The country is observing a ‘silent period’ until the election is over at 5pm tomorrow after the campaigning drew to a close at midnight on Monday. During this cooling-off period, the political parties and the candidates take stock and wait for the way the electorate cast their ballots. The voters are free from the pressure of political canvassing and can therefore consider their options coolly, if they have not made up their minds already. As the heat of the electioneering subsides during these official forty-eight hours, the risks of violent clashes between the cadres of political parties are expected to fall. So, threats of pre-poll violence, if any, are more likely to come from quarters that are not happy about this election. In this context, Monday’s agreement between the three Leftist parties – the CPN-UML, the CPN-Maoist, and the CPN (Unity Centre-Masal) – assumes importance. Because during the campaigns, it was the communist parties which fought among themselves more often than with the others.

Both domestic and international observers that number over 60,000 are already fanning out across the country to observe the polls. The purpose of all this exercise is, supposedly, to ensure a free and fair election. However, the row over whether the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) could deploy its staff to monitor human rights during the polling day without the Election Commission (EC) passes was allowed to reach a stage where it had threatened to damage the reputation of the EC and the home ministry. The EC said the NHRC needed its passes; the NHRC, being a constitutional body charged with monitoring the human rights in the country, said it could act on its own as long as human rights were concerned. Then, the EC even refused to issue observers’ passes to the NHRC, complained the NHRC in a press release.

The home ministry clarified its position saying that all organisations other than the OHCHR-Nepal, the ICRC and the UNMIN were required to hold the EC passes in order to monitor the election. Both the EC and the home ministry were clearly at fault on this issue. First, they had treated the nation’s constitutional organ as any other poll observer. Polls and human rights are closely related, and it is the NHRC’s constitutional duty to monitor human rights, and there must be no restrictions on its operations. If these three foreign organisations did not require the passes, the question arose why the NHRC should be treated otherwise. In any other country where government leaders and public officials value national self-respect more, their own national institutions receive priority over foreign ones. This is not to say that these three foreign agencies should have been treated differently. But if the nation’s constitutional human rights body was not allowed to monitor the polls freely, a lot of uncomfortable questions could be raised about the deniers. However, soon after the NHRC decision on Tuesday to disregard the EC and act on its own to monitor the polls, the EC decided to treat the NHRC like the other three agencies. This last-minute realisation of its untenable position has saved the EC from scandal.