Damned if we do damned if we don't. Whether or not the Supreme Court re-instates parliament on 6 August, it looks like we are headed into more severe turbulence. More confusion, more chaos, more uncertainty. Was this the intention all along?

Reinstating parliament would set another dangerous precedent of political parties settling scores in the courts and not through the people's mandate. Nothing wrong with that in a country with rule of law, of course, but you are forced to ask who is running the country: politicians or lawyers? Restoring parliament would set off a new round of the horse-trading that we have come to expect from the people's representatives. Political permutations will be needed to reach the magic number 58, and whoever is at the helm will control government machinery at election time.

Not reinstating parliament will mean a high-risk election scenario. The government's conviction that it can hold parliamentary elections, but that it is too dangerous to conduct local polls is so hypocritical and disingenuous that it does not merit any more comment. Every eyewitness report we have carried from the districts in the past month point to the perils of holding general elections in the present political limbo. Democracy abhors a vacuum, and this vast vacuum is also deleterious to development. Together with the insurgency, these decisions have pushed us back 30 years.

We have no one else to blame for this but the same old astigmatic leaders, rival power-brokers, and their hangers-on in the ruling party who have made the nation and the people pay for their selfishness. What a ghastly betrayal of the people's trust.

Everyone is hunkering down for expected showdowns in the weeks ahead. The Election Commissioner says he is sick of the Congress factions breathing down his neck, and is probably going to rule on who gets the party symbol before the Supreme Court verdict expected on Tuesday. Then there is the extension of the state of emergency due on 28 August. Technically the prime minister and the king together can get the extension, but the prime minister also wants elections. And he can't have both.

Like it or not, the Maoists hold the trump cards. Their campaign of violence may be backfiring, they may be trying to slink back to the negotiating table, but it is the threat of violence that has given them the clout to dictate terms. The bait they are dangling this time is the prospect of talks. The Rs 5 million dead-or-alive ransoms on the heads of underground Maoist leaders is not preventing various organs of state from having furtive meetings through back channels.

The comrades appear to have decided at their plenum in early July that their earlier strategy of a series of military victories to propel them to capture state power by November was unrealistic. Now, they have settled for the political weapon of a bandh on 16 September, and a week of mayhem preceding it to put pressure on the government to resume dialogue.

But having breached everyone's trust by unilaterally breaking the truce last year, they will have to do much more than issuing conciliatory pronouncements for the people and the government to take them seriously. Depending on how the secret backdoor bargaining is going, we will see the repercussions on above-the-ground politics.