Date Line The Telegraph - Weekly (Nepal)

D A T E L I N E

By: N.ARYAL

Options Left

As the veiled Indian presence in the Nepali crisis is mounting, Nepali state is falling apart. The other side is certainly the failure of three consecutive governments under the King's direct rule which confirms his experimentation brought the state to square one.

Hence the King's next move is highly awaited.

Is Deuba the last civilian prime minister?

Is this is the only option left for the King? Questions like these galore in the Kingdom.

Answers to these will come with unfolding of events in series as they come in the coming future.

The Indian Presence

When Krishna Gopal Shrestha, a UML Minister in the present government publicly disclosed that India is pressurizing the Nepal government to accept the Maoist's demand for a constituent assembly, the rebels relations with the Indian establishment becomes even more mysterious. It reminds how Ishwor Pokharel, then UML leader and now a minister, was grilled by India security forces at the Indira Airport and questioned him as to what was the harm in accepting the Maoists demand for a constituent assembly.

Clearly Indian security forces posses sympathy for Maoists and appear more political than BJP and Congress politicians.

Given this scenario Indian Government's unawareness of the fact that there existed Maoists' training camps in the Indian northern state of Uttaranchal becomes even more baffling.

Constituent Assembly

Now it is very well understood that the adoption of the constituent assembly by the Nepali Congress was not only a strategy of vengeance that was directed towards the King but the Indian pressure also prompted NC to adopt the CA option. To remember Girja's return from Delhi saw him getting more keyed up than before for the issue of a CA.

Nepal Lever Limited

Came as a big surprise and indeed unbelievable that the Maoists bombed the factory of Nepal Lever Limited, a Nepali version of Hindustan Lever Limited, India. The other day laymen were puzzled to the coming of another Maoists press release that said, the US ventures in Nepal would be their main targets. Two equally probable analysis can be done. The first one, of course is the breaking of pro and anti- India faction in the Maoists. The other one could be that the Maoists top leaders have no control over their cadres.

From Korea-Herald

A senior Indian counter-insurgency officer, Vinay Kumar Singh, noted that guerrilla leaders in Nepal and India had talked about a "red corridor" stretching from Nepal into the Indian states of Bihar and Andhra Pradesh. "We all laughed 10 years ago at the 'red corridor,'" he said. "Nobody is laughing any more." Richard Halloran, a former New York Times correspondent in Asia and military correspondent in Washington, D.C writes for the Korean Herald.

Words and deed differ

With a population of more than a billion and a silver medal to its credit at the Athens Olympics, Nepalese diplomats say practicing coercive diplomacy in the neighborhood and bagging medals at a competitive playground are two different things. Got the point!