Whatever it was that was started on 4 October last year, by now we know it is not working. Most Nepalis are just trying to stay alive. They want to be left alone by the Maoists, and increasingly, they want to be left alone by the force that was supposed to protect them from the Maoists. To make matters worse, armed gangs pretending to be guerrillas roam undeterred through the countryside preying on the innocent. Lawlessness rules, the killings have intensified, large areas of the country are out of bounds because of curfews and counter-curfews. Extortion and robberies have peaked, schools are being forced to close, teachers are abducted and children are still being taken away. Travel has become such a torture that most people don't unless they have to.

In the capital, there is a sense of a creeping militarisation and not just because there are guns bristling on every street corner. The past year has been one of regime change in slow motion: from a messy democracy to a future that is faceless and nameless. It is hard to say which is worse, but we'd rather stick with a faulty system that we know how to fix rather than with a drift back to an autocratic model that didn\'t work.

The people have been gradually stripped of genuine representation, the only longterm hope of development. They have not just been deprived of a proper mechanism for governance, they no longer have the ability to question decisions that are going to have longterm repercussions on their lives and livelihoods.

It should now be increasingly clear to the shadowy architects of this policy that we can't have peace now and democracy later. Despite an overwhelming peace constituency in this country, it is being sucked into an unwinnable and ruinous war waged by people who couldn't care less what the nation wants.

A return to the democratic process, therefore, should be a part of the solution. The answer to the violence is not less democracy, but more (and more genuine) democracy. Only then will we get out of this winner-takes-all power grab. In the end that is what it is: a fight to the finish between two power blocs that are not willing to give an inch. Neither realises that no one will win. They will both lose, and because of that we will all lose.

It has been a wasted year. Whatever it was that we were experimenting with, it didn't work. It's the palace's turn to seize the initiative and exercise statesmanship to bring the parties into the fold and work towards a restoration of the democratic process so that a constitutional collective
can unitedly negotiate a resolution to
the conflict.