Nepal: In the family

Nguồn tin: nguontinviet.com

Sushil Koirala: familiar face

IT IS hard to believe that the prime minister, Sushil Koirala, once had the oomph to take part in hijacking an aeroplane full of cash. These days the 74-year-old exudes little energy or confidence. And yet Nepal’s hopes for stability and a constitution rest on him and his party, the Nepali Congress, which narrowly won elections for the Constituent Assembly in November and now leads the government.

Mr Koirala has a prestigious name in Nepalese politics. One cousin was the country’s first elected prime minister, before he was ousted in a coup in 1960. Another cousin, Girija Prasad Koirala, orchestrated that hijacking in 1973, to finance a planned armed insurgency that came to little. He went on to become prime minister four times, between 1990 and 2008.

Nepal’s government and its leader are thus seen by nearly everyone as the return of an old guard. Others in the cabinet, including the finance and home ministers, are familiar faces from the 1990s, too. That is hardly reassuring: this era is remembered for corruption, ineffective rule and the brutal mishandling of a nascent Maoist rebellion which only helped it spread through the rugged countryside. Maoists went on to wage a decade-long civil war, in which they sought (and eventually achieved) the overthrow of the monarchy and the promotion of the interests of the lowest caste. The war ended in 2006.

Today the ruling party seems not to think that lower castes matter much. The powerful ministries are all run by high-caste men, marking a return to earlier times and a failure to reflect the country’s diversity. Though dalits—once known as “untouchables”—account for nearly one in six of Nepal’s 28m people, Mr Koirala’s party fielded none in the election, and none sits in his cabinet.

“It’s as if there was no movement in 2006, and no Maoist insurgency for ten years before that,” complains an activist leader, Devendra Raj Pandey, referring to street protests in the capital, Kathmandu, that helped to bring an end to the war. Mr Pandey, like many educated types, says he would like to support the Nepali Congress, but is put off by the party’s failure to share power with lower castes or devolve it to local bodies. Nonsense, a defender of the party retorts. He says it now supports both republicanism and federalism, a sharp change from the 1990s, when the monarchy still existed.

At least a cabinet exists, after much wrangling for plum posts among party factions and a junior coalition ally. The government says it plans to get a long-delayed new constitution written and then hold a new election for president—all within a year. In theory this is possible, since much of the constitution is agreed upon. But Mr Koirala may not rush to put himself out of a job. And other Nepalese politicians are not notable for their work ethic. Mr Koirala is not the only one short of oomph.

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