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Kathmandu Monday February 05, 2001 Magh 23, 2057.
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Upping the ante
Chief justice Keshav Prasad Upadhyaya has
just narrowly escaped with his life at the hands of assassins, and the country is rather
stunned. In what is suspected to have been an ambush staged by Maoist insurgents, in
Surkhet district some 20 kilometers east of Birendranagar, others were not so lucky
including an appellate court registrar and the chief justice’s bodyguard. The
incident stuns not just because of the rank of the person obviously targeted but also
because of its audacity. It involved a series of explosions as a convoy of vehicles
entered the ambush area, followed by gunfire from a nearby hillside. Although the Maoists
have repeatedly attacked members of officialdom, apart from police personnel, this is the
first time the judiciary has been singled out and also the first time someone of such
rank. It inevitably raises a number of questions. It also marks the crossing of an
invisible threshold of what is acceptable for civil society.
To take up the questions first, why are the
Maoists training their guns on the judiciary, if indeed that is what they are doing? It
could be because they don’t like the idea of the Special Court which the government
has just set up. The stated objective of this court is to take up, among other things,
precisely the kind of insurgent activity that the Maoists have made their hallmark. The
Chief Justice heads the judicial council which selects the judges for the Special Court.
The attack on the Chief Justice may have been the Maoist way of signaling their
displeasure. The ambush could also have had something to do with the fact that the sixth
anniversary of the "people’s war" is just days away. The authorities had
been expecting some escalation of Maoist activity to mark the occasion. But they were not
expecting an assassination attempt on Mr Upadhyaya. Or it could be they were simply
gunning for someone of sufficiently high rank to make the point that they are upping the
ante. That would fit in with a general design of pressing the insurgency closer to home
against a ruling elite still smugly ensconced in the relative safety of the capital and
its environs. Which raises a second question. Given the impunity with which the Maoists
have carried out their attack, just how safe are our other public figures, and just how
safe is travel up country for whatever purpose. The Americans might not have been so wrong
in putting out a travel advisory for their nationals in Nepal to confine their movements
to the Kathmandu Valley.
In this sense and otherwise, Chief Justice
Upadhyaya’s close call does not make life any easier for our incumbent Prime
Minister. For all one can say, he might well be next on the hit list. Even if he is not
himself targeted in that fashion, his cup of woe is filling up nevertheless. He has shown
himself to be thoroughly incapable of dealing with the Maoists, be that for reasons of
intra-party wrangling or the shortcomings of the existing constitution. It may not all be
his fault. But he does deserve censure as it was precisely for purportedly the same as
well as two other reasons that he saw fit to engineer the ouster from office of his
predecessor Krishna Prasad Bhattarai almost a year ago.
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