UML wooing all sides

February 4, 2004
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Kathmandu: As events are allowed to escalate on the streets, an indifferent public awaits the event that will pressure the different sides in the political arena to budge. The fare is that it will be the indifference that will buckle under. That this is what the Kathmandu bundh and the series of bundhs threatened in opposition to government, and thus the King, is clear.

A movement that is now a year over old designed to pressure the King to change his stance on the constitution had been passing the public by. Radical slogans in a supposedly different student movement provoked administrative action. Now, party and students movement combined to attract other class and professional organizations in the agitation. Katmandu’s volatile trading community will be asked to pay the price of nonchalance. The Shutter-culture suffers in bundhs of this type and their continued non-participation in the agitation is being targeted.

The Nepali congress assumes a back-seat in the Kathmandu bundh agitation on practical grounds. Their valley organization is weak and divided and the UML presence among Katmandu’s small traders is an organizational target worthy of co-opting into the agitation.

Of course, this reluctant community can’t but close down businesses when threatened with brickbats and mob furore. But the initial reaction of compulsory closures may very well be voluntary ones if this is the only practical solution to opening business.

The UML whose presence was large in the bundh on Monday can thus be explained. Also, it seems to be the only party at the moment with a roadmap open-ended on all sides. It partners an agitation with a congress that wants the reconvening of the dissolved parliament. It proposes a round-table conference with the Maoists participation after which elections and constitutional change will be made. It, moreover, has modified initial demands for its premiership in a five-party led government to accommodate the monarchy’s prescription for an “all-representative” government endorsed by the five parties. If the congress, which insists on the restoration of the dissolved parliament, is likely then to part ways with the UML if one of its open-ended proposals is endorsed, the roadmap’s call for Maoists participation in its round-table remains a no-no as yet in their response to the UML. The one feasible road to be taken thus is the “all-representative” government angle.

But then the cadre will have to be winned away from the radical exhortations from which the UML leadership makes a point of distancing itself. The party will have first to convince itself that its current accommodative standpoints is no about turn. While politics is surely the art of the possible, how this will apply to the UML’s options will have to be watched. As of the moment, its roadmap package on the streets is close to the Maoists, it partners the agitating congress and woos the monarch.