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
