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Bulletin #36: Lifting the State of Emergency is an Eyewash

Nepal’s political leaders, who fled to India after the Feb 1 royal coup, Saturday termed the lifting of the emergency by King Gyanendra an “eyewash” and a “maneuver” to hoodwink the international community”.

“I am very skeptical about this lifting of emergency without releasing political activists and removing media censorship,” Nepali Congress leader Shekhar Koirala told IANS.

The king, who returned to Kathmandu Friday after a 10-day foreign visit, in a late night statement declared that the state of emergency, under which he dismissed the government of prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba and assumed absolute power, had been lifted.

“If the king’s intention was good, he should have released all political prisoners. The credibility of this exercise is seriously in question,” Koirala contended, questioning the sincerity of Gyanendra’s motive. The emergency proclamation would have lapsed Monday.

Rajendra Mahato of Nepal Sadbhavana Party smelt a “devious design” in what he termed a “ruse to hoodwink the international community.”

“Lifting of emergency is not the same as the restoration of democracy,” he maintained, while pointing to the hundreds of political leaders and human rights activists still languishing in jails.

Rajan Bhattarai of the Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist- Leninist) was also not taken in by the king’s move and appealed to the international community “to find the hard truth behind the surface.”

“The king will continue to do so what he has been doing earlier under the emergency proclamation,” he said, stressing that nothing had changed on the ground after the emergency was lifted.

“(Gyanendra) has also revived the Royal Commission for Corruption Control under a new provision,” Koirala pointed out, alluding there was something sinister about the move.

The commission had been packed with handpicked former bureaucrats and has been given unprecedented power to investigate, try and sentence anyone it chooses to. To counter the king’s “hidden design”, political leaders here plan to drum up popular support for the restoration of real democracy in the Himalayan kingdom.

“All political parties will now come together on the same platform to revive democratic institutions so as to create a new constitution under which people will be supreme,” said Mahato.

INSN is the International Nepal Solidarity Network, which has activists in over a dozen countries around the world who are working to bring democracy to Nepal. Visit their website for regular updates related to the Nepal crisis.