Re: Sambhav Sharma's retort (Letters, #262) to my earlier reply (Letters, #260) to his first response (#259) to my Guest Column ('Support by default', #258). The difference in the incidence of corruption between mature democracies and ours is that in the former you have to look for the corrupt with a floodlight and in ours, they are everywhere. The monarch did not breach the constitution but salvaged it by taking over the reign because corrupt politicians had so ruined the nation that there could be no election, no parliament and no elected cabinet. While I am not an apologist for all the monarch's appointments, we should be thankful that there is an article 127 in the constitution to keep the country from going astray. To say that democracy has a self-cleansing system is to collude with the corrupt politicians who want to make their millions now and tell the people that democracy will take care of them later. A real democracy must begin to do better than the preceding regime from Day One. That is the bottom line of a genuine democracy. Regarding ex-generals in the Election Commission, they too are respectable citizens and must not be deprived of opportunities to serve the nation. So the only option for the country to return to democracy is for the parties to cleanse and reincarnate themselves under a new set of leaders capable of evoking trust among the people once again. The monarchy will continue to be there as the fallback position in the country's tryst with democracy whatever the outcry of ever-hungry politicians and their well wishers.

Bihari K Shrestha,
Lalitpur