Now that Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal is at the helm, the Common Minimum Programme (CMP) has once again been written in the country, the first time being in 2004 when the CPN-UML was preparing tojoin the government formed under Nepali Congress (D)’s Sher Bahadur Deuba.

Given the novelty of the concept and extended parleys held for drafting it, people expected the Common Minimum Programme to be a charter of concrete goals and activities of immediate national priority complete with measurable indicators etc. ready to be vigorously implemented to give the people an early and positive taste of new leadership. But to their utter

disappointment, the much-vaunted Common Minimum Programme turned out to be a long list of platitudes, most of them plagiarized from the Tenth Plan document.The 43 different items in it started with the then all too familiar cliché of “protecting the achievements of the 1990 Movement” and ended with “ensuring the rights of overseas Nepalis.” But the haggling for the ministries continued

long after the Common Minimum Programme’s

“finalization”, thus letting the cat out the bag that the acronym in reality stood for something more avaricious i.e. Claiming Maximum Portfolios. By all accounts, it was an exercise in collective political dishonesty, purposively committed based on their conviction that all the people in Nepal can be fooled for all the time.

While such irresponsibility has always remained the hallmark of our politicians, it is not only the people who suffered. This time around they too are fighting for

their own survival.

Their cadres in the districts and the villages have been killed, maimed or otherwise chased away from their own villages by Maoists, but their leaders in Kathmandu can do nothing other than trek to the Human Rights office and lodge a complaint, knowing fully well that the latter remains even more paralyzed.

And to add insult to injury, these politicians are regularly ridiculed as “eunuchs” — a term, given their state of utter helplessness, might just be the correct description of their being at present. Based on what little we know from the media, the Common Minimum Programme is once again blandly worded.

Apparently, it is designed to “providing immediate relief to the people on essential commodities, improving the law and order situation, carrying out development works adjustment and rehabilitation of the Maoist combatants for lasting peace, (and) the writing of the constitution on time”, the situation warrants that it be a more concrete document.

For the people themselves it has never been so bad. Impunity is rampant. There is near total breakdown of law and order. Inflation is galloping, and so is unemployment, the latter further aggravated by the hordes of migrant workers driven home by recession abroad. The problems of Maoists’ victims remain

unresolved despite several multi-point agreements

between the parties and Maoists.

The security forces themselves remain demoralized as is the business-industrial community, the latter

continuing to suffer from shutdowns and extortions.

Development activities remain stalled in the villages because the allocated

money remains unreleased under the alibi that there

are no elected officials in the local bodies, oblivious of

the fact that such officials have had little to show for the billions they have spent during the last half century of their existence.This amounts to a grievous insult to the people who, by working through user groups, have been conserving and managing one of the best forests in the world.

While our problems have grown to be gargantuan over the last few years, there is no trust on our politicians. For instance, the Hawaii-based political risk consultant, Thomas Mark, who

has written extensively on our insurgency problems, recently lamented that in Nepal “there is no leadership in sight of the quality one sees in Colombo”.

According to him, the problem Nepal is facing is one of a “state within a state”. It is against such context that the so-called Common Minimum Programme has been written. To assure the people that this is

not the repeat exercise of the political dishonesty of five years ago, each and every word in it must seem to address specific problems being suffered by them.

As a matter of fact, the new defense minister, Bidya Devi Bhandari, has said

as much of a possible Common Minimum Programme when she recently told

the media that “the new government is committed for assuring peace and security to the people in real sense” and “investigating into the case of Prachanda Thaiba, Ram Hari Shrestha, Bibek Devkota, and others victimized by the former government”. (THT May 28)

All these require good politicians on whom people can bank. It is not only a good Common Minimum Programme that is needed; it is also the will to

implement it. It is the quality of individual politicians that counts even more.

Shrestha is a development writer.