We are fully committed to multi-party democracy, impartial judiciary, freedom of speech and the rule of law: Pushpakamal Daha
I would like to warmly welcome all of you to this evening’s get-together which has been organized to share some of our feelings regarding the current political impasse’ in the country. As envoys from various important capitals and as trusted friends of Nepal, I am sure that all of you are worried of the continuing standoff in the Constitution writing process, deliberate stalling of the peace process and the half-hearted approach by the present government to the entire state restructuring package that the Nepali people had desired through the people’s movement of 2006. As your are well aware, the UCPN (Maoist) had decided to end the people’s war, stationed our PLA soldiers and locked up all our weapons in the UNMIN monitored cantonments and participated in peaceful elections to the Constituent Assembly on April 10, 2008 with the anticipation that an inclusive, progressive and a peaceful Nepal would emerge, all people of different regions, religions, caste, class and ethnicities would be given equal opportunities and the centuries’ of neglect of the rural areas and villages would be changed through a more balanced economic policy. We had also hoped that sovereign people of Nepal and their duly elected government would have its supremacy over the Army. And a New Nepal that is democratic, federal, progressive and inclusive that you the international community too had hoped for would materialize. Unfortunately instead of addressing the genuine concerns of the international community, dealing with the core issues before the nation such as writing of the Constitution and taking the peace process to its logical conclusion, the present government mostly run by those that were defeated in the elections is looking for  confrontation rather than consensus in our politics, it is clearly desiring another war rather than peace to take root. Hence, this government has become the biggest stumbling block to writing the Constitution on time and consolidating democracy in our country.
Therefore, what we said in the past one year has been proven that without a national unity government, these core issues before the state will remain unfulfilled and will only invite further political instability and economic downturn. This will ultimately force the nation yet another deadly conflict. We the United Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists) are aware of our commitments to you in the international community and our pledge to the United Nations which is why we exercised maximum restraint during the recently concluded people’s movement -III. There was intense provocation from government hired vigilante? and criminal elements to clash one group of people with another but as you have also witnessed, the country saw its first mass movement with lakhs and lakhs of people in a totally peaceful, disciplined, pollution-free agitation. These were people that earn less than 50 Rs. a day, hundreds of thousands of poor peasants, workers, and the common man volunteered and organized themselves in the streets because they wished to see this government immediately make way for a national consensus government. We took it up as a test-case for ourselves in the party to make sure that the movement does not turn violent but the government has termed our responsible approach as our weakness. These are the same people that used to send me SOS messages for waging more violent and daring attacks on Nepal Army installations during the King’s rule and they are the ones that used to seek our assistance for bringing in the masses from the villages for the people’s movement of April 2006 because they themselves could not assemble even a few hundred people in Kathmandu. Today, they ask us to become a civilian party. Nothing can be more ridiculous than that. We are the largest party in the Constituent Assembly trusted by the most number of eligible voters of this country, we don’t need the advice of those that were flatly rejected by the people on how to become more democratic.
We took up the decision to call off our strike taking into consideration your suggestion; we had hoped that this gesture will be reciprocated by a positive response from the side of the government. Sadly, the government is becoming more and more aggressive and hostile towards us and this has pushed the peace process as a whole to a critical juncture.
Let me reiterate again that we are fully committed to multi-party democracy, impartial judiciary, freedom of speech and the rule of law. But we cannot be humiliated any further and pushed to the corner by the present government which simply wants to indefinitely cling on to power and waste the taxpayer’s hard earned money on record high general expenditure. This is a time to renew the nation’s promise of a democratic and an inclusive Constitution and a peaceful future for all of us. Therefore we would like to appeal for your continued support for the formation of a national unity government which can fulfill that pledge and bring hope and optimism back to this nation.
[Speech delivered by UCPN-M supremo Pushpakamal Dahal to the Diplomatic Community on 17 May, 2010.]