All-round failure of the government demands an active
role of the private sector. It has shown some activism by
actively going out and convincing the government to
bring diesel plant for electricity generation. Similar private sector activism is needed also in other issues.
Nepal was never in a situation as worst as this in its recent history. But we can’t blame only the political parties for all this. The private sector is equally to be blame.
They went wrong terribly by bending over backwards to welcome the king’s direct rule. Consequently, the political parties have been suspicious even after the Janaandolan-2. After the maoists came out victorious in the Constituent Assembly elections, the private sector again went out of the way to give a blind support to the maoists. The private sector was so careless that it did not bother to read through the official lines of the maoist party’s Constituent Assembly election manifesto. Had they read these documents, they would not have overlooked the wide difference between what the Maoist leaders said in their speeches and what the party had in their official documents.
What the Maoists are doing now is exactly as they have mentioned in their official documents. (Therefore, criticising the maoists for what they have been doing, would be private sector's intentional ignorance towards their own flaws. In fact, if the Maoists do contrary to what they have in their official documents, they will lose their moral standing.) The games maoists are playing these days signify one single pre-determined purpose--to control everything under the party, be it education, health, industry, commerce, the press, the army, the trade union or even the religious institutions.
But the situation has become so worse that things cannot be allowed to continue as they are. The prime minister has accepted his failure to govern the country. He has gone on the record saying that he is unable to gain support from domestic and foreign powers. That is despite his another admission that all the first three months of his office were spent on trying to woo the foreign powers, taming the bureaucracy (for this he created 20 new positions at the secretary level in the government and promoted people to these positions so as to win their favour) and resolving the internal dispute of his own party. Still he believes that he is not getting the required support from all these three quarters. Meanwhile, opposition party is naturally idoing its job of opposing.
The point here is that though it has been more than four months since the government took hold of the office, the government hasn't started even the first steps of governance; forget about drafting of the New Constitution. People are being killed and factories are being forcefully shut down by the cadres of the prime minister’s own party. The National Planning Commission hasn't been formed yet. The power supply situation has worsened to an unprecedented level. And the prime minister is planning to go on a tour of Norway and Lebanon to study how these countries have resolved their power supply problems. It shows that he does not believe in the management theory of delegation. His sole principle of governance is to terrorize and control. He has to prove the otherwise.
This is too much. Even the non-Maoist political parties (whether in the government coalition or outside it) seem to be perplexed. So, it is absurd to hope anything concrete from them to get the country out of the present mess. Also the non-government organizations (euphemistically called the Civil Society) seem to be in similar situation. Therefore, the private sector should now take the leadership in its hands. It should launch a dual campaign. On one hand, it should educate the general people about the wrongs that the government is committing and rights that are being done. And on the other hand, it should put pressure on the government to rectify its mistakes.
But will the private sector stand up to the occasion and show similar activism as it displayed in the case of power crisis?
