Apropos of the news story “National unity govt is the need of the hour, says Dahal” (THT, May 10, Page 3), politics is all about power mandated by the people through periodic elections held in a free, fair and impartial manner.

In a democracy there are various interest groups operating as per their agendas.

This is the reason why we call it democracy in which those interests are best served through a legitimate way.

On the other hand, there is an opposition party in parliament that keeps vigil on the government’s activities as well as its policies and programmes.

This checks and balance is the beauty of real democracy. But sad to say the oppositions quite often do not follow the very principle of checks and balance approach that would otherwise make the government accountable to the people.

All the political parties in parliamentary democracy are entangled in petty interest and hardly discuss the public issues and policy level and economic issues that may help transform the society.

It has become the tendency of the main opposition to oppose everything that the government unveils, even new programme that may be suitable to address the problems of a larger population.

Even if the new programmes are attractive and feasible from the implementation point of view the opposition parties term them as “populist” and express skepticism about the possibility of their implementation.

They tend to forget the fact that they were also in the government sometime ago and criticize the government for failing to deliver the goods for which they had also failed to do so too.

The opposition should also change their attitude and play a constructive role while being vigilant about the government’s wrong doings.

Saroj Wagle, Bara

Initiatives

It’s a matter of chagrin that the Bagmati river clean- up campaign has lost its enthusiasm after the longest 150 weeks of this mega initiative taken by people of all walks of life for over two years “Bagmati clean-up campaign losing steam” (THT, May 8, Page 2).

I got quite perturbed after reading the news story that the level-headed ones failed to keep up their overwhelming promise to freshen the water of Bagmati river in order to facilitate it with fish farming since they succumbed to an old disease of discontinuing their exemplary initiatives regarding the resolution of sensitive and burning issues.

There is a famous saying, “Many people know how to succeed but very few of them know how to keep it up.” Now the time has come for every level-headed ones and concerned authorities to take efficacious initiatives regarding the maintenance of proper sanitary condition of the holy River of Bagmati without any further delay.

What I would like to say is that the Bagmati River cannot be revived to its pristine beauty unless the municipality bars every household from discharging waste directly into the rivers.

Sanjog Karki, Tansen