Of all the characters in Nepal's political firmament, Madhav Kumar Nepal was the last person anyone expected to be a wily manipulator.
When he was installed as prime minister exactly a year ago, it was his very indecisiveness and lack of leadership qualities that made him the perfect compromise candidate. The country needed a dealmaker to bring the three main parties together, and no one seriously saw him as a political threat.
In the past year, Madhav Nepal's biggest contribution was to keep the totalitarian ambitions of the Maoists at bay. It is only now becoming clear how close we came on the night of 4 May 2009 to a complete Maoist takeover. Now, Nepal has shown that he also knows when it is time to go, unlike many of his peers.
To be sure, Nepal wasn't successful in forging a consensus government. He couldn't rein in his spectacularly corrupt cabinet colleagues. And his most glaring failure was to completely ignore the economy and development.
But by surprising even his close aides with the announcement of his resignation, Nepal seized the moment, wrested the initiative and took the moral high ground ahead of the UML central committee meeting. In his resignation speech, he explained that the only reason for his delay was that he wanted to spare the country the uncertainty of succession. He wanted to be seen as a facilitator and not as the obstacle that he was becoming.
Sure enough, the resignation has already intensified the bitter power struggle between rivals within all three parties to be Nepal's successor. The disagreement is not between the parties but within them, among rival candidates for prime ministership. Till the president's 7 July deadline, Nepal has converted himself from a lame duck to a caretaker.
The ideal scenario now would be for the two rival leaders in each party (Dahal and Bhattarai in the Maoists, Deuba and Poudel in the NC and Oli and Khanal in the UML) to bury the hatchet and work towards a consensus government.
Coming out of the autocratic shadow of GP Koirala, the NC is now re-emerging as a strong democratic alternative to the Maoists. But it is absurd to foist people like Sher Bahadur Deuba or some of the tired old discredited faces from the past as if they are the only choices we have. It is time for the party to make a clean break and go for people like, say, Kul Bahadur Gurung, who would be less objectionable to the other parties, and let them prove themselves.
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