Step away from the polls

This is not peace. When 28 people die in violence in a single day while a 'comprehensive' peace agreement still holds, something is seriously wrong. Between the disaster in Gaur and the business-led shutdowns this week, the dynamics of post-peace politicking and protest in the country have again moved from the realm of the messy, petty, and unfair, to that of tragedy and travesty.

And after a week like this, the idea that elections of any credible kind can be held soon looks like the most dangerous kind of wishful thinking.

The responsibility for Gaur lies in equal parts with a paralysed local administration and state security apparatus, provocateurs in the Maoists' Youth Communist League and Tarai Mukti Morcha, and the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, which will do anything to cement its position at the forefront of the tarai movement.

Informally, the Maoists argue that their continuing extortion drive and parallel policing through the YCL are tactics to put indirect pressure on the government to speed up the formation of the interim government, and hold the constituent assembly elections in June, no matter what.

Yet they know two things. First, a government as inert as this one will not respond to such convoluted reasoning. The parties continue to ignore warning signs in the tarai. They offer little more than bromides to indigenous groups demanding equal representation, which lead, again, to threats of violence.Schools remain vulnerable to Maoist whims. The parties have never been able-or shown the will-to stop extortion and intimidation of the business community.

Second, the longer the Maoists use brute force and coercion, the more they will lose in the upcoming election. If, that is, they really want an election. The CPN-M leadership might publicly stick to the elections-in-June line, for the most part. But their simultaneous position that immediate declaration of a republic is the only way to delay the elections, the 'mistakes' they keep making and half-apologising for, and most markedly, the behaviour of the league around the country, all sabotage any hopes of an election-friendly environment.

The Maoists' behaviour reinforces the belief, no longer just 'regressive', that the comrades are not entirely comfortable in a democratic set-up. But people are turning against their politics of demagoguery in increasingly dogged and violent ways.

The business and entrepreneur community, for example, long sick and tired of bandas and strikes, found that it was even more tired of Maoist intimidation and extortion. In their impotent and frustrated anger, the Valley's businesspeople adopted their tormentors' tools of protest, and unwittingly cut off their nose to spite their face.

To be sure, there are consequences to delaying the elections. But it would be disastrous to hold an election when the order of the day is a free-for-all wherever you look.

It is time the parties acknowledge that the constituent assembly elections need to be postponed. Before we can have anything else, we need law and order and accountability.