There is now a near political consensus that Nepal should be some kind of a federated republic. The constituent assembly to be elected next month will have ample time to debate the pros and cons of different types of federal structures.

The Maoists want these units, or provinces, to be carved out based on ethnicity. We think it's a bad idea.

Nepal is a country of minorities. Nineteen of the 103 ethnic groups in this country number less than 5,000 individuals. Only 18 ethnic groups have more than one percent of the population. This mishmash penetrates right down to the VDC level. For example, the village of Badharmal in Siraha has a Chhetri majority, but they only make up 10 percent of the population.

In their elections manifesto, the Maoists have adjusted their provincial breakup to divide up the original Madhes into linguistic sub-provinces: Bhojpura, Mithila, Awadh and Kochila. They have also carved out Limbuwan from the Kirat autonomous region. All this gerrymandering before elections looks like too much of a coincidence.

The Maoists, confronted with poor poll prospects, have obviously seen the ethnic card as the only way they can steal away votes from the mainstream parties. By now they should have realised how hard it is to put the ethnic genie back into the bottle. The Madhesi militants and the radicals of the eastern hills are all Maoist offshoots. The comrades now have to sound more radical than the ethnic parties they spawned in order to retrieve the agenda.

When they first mooted the idea of autonomous ethnic provinces, the Maoists were working out of the Soviet template. Lenin felt having a fa?ade of devolution to ethnic and linguistic Soviet republics was a neat way to camouflage centralisation of power in Moscow.

The only rationale for ethnic federalism in Nepal is to compensate for historic wrongs. But we have to be careful about correcting one mistake with another. The Maoists have realised they have opened a can of worms, their former cadre will now settle for nothing less than separatism. Instituting these ethnic federal units is fraught with dangers and could fragment the country.

There is a real danger that the group after which each ethnic province is named will suppress or even evict other groups. Making an ethnic federation work presupposed political maturity and responsibility that our opportunistic leaders haven't yet exhibited.

Two books reviewed in this issue (p12-13) show in maps how Nepal and its provinces must, by definition be multi-ethnic and multi-linguistic. Let's not get into who settled down here first. Except for a handful of indigenous groups, we all came from somewhere else.