If anyone needed a reminder of the hair-trigger situation the country is in two weeks before the Maoist ceasefire ends, the Nagarkot carnage is it. This is what happens when a country slides towards militarisation and the state's security apparatus ends up alienating the very people it was set up to protect.

Wednesday night's heinous slaughter of innocents may have been an isolated act by a soldier running amok. But it is yet another blot on the RNA's dismal human rights record. This time the army reacted swiftly with a statement providing full details and promising an investigation. It needs to make sure there is no coverup this time and that the families of the dead and wounded are properly and promptly compensated. Otherwise the public's worst fears, that something is seriously rotten in the army's discipline and morale, will be confirmed.

All we can hope for now is that nothing will derail the movement towards peace that began with the party-rebel pact. The Pink Palace has two choices: to build on the agreement or to wreck it.

To turn the Maoist MoU with the parties into a tripartite agreement and steer the country back to peace, stability and development would be the right path. But the royal regime appears to take the agreement as a direct threat. Going by his track record over the past three years, the king thinks he can ride this out and even seems to be working on a parallel deal with the Maoists.

For a brief moment last week we were almost tempted to be optimistic after seeing the new faces in the reshuffled cabinet. In Singha Darbar's vast corridors of mediocrity, Kesar Bahadur Bista, Kamal Thapa and Narayan Singh Pun stand out as doers. You may not agree with them but they are not the shrill sycophants we are used to seeing. And because Pun was the architect of the 2002 peace process with the Maoists, there was speculation the royal regime was finally responding, albeit indirectly, to the initiative taken by the parties and the Maoists towards peace.

But the pronouncements that the new ministers have made in their first week in office indicate their terms of reference are solely to conduct municipal elections. What a waste of talent to have these guys as just window-dressing for a showcase poll and put them in charge of a demoralised bureaucracy already micro-managed by royal cronies.

With time running out on the one-month ceasefire extension and after the Nagarkot incident, the palace needs to respond positively to the party-rebel agreement and tighten the bolts on a tripartite peace process. A monkey wrench can be used to put a spanner in the works but it is really meant to be a tool to fix things.