Two things happened during that intervening period. First, there was the skirmish in parliament over budget presentation. The Maoist lawmakers not only blocked Finance Minister Surendra Pandey from tabling the budget but also manhandled him and other ministers and resorted to vandalism, smashing the finance minister´s briefcase containing the budget booklet and breaking parliamentary furniture.
The government has accused the Maoists of breaching the agreement reached between Prime Minister Madav Kumar Nepal and Maoist Chairman Pushpa Kamal Dahal to allow the government to present the budget. A furious Prime Minister Nepal said publicly that the relevance of negotiations with the Maoists was over unless they apologized for the fracas in parliament and assured other parties about their sincerity towards concluding the peace process and writing the constitution.
As if things were not bad enough, the Maoist plenum has further complicated matters and worsened the environment for talks. The major political discourse at the plenum wasn´t peace and the constitution; instead, it was the talk of revolt that captured the imagination of Maoist cadres as all the leaders spoke of revolt and revolution as their ultimate goal and asked them to start preparations toward that end. Though Maoist Chairman Dahal, addressing a press conference at the end of the plenum, said his party would immediately initiate talks with the leaders of major political parties to conclude the peace process and draft up a new constitution, that has failed to cut ice with the other leaders.
There will now be renewed, legitimate questions and suspicions about the Maoists’ commitment to peace and their willingness to accept a democratic polity, something which the Maoist leadership will find hard to address. But get back to talks they must and the Maoists must prove their sincerity through their actions. Any ambiguous commitment by the Maoists at the negotiating table is only going to deepen the trust deficit. So we urge the Maoists to come to talks with all the sincerity required by the gravity of the situation.
The parties must remember once again that time is running out. UNMIN will leave on January 15, as per the last agreement reached between the Maoists and the government and the last mandate of the UN Security Council. If the parties fail to conclude the peace process by then and reach an agreement on constitution-writing and power-sharing, the peace process will start to unravel, and that will not be in anyone´s interest. At least, not in the country´s interest.
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