The Spring of 1990 ushered democracy to Nepal and with it the hope for the achievement of a more just society created by upright leaders commanding popular respect. Half a dozen years later, is the sheer hopelessness of it all… What went wrong? Who, or what, is to blame? Which is the way out? Perhaps a term which has just joined the Nepali lexicon sums it all: pajerohaad. The term has its origins in the Japanese luxury four-wheeler and refers to a government decision allowing all members of parliament as well as senior bureaucrats and judges facilities for the duty-free import of vehicles without disclosing their source of income.
Absolute power was wrested from the king in 1990 and representative power was given to the politician-commoner, who has proven incapable of living up to the high standards of diligence, dignity and integrity required of him. Today, though empowered, the Nepali politician, like Nero, fiddles on his sarangi while the country burns. Senior political leaders have used their parties more as fiefdoms of nepotism for personal gain than as vehicles of ideology and development philosophy. All pretence of meritocracy has been abandoned.
The list of sins in statecraft is long and starts right at the beginning, in 1990. The new rulers, rather than punish the wrong-doers of the old regime, opted for what then seemed like magnanimity but which now is obvious was a lack of courage or conviction. Any revolution owes its future a cathartic cleansing of the past, and Nepal´s "people´s movement" was denied that purification.
The result is clear for all to see: the corrupt and the criminal are loose or back in power, providing their brand of expertise to party bosses lacking the self-confidence. The bad apples of the Panchayat era—when the king ruled supreme—infected all, including those in the mainstream left and the Nepali Congress. Today´s national level politics is essentially about the Congress and the United Marxist Leninists, the two main forces of the People´s Movement, vying with each other to curry favour with the former ´Panchas´.