Political confusion

The Himalayan Times

28 April 2017

Political confusion

Looking at the ongoing political environment and blame game going on among the major political parties, it does not seem that the local level election will be held peacefully. The UML, the main opposition obstructed the House proceedings on the pretext of different reasons “UML obstructs House proceedings over DPM’s reply” (THT, April 27. Page 1). The ruling parties seemed able to finally convince Federal Alliance (FA) and Rastriya Janta Party-Nepal (RJPN) to participate in the local elections to be held in two phases. However, the RJPN says that it will not participate in the elections until the government amends the new constitution in accordance with the agreement.

Both the ruling parties and opposition are still blaming each other for not being serious in holding local level elections. Senior leaders have been found exchanging hot words over their intentions about the polls “Deuba, Oli exchange angry words” (THT, 27 April, Page 5) at such a time when they were supposed to be seriously engaged in coming to consensus over resolving major issues of constitution and holding the long awaited local polls. It was almost for the last 20 years the local governing bodies were dysfunctional due to absence of local elections. Most of the development programmes were not implemented having direct effects on daily lives of people. Budgets meant for such programmes were grossly misutilised. The all party mechanism completely failed and heavily engaged in corruption.

There are only seventeen days left for the first phase of elections to be held. Major parties have started publishing their rosy political manifests to lure voters. So far, NC and RPP have made public their highly ambitious programmes. Looking at these programmes, it seems that Nepal will be turned into one of the middle level developed countries in the next 10 years. It was not surprising to see such rosy manifestos in the past also. Not all such promises were fulfilled.

Rai Biren Bangdel

Maharajgunj, Kathmandu