Show Guts Say "NO" to Extortion
Continued Maoist drive to collect forced donations from businesses has been driving business people up the wall. Meet anyone from the business community and ask him about how his business is going and the answer will be a lengthy wail recounting how business has suffered due to donation drives. The situation has worsened in the recent weeks. And it is not only the Maoists who are in this race. Almost all the political parties have sent their own cadres to exact as much as they can from businesses. 
How heavy the pressure may be on business is very easy to guess. According to one count, the Maoist party has 22 sister organizations. The number is a bit less in other parties, but the grand total of the entire sister organizations will cross 100. If one pays Rs. 10,000 to each of these organizations, the amount will add up to one million rupees. But Rs. 10,000 is too small for these seekers of political donations. Most of the levy is at least in six digits though some donors may haggle and manage to reduce it to five digits.
It seems donation collection has gained a business status among the political parties. Soon after one group is sent away with donations, another makes an entry with an even higher demand and threat of fiercer consequences if the demand is not met.
The business people themselves are to be blamed for this, because it is they who encouraged this tendency by buckling down to the initial demands of the Maoists with the hope that such practices would be transient and would go away as soon as the Maoists entered mainstream politics. But even after the Maoists have entered the parliament, it seems the group that succeeds in getting money informs another where to find easy prey. Therefore, this situation has worsened. And it seems there is no end to it. Whether the elections for the Constituent Assembly polls are held in June or not, the parties are not likely to stop their donation drive. If the elections are held in June, they will demand donations for electioneering and if there are no elections, they will need donations to carry on feeding their cadre and running other political activities.
In such a situation, the businesses have only one alternative: to be united and say “NO” to all types of donation demands from the political parties and at the same time to press the government and the political parties to bring out a law that will make the donations transparent. Making donation payments is not something alien to Nepali businesspeople. They have been doing it all along. They would not mind making such payments even now as long as they can write such payments as expenses in their books.
Also the political parties and their sister organizations should be required to audit their accounts and make the report public from time to time – not only annually, but quarterly or at least every six months. This is more urgent now in the wake of the statement by the Finance Minister that the Maoists are not providing any report regarding how they are spending the money that the government had provided them for various purposes.
