The NC-D is going to hold on tight to Hydropower in the interim government even if it means sacrificing Deuba's chance to be President Girija's heir apparent in a unified NC. Girijababu himself wants his cousin Sushil and not Ram Chandra to be Deputy PM. Ticked off, the UML wants Home or nothing. So the Maoists will have to settle for Forests and Information.
But just imagine if the Maoist Information Minister's job is to send out CDs like the one that is alleged to contain evidence of Paras' plot to assassinate republicans. The Ass saw excerpts on Mero Sansar and it's just a clipping service of digitised newspaper cuttings. Comrade Mahara will have to do better than that if his job is going to be feeding state media off-the-cuff pronouncements like the ones his boss has been making in the past weeks. First he said the palace was planning to kill Americans and blame it on the Maoists so the Americans would think the Maoists did it and bomb Nepal to smithreens. Then he stated categorically all guns were in containers, but some may have been washed away in floods, suddenly remembered he had a whole lot of them stashed away. When Ian raised a surprised eyebrow, Chhabilal Baje said he was just kidding, and then backtracked again and said he meant socket bombs. OK, PKD, wake us up when you make up your mind.
.....
King Gyanendra couldn't stand trees. He saw them as symbols of democracy. So during his royal regime he had all the majestic gum trees along Pulchok and Baluwatar chopped down. Rumour has it that tantriks convinced the king that this would keep loktantriks away. It didn't. But the stumps are still there and the democratic governments haven't shown much interest in replanting the trees. And now the Maoists are following the monarch's footsteps and have given orders to cadre to decimate all private and community forests wherever they can find them. Forests have been a traditional source of income to fund elections ever since they were cut down to buy off the yellow votes in the 1980 referendum. Now, the Maoists seem to have reached the same conclusion. As one wag put it: let's at least hope the comrades are cutting down the jungles because they don't intend going back into them......
Girijababu's pronouncement this week that King Gyanendra and Paras should both abdicate doesn't seem to have ruffled too many feathers in Narayanhiti which is still sending out greetings to foreign heads of state just like in the good old days. However, the palace gets responses only from Arab sheikhdoms and Thailand. Certainly, Paras doesn't seem to be planning to go anywhere, he is having a swimming pool built in Gokarna. 
