Kathmandu, November 18:

The failure on the part of the seven-party alliance to have the CPN-Maoist enter a peace deal on Thursday has tended to disrupt the immediate course of the peace process. But the tension has not yet crossed the danger mark.

While no one who has kept a tab on the peace process will venture on to say that the peace process is in for a beating so early on, the failure has nonetheless put the alliance and government under pressure.

The CPN-Maoist, which is well-known to play its rivals one against other remarkably well, has now resorted to extortion, renewed conscription and intimidation as the best vehicle to bring the ruling establishment and alliance alike under pressure once again.

Moreover, while the Maoist leadership is sticking to an action plan when dealing with the alliance through this critical phase, the leaders of the alliance have been found too complacent to follow any blueprint as an insurance against Maoist tactics. The alliance appears more complacent following the November 8 deal.

The fact that the alliance leadership was complacent about successfully signing the deal on Thursday becomes evident from the way they reacted to the Maoist proposal that the deal be made public along with the interim constitution. This could, at best, be a bargaining ploy while alliance leaders had no words for it.

The fact that it was the Maoist talk team which came up with the proposal suggests that the government talk team was too complacent about the day’s business and had no action plan to take the Maoist negotiators by surprise.

Had the government talk team something to shock its rivals with, the business perhaps would have been smooth. However, since there was nothing of the sort, the Maoist talk team gained in morale and could be thus expected to have upper hand hereafter.

Given what transpired yesterday, the seven-party alliance has taken a beating for its lapse in not coming out successful in pushing the deal. The reason behind the failure — as Laxman Prasad Ghimire of Nepali Congress (NC) said — is “we had ambiguous deal in hand. No one can expect to pin down rivals when he/she has ambiguous text which is prone to arbitrary interpretation.”