NCP (Pvt Ltd)

The Ass

Many of you who cannot make head or tale of the recent trends in Nepali politics have SMSed me in the past week to ask: Will Share Budder become prime minister again? Is it possible for Nepal to finally graduate to middle-income country status? And also, does God exist?

As a media anal-ist it is incumbent upon me to refer you to a more competent asstrologer who has predicted that the planets are favourably aligned to make Deuba prime minister of Nepal up to a total of seven times. At last count he had only made it to #4, so he has three more match points to go.

Meanwhile, for comrades who believe in the dictatorship of the politburo and like to define their parties with prefixes like ‘unified’ and ‘united’, Nepal’s Communists are splitting faster than uni-cellular amoebas through the process of binary fission.

In fact, recent detonations within the NCP have set off a runaway thermonuclear chain reaction. Other sub-atomic comrades, however, are coming together to create even more heat and sound through nuclear fusion.

There was already another party called Nepal Communist Pawti when they conjugated, which means they now have to come up with a completely new name. There is therefore no other option but to distinguish the various incarnations of the party with creative suffixes in brackets. As well-wisher, the Ass offers below a range of choices:

Nepal Communist Party (Un-unified)

Communist Party of Nepal (Unfit)

Communist Party of Nepal (Big Plop)

Underfed Marxist-Leninists (UML)

Unified Marxist-Leninists (Oily)

Unified Marxist-Leninists (Nepal)

Unified Marxist-Leninists (India)

Unified Marxist-Leninists (Shaivite)

Communist Party of Nepal (Brahma-Vishnu-Maheswar)

Nepal Communist Party (Royalist)

Nepal Communist Party (Gang of Four)

Nepal Communist Party (Revolting)

Communist Party of Nepal (Pvt Ltd)

Nepal Communist Party Marxism-Stalinism-Maoism (MSM)

Communal Party of Nepal (Polpotist-Maduroist-Kim Il-Sungist)

However, even dyed-in-red communists are beginning to admit that the time may have finally come for the party to re-brand itself after political philosophers like Groucho Marx and John Lennon, while at the same time remaining true to its revolutionary antecedents. Allow me to suggest the following formulations:

Nepal Communist Party (Groucho-Lennonist)

Communicative Party of Nepal (Facebook-TikTok)

Nepal Communicable Party (Covid-19)

Nepal Commuter Party (Monorail)

The acronyms will get to be even more complicated if, and when, the various permutations of the next coalition government become clearer:

UML-JSP (KPO)

MC-NC-JSP (BRB)

MC-NC-JSP (RCP)

MC-NC-JSP (SBD)

UML-MC (JNK)

UML-MC (PKD)

UML-MC (MKN)

The only problem is that the 2017 Constitution has an open-defecation free law that prohibits horse-trading. The Ass takes umbrage at the speciesist language insinuating that it is only horses that get to be traded. How about us donkeys, aren’t we also good enough to be bought and sold by the highest bidders? Why isn’t anyone ass-trading? Why discriminate?

To which I am sure you are dying to also ask: Is God a he or a she?