A country that has no idea where it is going has no right to complain about being told which way to go
The Election Commission, probably under pressure from political figures who felt alluded to, took umbrage at the ambassadors of various countries making statements about the forthcoming elections and instructed them to refrain from doing so. To be sure, the way some members of the western diplomatic community in Kathmandu hold forth loudly and frequently on Nepal’s internal affairs in a patronising way often smacks of double-standards. Kathmandu-based ambassadors are not averse to expressing opinions in public, something they would never be allowed to do in India or Sri Lanka. One reason is that after 1990, we got so beholden to donors and our self-esteem sank so low that we didn’t mind being lectured to.
BIKRAM RAI
A country that wants to be treated with dignity must first put its own house in order. If we want others to take us seriously, we must first take ourselves seriously. A country that has no idea where it is going has no right to complain about being told which way to go. How can we complain about what Nepal-based ambassadors say in public when our own ambassador in Qatar refuses to relinquish her job, even though she has been sacked by the party that appointed her and has received her marching orders from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs? Neither does it behoove us to complain about the Indian embassy in Kathmandu micromanaging our internal affairs when our external affairs is in such disarray that the Nepal embassy in New Delhi has been ambassador-less for the past three years.
What the German ambassador said or didn’t say in Tanahu should be less important to Baburam Bhattarai and the Election Commission than the fact that the convicted murderer he got out of jail and has been coddling for the past three years is going to be a candidate from the same district where he masterminded the homicide of Ujjan Shrestha in 2004.
The Supreme Court on Monday has upturned its own precedent by quashing a writ petition demanding that candidates with moral turpitude should not be allowed to contest elections. As veteran bureaucrat Bihari Krishna Shrestha puts it in a Guest Column, at this rate the second Constituent Assembly is going to be ‘of the crooks, for the crooks, and voted by the people’.
Late Thursday after this edition went to press, a three member Supreme Court bench overturned its previous ruling and asked the government and the Election Commission to bar murder convicts from contesting elections.
When Bhattarai stepped down as prime minister to be replaced by Chief Justice Khil Raj Regmi, we all thought that, if nothing else, there would be more respect for the rule of law. But Regmi is presiding over a state that is allowing the candidacy of a person whom the Supreme Court convicted for murder and sentenced to life imprisonment when he himself was chief justice. There is a slew of other examples, but you have to go no further than Monday’s Supreme Court ruling for proof of the collapse of the rule of law and of the moral bankruptcy of this so-called ‘technocratic’ regime.
Except for a handful of civil rights activists who picketed the Election Commission on Tuesday, no one seems to be too bothered by this. Least of all the international champions of democracy, the rule of law, and the multilateral agencies based in Kathmandu. For them, it’s elections or bust. Nothing should distract us from that goal. Regmi has got the message and set off for New York on Thursday as if he didn’t have a care in the world. The only silver lining is that Nepal is not much worse than Bihar used to be. There used to be a time not too long ago when Pappu Yadav and others won elections in India while they were serving time in prison. Lalu Yadav campaigned for elections from behind bars during the so-called Fodder Scam. But Bihar cleaned up its act; it has had two successive peaceful and independent elections which has put into office a visionary chief minister and an accountable government. If Bihar can do it, there is no reason why Nepal can’t.
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Observing the observers, BIHARI K SHRESTHA