Pashupati Shumsher Rana, chairman of the truncated Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), has come down heavily on Home Minister and chief of the breakaway RPP, for his implied threat to brand the mainstream political parties ‘terrorists’ for their 12-point understanding, which their recent second understanding with the Maoists has agreed to strengthen further. Rana has labelled as a ‘dangerous conspiracy” and “hypocrisy” the government’s call for talks with the parties on the one hand and arresting political leaders and threatening them with a terrorist tag. All this Thapa and others have been doing, apart from ruling out both the possibility of restoring the House of Representatives — a key demand of the seven-party political alliance — and constituent assembly, the cornerstone of the 12-point agreement between the parties and the Maoists. The government’s focus, under the royal road map, is now on conducting the ‘general election’ while, both at home and abroad, the recent municipal polls were roundly dismissed as a fiasco.

The political parties are the bedrock of the 1990 Constitution. One wonders what kind of multiparty democracy government leaders like Thapa may be talking of by threatening the parties with whatever the government likes to do. By sidelining and ill-treating the parties, people in this unelected lame duck arrangement may be thinking that it would still be a ‘multiparty democracy’ if half a dozen freshly-anointed parties, including Thapa’s own, formed by tiny groups with vested interests pretended to be functional. But this is a grossly mistaken notion. Nobody will recognise such an attempt as being legitimate. If the government wants to live with this make-believe, let it but at its own peril.

The gap between the government’s words and deeds clearly indicates that its idea of ‘democracy’ is not the one shared by most Nepalis and the international community. And its treatment of the parties has removed any benefit of the doubt it may have received as regards its ‘commitment to multiparty democracy and the Constitution’. If those in government are incapable of behaving like responsible citizens, they could at least have talked more responsibly. The government must at least summon the courage to jettison hypocrisy — stop talking of multiparty democracy if you continue to go the way you are going, or let the political parties assume a role guaranteed by the Constitution. To put it another way, restore the Constitution or scrap it instead of acting hypocritically. Such a move would at least offer the country a more definitive view of things to come.