The ass is just a horse with big ears. This is what gives him an acute sense of hearing and wisdom, over and beyond his rugged good looks.
That just by introduction to this, the tenth Backside column in this space. The Ass thanks all faithful readers for their time and support as well as for the rotten tomatoes thrown his way. More, throw me more, yum-yum. I would not be where I am today without them. Please, please, please, can all you rumourmongers out there send chitchat to my email below? I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel here.
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Nepal's designer revolution is now really going places. The Pushpakamal-Baburam show is back from Delhi (from 'The Forbidden Fruit or the Nectar of Progress'-who is the copy editor at HT, that\'s what I want to know). The Ass couldn't help reflecting that the very people who were forcing schoolchildren in Nepal to build bunkers in preparation of an imminent Indian invasion two years ago are now being feted by ex-Indian PMs for conducting a successful revolution.
Also, wasn't it just last year that Indian spooks successfully patched up a serious public rift between Chairman Prachanda and Ideologue-in-chief Laldhoj?
Do these ga-ga Indians, who want revolutions only in other people's countries and not their own, ever read the news? The campaign to force schoolchildren to cantonments is so calculated, deliberate, and nationwide that it could only have come from a command at the highest levels of the Maoist hierarchy, despite what they have been telling Ian. ("It is not part of our policy and we will take strong action against anyone going against it." Where have we heard that before?) It's pretty clear the Maoists are blackmailing the people with peace, and the strategy goes something like this: We know you all want peace, and we are the only ones who can give it to you, so you better allow us to take away your children into our PLA otherwise we will go back to war, and if we won't get our way in the interim parliament and the interim government we'll go back to war, and if we are not allowed to extort money we will go back to war...
To be fair, it is rather embarrassing for the comrades who till recently had been boasting of a 35,000-strong PLA to show up with only 4,400 rank-and-file guerrillas. Not surprised they want to pad their numbers.
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Dahalji in his dapper blazer and Bhattaraiji in a jacket sporting a Nike swoosh knew what the babujis wanted to hear so they made gratuitous references to the ISI ("the Pakistanis wanted to give us money and arms and we refused"). Oh yeah, and I'm a horse. Then the ding-dong duo sucked up to the ex-Naxalite closet pinkos in the India International Centre saying they found them much more sympathetic to Nepal than Kathmandu's buddhi jeebees. Hee-haw.
The donkey's moles in Delhi tell him this has been the strategy of the intelligence wallas all along: to make Prachanda president so they have a say over Nepal's hydropower and trade and whatever. The idea is to defang the Nepali Maoists by arm-twisting them into the mainstream and this way sideline an arrogant king, weaken those pesky political parties and cut the Nepal Army down to size. The bonus is that this will delink Nepali Maoist from their Indian comrades.
Prachanda's utterances in Delhi show this is going brilliantly according to plan. Then, I suppose they will do an Indira Gandhi on the Naxalites with scorched earth in Andhra, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh and Bihar. Well, good luck to the big brothers.
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Business as usual for the royal pundits, though, who are still roving the kali temples doing pujas to enlist divine intervention to save the king. He'll need that with the final verdict of the Rayamajhi (Better Late Than Never) Commission this week. 
