For its own good, and for the good of the country, the Maoists need to get off the streets and back into parliament.
There is a functioning legislature that we the people helped elect in 2008 that is in limbo. Yet the Nepali people are being held at gunpoint, the country's tattered economy further ruined, over issues that should be voted on in the House.

A general strike in this country works because of the power of fear that holds the whole country hostage. An editor of Sikshyak magazine was hospitalised in serious condition on Wednesday for defying the shutdown. On the Ring Road, we were witness to an elderly man on a bicycle being beaten mercilessly with a bamboo pole because he didn't deign to dismount when a bunch of 14-year-olds manning a tyre barricade told him to. These are not isolated incidents. Across the country, the Maoists are waging war by other means, by putting the whole country under house arrest. We should stop calling this a "peaceful" protest.

Neither is it Jana Andolan III as Chairman Dahal would have us believe. It is one party's attempt to come back to power through forced street protests because it couldn't muster the magic 301 in parliament to pass a no-confidence vote. That's not us saying it, Maoist leaders have time and again warned that they will re-enact Lenin's 'October Revolution', and they often do what they say.

Giving in to this would mean setting a dangerous precedent of bypassing parliament. The Maoists themselves may get an absolute majority in the next election, for instance, but neo-royalists could bus in 200,000 people from the countryside and topple them too. Democracy works by a certain set of rules. Circumventing parliamentary arithmetics leads to totalitarian rule.

The Maoists became the largest party in parliament in 2008, but are short of an absolute majority. They squandered the support of their coalition partners and had to resign last year. Our public opinion survey results this month showed they are still popular, which is why Chairman Dahal need not inflict more misery on this long-suffering nation and embark on such a self-destructive path. But the fact that he has unleashed this punishment on the very people he promises to liberate proves his sole goal is to set up an outdated model of a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.

We need to get the focus away from street terror for power to the constitution-writing process through the CA. For this, a government of national unity and the withdrawal of this strangulating strike should be the first two steps. If necessary, Madhav Kumar Nepal should be willing to face a confidence vote in the House.

Otherwise we may have to witness more scenes on TV such as that on Tuesday of YCL activists having to be rescued by state police from a lynch mob of angry locals.