Of the intrigue and back-stabbing that has always characterised Nepali politics, it is still true what they used to say 150 years ago: you will learn more if your eyes are closed, you won't see much by opening them.
In this netherworld of conspiracy, nothing is as it appears. If nothing is happening something is up. If something is happening, it's probably not. Since we believe our destiny is written in our stars, the only people we truly believe are astrologers. We don't even believe in ourselves. Our nation's future then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of doom.
The rule of survival in this Machiavellian kingdom is to keep your eyes wide shut. The Panchayat years taught us to walk around with masks, and some of us never really took them off. Is that why, even when the truth is staring at us in the face, we look away? At this moment of great turmoil and tragedy in our country's history, we keep masquerading. The ruling party, the opposition, the elite, the underground left, the palace, the security forces-all milling around in this masquerade ball while a long-suffering people look on from outside the fence.
A crisis of this magnitude in most societies works as shock therapy and brings out the best in people. With us, it has shown us at our worst. When we should be rallying around to keep the country united, we scurry off to hide in our individual little burrows. When parties which believe in democracy and parliament should be standing up for their beliefs, they all lie low, afraid to speak out lest they be noticed. Factions within political parties have daggers drawn instead of patching up their petty tiffs. Our revolutionary republicans who wear Mao masks have, with retroactive hypocrisy, discovered that they were monarchists all along.
Orphaned by the annihilation of their patrons, the ultras of the left and right who are united by their do-or-die hostility to parliamentary democracy now want to give our fragile constitutional processes a fatal knock. Of course, given the utter lack of accountability of our elected leaders, half their battle is already won. But one really has to wonder: if they are the true nationalists they claim to be how will this short-sighted and opportunistic assault on the monarchy help them?
Our little boat is taking water fast, people on it are beginning to panic, and the comrades are bent on rocking it. When the boat finally sinks, don't they know it will take them down with it? Our democratic institutions survived this crisis intact, and everything happened according to the laws of the land-that is the bottle-half-full way of looking at it. The half-empty version is that these same institutions are all hollow: our elected leaders have squandered most of their moral authority, military and police morale is low, and even the once-monolithic monarchy which was a symbol of national unity is a shaky shadow of its former self.
This week's parliament session was the first sign in a month that there still is a government in this country. Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala's 14-point programme presented in parliament on Monday offers a way out of our present political impasse. Koirala has also offered to step down, and we hope that is not another bluff. Since the UML's Madhav Nepal has welcomed the 14-point plan, all we need now is for the Nepali Congress and the UML to be serious about it.
Out country is not fated to doom, it country can be saved. Our destiny is not shaped by the stars but by actions we take together today.
