Nepal’s Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala, still suffering from regressive mindset, has not resigned even after 10 weeks of the Constituent Assembly poll. He has resisted the request from all other political parties to facilitate the formation of a post-poll government. Because of him, the constitution-drafting mission assigned by the people has already fallen behind.
Prime Minister Koirala, who did his utmost to preserve monarchy till 28 May 2008, is now demanding that he be the first president of Nepal. The Nepalis have been laughing at his power-mongeing nature. He holds the posts of Head of the State, Prime Minister, Defence Minister and Party President at present.
In 1998, he promised to resign from his party presidentship while becoming the prime minister. Although he has become Nepal’s prime minister several times, he has not resigned from party presidentship. He currently holds four salaried posts: Head of the State, Prime Minister, Defence Minister and Party President. He does not want to give any of those posts to anybody else. The Nepalis are familiar with his power addiction.
Although the 10-April Constituent Assembly poll has given a mandate for new leadership in the country, Prime Minister Koirala has declined to accept the elected leadership, i.e., Maoists who scored three times more than Koirala’s party Nepali Congress.
Since the Nepalis, who have already experienced the rule of Nepali Congress Several times from 1992 to 2008, they no longer want to maintain it. The reason is clear: the government under the leadership of Nepali Congress has always worked for the elites and business tycoons and clearly against the working class people. State mechanisms under Nepali Congress leaderships work to strengthen smuggling, blackmarketing and other criminal networks while jeopardizing people’s daily life. The world may have received distorted information about Nepal. Their opinion formation may not have taken place accurately. As the international community appears to have been dependent on the information disseminated by Nepal’s elite media, they are likely to have been misinformed to a great extent. In this context, they may equally have been misinformed about Koirala under whose rule the majority of people have continuously suffered.
The April uprising of 2006 forced Koirala to side with the people in appearance. He has unwillingly signed in many documents. That is his contribution to the peace process. But his regressive mindset has always become a serious problem to his own personality. Koirala’s leaderhip in the Nepali Congress has clearly proved this. His addiction to power is another problem that has not only victimized himself but also the people. Because of the problem of his political morality, his party, along with the nation, is suffering.
But Koirala is not the only problem. It would be unjust to say so. Other leaders within the Nepali Congress by following Koirala’s footsteps have not been able to guide their party politics. They just became followers, not thinkers. They could not question Koirala at all. They just played the role of passive consent-givers.
Likewise, leaderships in other parties have not cooperated among themselves as well as expected. They have confined themselves to their own existence. They have paid little attention to the hardcore truth that a party’s existence depends on how they work to improve people’s daily life.
It has become quite indispensable for the political forces to accept the new reality and defeat the power monopolism of Koirala because democracy does not accept the idea of monopolism.