We are familiar with the English proverb of killing two birds with a single stone. This is considered an act of smartness. The Maoist ceasefire was something more than that. It killed four birds with one stone. In one sweep, it embarrassed its foes, wooed the political parties to its side, won public support and befriended the international community. In that sense, it was a greater and more powerful bombshell than any bomb they had used during their 10-year-old insurgency. That should teach them a sweet lesson that peaceful means is more effective than the violent ways and that they should henceforth opt for an effective one.

Is it not paradoxical that people asked the King for peace but they got it from the Maoists? The King promised peace to the people, which the Maoists fulfilled. In that process, the rebels looked generous whereas the King was perceived stingy in approving peace, let alone granting it.

To outdo the Maoists, the King should and can go a step forward and declare a ceasefire for six months or, say, a year. Why not? That is how the common people feel about it and are voicing their concern openly. They would have found a cause, in that case, to cheer up their King who seems to have missed the bus along with a trip to New York. It is not the time to watch it idly. It is time to reciprocate with smarter moves. One move could be to hold a political conference that the political parties, including the Maoists, could not refuse to participate. That can pave the way for a peaceful solution to the ongoing political conflict.

The one-sided ceasefire turned out to be a miraculous somersault. Shirking the garrulous image, the Maoists appeared overnight like the lovers of peace. But the government, on the other hand, looked like a war-monger by not responding in a matching peaceful coin. It was as if the government has not heard the King repeating peace as the popular desire all through his recent tours in the east and west of Nepal. When the whole world is talking about the ceasefire and restoration of instant peace in the country, the government is silent with the exception of the scrappy and brainless statement.

If and when the war break out again, say, after three months of the unilateral ceasefire, the cabinet members will start roaring like lions against the “terrorists”. But the people will hold the government guilty of restarting the war even if the truth might be something else. Will it not be yet another paradox that the innocent will appear guilty and the guilty will appear innocent?

The most wonderful thing to witness is that nothing of the sort of stopping the gunfire, so widely welcomed by the people, has ever happened in Nepal to the government media, a media which had so tantalisingly focused on the royal directives to government officials to work for peace. It is like a Japanese soldier who disappeared in the Filipino jungle during the Second World War and reappeared in the civilised world after about 20 years. But he believed all these years that the war was still continuing. Should not the government media wake up to the reality of life and at least take cognizance of the suspension of fighting?

It is all the more striking to note that the security forces, especially the army, were suddenly immobilised not by victory or defeat but by the rebels’ putting the arms on hold. Can the army complain of losing the opportunity of fighting a war? It is not technically obliged to observe the ceasefire as it is a unilateral decision of the rebels. But will it not further tarnish the government’s image if it goes on the offensive at this time? The story of the police force is however something different. These days it is keeping extra busy with the peaceful demonstrations reaching a crescendo. Till the agitation remains peaceful, the army will have to keep away.

It must be a revealing irony even for the Maoists that they are winning popular support by ceasing fire, which they were losing by opening fire. It must convince them that what they could not achieve with the barrel of the guns they could do so by the power of peaceful sloganeering. It is a quirk of fate that the political parties and Maoists, hostile to each other, are coming closer over time. Girija Prasad Koirala was the greatest enemy of the Maoists when he was the prime minister on several occasions. It did not take even a decade for him to emerge as their greatest friend. No wonder then the Maoists, he said, suspended their war at his calling. Why would they not when the leading parties came around to their political agenda of constituent assembly and democratic republic not because the parties liked it but because the King compelled them to accept it?

The Maoists pleased the international community by their ceasefire move. It is only the US which has kept an uneasy silence. US ambassador James F. Moriarty once said it is the Maoists, not the King, who is Nepal’s problem. Is it not the time to ask him if he has changed his mind?

Shrestha is a freelance journalist