Inside the Raxaul train station people were shoving and jostling in a queue for their railway tickets. It was not the main railway junction, but still there were lots of people going to various parts of India. Some were sitting on their haunches or just lying down on the floor, fanning themselves due to the heat and flies.
For Sagir Khan, 22, a student perusing his four-year Electronic and Electrical Engineering under graduation degree from International Islami University in the Bangladeshi city of Chittagong, madrasa education has enriched his thinking and understanding.
The cabinet's new Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), set up last month, has already come under fire for being overzealous, and violating constitutionally guaranteed privacy laws in going after Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Two issues - floor crossing in parliamentary voting and Maoist drive in recruiting combatants of People's Liberation Army - are making the fourth round of Prime Ministerial poll on Friday in the Legislature Parliament more sensational. The monotony that the election had in the first three run-offs is sure to give way to thrilling experience this time, say politicos. Both carry profound potentiality of impacting Nepali politics particularly peace and constitution in varying ways.
As the third round August-2- Prime Ministerial poll draws closer, Nepali top leaders find themselves rather tightly-gripped in what could be termed the situation of Catch-22, the famous term coined by Joseph Heller in his novel to mean no way out. All politicians had first taken the poll to be a solution to the deadlock facing them, felt relieved and, therefore, passionately pursued it as the most convenient democratic fast track to provide the country with a viable alternative government through Legislature Parliament.
The parliamentary battle that Nepalis witnessed on Wednesday's Prime Ministerial poll is in a sense unique and somewhat innovative in varied series of recent democratic exercises. It gave them a fresh taste of failure to elect a Premier in the first round in an unprecedented way and trying the second one for a decisive ruling.
As a small kid, while heading out of Kathmandu on a bus trip to the Terai plains and beyond, seeing the Trishuli river quietly traversing through alpine meadows and rugged hills like a shifting mass of green plate always filled me with wonder. Starting as a small stream, it constantly widened and grew in size as it flowed in its course and ran parallel with the highway till it converged with the mighty Narayani river in the lush sub-tropical jungles of lowland Nepal.
Nepal is to pick up yet another majority government through parliamentary process to replace the Madhav Kumar Nepal-coalition –bunch. The exercise, the third one in the past three years following the 2008-election of the 601-member Constituent Assembly, is a compulsion imposed by political parties' failure to maintain the consensus spirit of People's Movement II.
