The nearer we get to elections, the more it looks like the Prachanda Jugend are doing their damnedest to damage their chairman's chances of winning in elections. Baddies are beginning to panic that their leaders may actually lose, hence Uncle Dahal's tirade against Uncle Sam last week.
He alluded to a mysterious foreign conspiracy led by American imperialists and Indian expansionists to prevent him from winning in Rolpa. (If that is so then why is His Fierceness going to India before elections?) Actually, Comrades Lotus Flower, Cloud and Jit Bahadur don't need any foreign conspiracy to lose. The YCL will do very nicely.
Extracting campaign finances with telephone threats has become so common that it is getting impossible to locate anyone on the phone these days. Businessmen, traders, doctors, senior civil servants have all switched off their mobiles and disconnected landlines.
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On Shivaratri a bunch of street urchins had pulled a rope across the road to extract money from passersby near Pashupati. Among the people forced to cough up a Rs 1 donation each were a bunch of YCL in grey racksuits. This is what happens when the Nepali Jungvolk are more powerful than the Prachanda Jugend that inspired them.
The YCL was at the receiving end of a technique it regularised, but it has long been perfectly acceptable to forcibly demand money in the name of deity in Nepal. This is also what made the Maoist use of the tactic not only acceptable but somehow sacred and acceptable in the Nepali public sphere.
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The former subterranean comrades are showing themselves to be no different from their mainstream counterparts with the revolutionary nepotism in the Ministry of Metaphysical Planning and mass recruitment of cadre in the Ministry of Jungles.Now comes word that the Maoist election manifesto whitewashes even willful defaulters by adding a small clause about NPAs that reads: 'borrowers can be pardoned if they have good intentions'. Right. The guy stole a billion bucks from a public bank, but it's all right because he is well-intentioned. Irony of the month: the biggest supporters of the crookedest capitalists in this country are the communists.
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A week after tourism minister Prithbi Subba Gurung told NYT there was pressure from China to close off Everest till 10 May, his ministry spokesman has denied it outright. The statement reads exactly like the China Tibet Mountaineering Association press release, saying expeditions will be doing their climbs only after 10 May because of "overcrowding" on the mountain. How is there going to be overcrowding if no expeditions are allowed? It will be crawling with PLA, stupid.
There is nothing unusual about our guys buckling under Beijing's pressure, but did the Chinese also tell our riot police to beat nuns holding candles like they were rag dolls? And not a peep from our heroic human rights activists yet.
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So the Election Commission has got the Press Council to finally haul up Gorkhakopatra and warn it to follow the Code of Conduct. The Maoist mouth-organ is so loyal to its masters that it printed Comrade Dahal's entire election manifesto as a special supplement. But the warning seems to have worked because the paper then started printing the manifestos of all the other parties as well. It wouldn't have helped boost the paper's declining circulation, that's for sure.
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Kingji's name is not on the voter's list, so he can't even vote himself out of power. There isn't much for him to do these days, so he sits in the palace googling himself and probably contemplating another interview with sympathetic media like perhaps the North Korean News Agency, Yonhap, this time.
Just exactly why is KingG looking so unperturbed even as his kingdom is nearing its last throes? Does he know something we don't?
Is he planning to publicly expose the secret deal between him, the eh-maleys and kangresis in the palace on 23 April, 2006 that would have ensured his safety and the continuity of the monarchy in return for not holding out against street protests?
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