Suspending Khand would have the right course of action to take for the CWC
The Central Working Committee (CWC) meeting of the Nepali Congress concluded on Wednesday with a decision to convene its Mahasamiti convention from November 27 to 29 in Kathmandu to chart the future course of action of the largest party in the parliament. The CWC meeting that began on July 18, which was streamed live, lasted a week and also took various others decisions, from asking the government to frame umbrella laws to make federalism fully functional and declare Madhes a drought-hit region to fighting corruption and ensuring good governance.
The CWC meeting that was delayed by a year saw intense parleys between the factions led by Sher Bahadur Deuba and his rival, NC General Secretary Gagan Kumar Thapa, who had hoped to convince the former to hand over the parliamentary party leadership to a younger leader of the party, but to no avail. The next CWC meeting of the NC will be held on September 19, as is required to be held every two months by its statute. However, the party decided not to hold the Policy Convention despite demands of several CWC members. Instead all the agenda that the party had earlier decided on for discussion in the policy convention will be done so at the Mahasamiti meeting.
It is unfortunate that the country's oldest party should be run at the whim of one person, namely, Deuba, who holds sway over the party. Its statute dictates that the policy con-vention be held within six months of the Mahasamiti convention, which was last held in December 2021. However, 19 months later, the CWC has decided to drop the provision. A CWC meeting is supposed to be convened every two monthsto see if its decisions were being implemented effectively, but it has not been held regularly. The NC CWC meeting also adopted the political report submitted by senior leader Gopal Man Shrestha, which decided to terminate the membership of those cadres who engaged in physical attacks on party members. However, it came as a big surprise that the CWC failed to suspend former home minister and NC CWC member Bal Krishna Khand, who is now cooling his heels behind bars after being implicated in the fake Bhutanese refugee scam. Against this, Gagan Thapa has written a note of dissent, and demanded that anyone associated with the fake refugee scandal be suspended if they are under investigation. Indeed this would have been the correct course for the CWC to take. By preventing Khand's suspension and shielding him from any action, the NC has made a mockery of the rule of law of the country.
Thapa and other aspiring younger generational leaders must understand better the political undercurrents prevailing in their party. Deuba has a firm grip on the party, and it is unlikely that he will transfer the leadership to the younger generation, much less to Thapa and his associates, during the Mahasamiti convention scheduled for November. But Nepal's politics is in a flux, and it is no longer the domain of the big three parties that have prevailed for decades.
People expect change, which the NC under the current leadership has failed to deliver. A party that swears by the ideals of its founding leader BP Koirala would do well to put them into practice and shun any dictatorial tendencies.
Tourism in SNP
Tourist arrivals at Sagarmatha National Park (SNP) in the Everest region reached pre-pandemic levels last fiscal year. As per the SNP data, as many as 57,690 tourists - 44,413 foreigners and the remaining from Nepal and India - visited the Everest region during fiscal year 2022-23. More than 4,000 tourists visited the region in 2022-23 compared to 53,000 tourists who visited the region in 2018-19. The SNP said only 4,819 tourists had visited the region during 2019-20 when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the country and the entire world hard.
Last fiscal year, the SNP collected Rs 143 million in revenue from the distribution and sale of forest resources, tourism activities, fines and others. The 'trek card' officially launched in April 2023 has helped the authorities to track their checkpoint entries and locations, from where the tourists can scan their trek cards to update their location to the local authorities.
Unlike other places, tourists can trek solo in the Khumbu region, which is famous for trekking all over the world. Out of the 2,341 households, around 750 are directly involved in the hotel/lodge business while others are engaged in small-scale eateries and guiding business.
A version of this article appears in the print on July 28, 2023, of The Himalayan Times.