Breaking all records for viewership on YouTube last month was the dramatic video taken in a South African national park by a tourist of a herd of Cape buffaloes fending off an attack by a pride of lions.
The lions attack the herd and fall into the river with a buffalo calf. While struggling to get the young buffalo out, alligators attack the lions and try to snatch the calf. The lions manage to get the calf back on land and are about to feast on it when the buffaloes return with reinforcements and chase the lions off. The calf, which is still miraculously alive, limps off.
On the internet, people have seen the moral of this story as one that proves might is not right. Do the mighty have might? Is it only the brute carnivorous power of the lions, or is there strength in numbers of vegetarian ungulates? And what of the laws of the jungle: aren't the lions supposed to be hardwired to kill for food? Isn't that the right way?
The video is a perfect metaphor for April 2006. The lions were the royal army and the buffaloes the people on the streets. The alligators were the Maoists. The soldiers and the guerrillas took turns to prey on civilians. But people power finally won out, underlining the moral victory of non-violence.
Today, the lion king is still prowling. The alligators are submerged in the water with just their eyes and snouts showing. The buffaloes are leaderless again and have fallen out among themselves. Old habits die hard, and somehow things always return to the natural order and the laws of the jungle.
We were reminded of the video when we read Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal's 22-point demand this week accompanied by a threat to launch a mass action and street uprising if his conditions weren't met. He's trying to get the buffaloes stirred up again as part of an election campaign strategy. If Dahal actually believes he can stave off elections through staged street action he is sadly mistaken. But he could also be playing it both ways as he always has to hide the chronic internal rift between hardliners and pragmatists in his party.
And what of the buffaloes? The leaders are busy headbutting in Kathmandu fighting over political crumbs while the tarai crisis gets worse. It is hard to tell whether they are letting things drift out of sheer incompetence, or it is a deliberate attempt to let the crisis simmer as a distraction to mask greater failures.
Whatever it is, our honourable members of the interim parliament better prorogue the house and get out to start campaigning for votes like they mean it.
