on hold as accepted by the duly elected parliament currently dissolved.
It is now clear that the impediment that keep constitutionalism from rolling, namely, partisanship of the extreme kind, is as much imbibed in the Thapa ministry which has been charged to remove it in order for the constitution to prevail.
This new certainty, that the King must dismiss Thapa is a widely accepted recent development that has triggered a flurry of activities in the political sector since last week. If the Thapa-Koirala alignments in preparation for the inevitable elections was only now uncovering itself, the decision to split the party will perhaps bring the two standpoints closer and open with Thapa’s public reaction to dismissal triggering it.
On the other hand, the possibility of such alignment already in making is likely to be countered by the other mainstream parties who would not want to be left out from an election government that must, furthermore, devise a policy to surmount the Maoists problem to conduct elections itself.
It is in this line of thought also that the sudden flurry of activities in the RPP mainstream may be viewed. Equally important is the gradual conciliatory stand of the Deuba congress. Of course, the UML which is the largest party outside the congress must seem poised for the change. And so none other than Madhav Nepal must risk a trip to Lucknow, India, to visit the Maoists and comeback saying publicly that he expects major change.
As Nepal later qualified, the change is expected after Prime Minister Thapa’s nine day SAARC sojourn which, curiously, makes two New Delhi stoppages while a Kathmandu break is scheduled only in transit at the Tribhuban International Airport.