Politics is not a spectator sport. We citizens are not supposed to just sit around watching gladiators finish each other off, especially when mortal combat in the arena spills over into the stands.

We want to have a say when our lives and security as citizens are at stake. The trouble is that the non-state side is so intolerant of dissent that it will send anyone who doesn't agree with the party line to kingdom come. And the state side recoils from the truth, labelling all scrutiny as unpatriotic.

About our revolutionary comrades, there is really nothing much one can say. They are behaving as they always have: with an extreme brutality calculated to sow terror, a strategy of winning support by fear, intimidation and threats. They justifying it with the catch-all line: "One can't make an omelet without breaking eggs".

Such thinking never made revolutionary sense and even goes against Mao Zedong's own tenets about not antagonising the people. But try telling that to our born-again comrades. How does keeping 400,000 children away from school in Bheri and Karnali help the cause? How does the public torture of villagers, and depriving those poor souls of dignity even in death by forcing the corpse to rot in the school yard serve the cause of societal transformation? Which values, exactly, are they trying to transform? Where is it written that barbarism wins hearts and minds? Some has to ultimately take moral responsibility for the fundamentally unjustifiable act of taking another human life. Na?ve questions, perhaps, for those whose hands are steeped in the blood of fellow-Nepalis, and for whom thousands, even millions, of dead can be written off as means to an end.

The way to counter such savagery is not by being a savage yourself. You don't battle terror by competing with the enemy in terrorising the population. You don't stop the carnage by contributing to it. We don't pretend to be experts in counter-insurgency strategies, but isn\'t the state supposed to show citizens that it is different? That it abides by the rule of law, and that it is there to protect the citizens from harm. And when civilians do get harmed, as they will in this fight, isn't honesty the best policy? To own up, and take steps to see that it doesn't happen again.

When it was dragged into this messy war exactly two years ago this week, the Royal Nepali Army had everything going for it. It had a good reputation, it did not interfere in civilian politics, and it carried a grand martial tradition going back to the days of the birth of this nation.

Today, even as the Maoists' violent path is alienating them from the very people in whose name they were fighting the war, the security forces face a sullen population and a reputation for trigger-happiness. When pressed, they take refuge in "they do it too" or "they started it first". For the state, that can never be an excuse.

Most Nepalis are trapped between unfeeling brutality on one side, and unnecessary ruthless on the other. Safeguarding human rights is not something the state does to keep donors happy, it does so because as the force legally mandated to bear arms its primary responsibility is to protect citizens.