Cartoon: Diwakar Chettri
The year has got off to a flying start with parties sticking steadfastly to their new year resolutions to keep partying on by extending the life of the Second CA. As the year-long revelries start, we should all brace ourselves to enjoy
accomplishing even less in 2015 than we accomplished in 2014.
Some parties have really got into the mood and have scheduled district, zonal and national bunds for the coming year. We can look forward to lots of do-nothing days that can be devoted to attending to personal hygiene and cleaning up our nooks and crannies. Now that 17 January and 19 January have both been declared Nepal bunds by the Dash and Cash Baddies respectfully, many of us will finally have time on our hands to extract wads of lint from inside our belly buttons which can be sold to the nation’s pashmina industry to earn the national exchequer valuable foreign currency to pay for our burgeoning imports. If all of us Nepalis contribute by taking part in navel exercises in 2015, we can make this country great again.
Through trial and error over the past 50 years we have finally hit on the right formula for governance in our country: allow our rulers to goof off so they don’t goof up. However, with factions and splinter groups declaring bunds left and right, there is a crying need for a coordinating body to schedule national shutdowns to avoid duplication and overlap.
The proposed High-Level National Strike Coordination Mechanism (HLNSCM) will be made up of a consortium of like-minded leaders who want the country to come to a standstill, but don’t want to get in each others’ way.
With most days in January already taken, the HLNSCM has announced that January 20 is the only date still open for any political force for or against federalism which wants to declare a bandh for whatever reason. The Mechanism has apologised to the public for the oversight, which means some people will have to actually go to work on that day.
But the Mechanics are taking bookings for bandhs in 2015 on a first-come-first-serve basis, and technicians are working on an app so that political parties can use smartphones to block off days when they want to get agitated, and the public can conveniently find out which days are allocated to protest a particular clause in the proposed constitution. We can also virtually set fire to a digital version of the new constitution if we can’t get our hands on an actual hardcopy of the draft.
The gobblement has also come up with a cunning plan to generate revenue from bund declarations: it will auction off remaining dates in 2015 which haven’t already been set aside for national strikes so that we can make the ‘Totally Shutdown Nepal in 2015’ campaign a grand success.
One thing we shouldn’t do is give up hope. We shouldn’t go: “Oh, what’s the use of bunds, they don’t achieve anything.” That is having a negative and fatalistic attitude. We must always think positive and take up the new motto: “Yes, the Nepali can. And the Nepali will bring the country to a halt.”
The success of a bandh hinges on people voluntarily keeping off the streets. But we must persuade them to keep their motorcycles at home by burning the first one that ventures out. We must train the guardians of our democracy in the art of shattering the windscreen of a speeding car from 25 yards. And who exempted rickshaws and airplanes? How can we defend freedom if we allow planes to fly around on Days of National Shutdown? Do we believe in Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Vandalism or not? When we say we want to jam all chakkas, we should mean it, and that includes anything running on ball bearings.
A note of caution, however. The donkey hears through the grapevine that there are still political parties out there who do not believe in bandhs and are squeamish about using this great avenue to express our democratic desire to take a day off. Woe on such spoil-sports. How can our hard-won freedoms ever be safeguarded if we don’t vigorously exercise our fundamental human right to stay home and harvest our burgeoning lint?
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Taskless force, Editorial