Power flows from the barrel of the BALLOT

Can Maoists form the government in Nepal? Will the army follow     protocol? Will the king go and the parties accept the Maoists? Will the mandate    overcome the feudals? Will India checkmate Washington?

Amit Sengupta Kathmandu

The tense soldiers of the 'Royal' Nepal Army with their hands on the trigger have vanished into the blue. Barbed wires and armed barricades have disappeared. So have the tangible terror of army and police presence and the body-searches with guns. The flowers are blooming in serene Kathmandu. The streets are calm and so seem the people who walk next to the lovely corridor on Durbar Road and the king's Narayanhiti Palace, a high security prohibited zone during the repressive Emergency and the non-violent democratic revolution of April-May 2006 - demanding the abolition of monarchy and a republic with a new Constitution.

But this is all very deceptive: Because this endless night of long knives might also push post-poll politics to a dangerous and deadly threshold in Nepal. During, before and much after May 28, 2008, when the newly elected Constituent Assembly meets for the first time.

Or will it all go by the impeccable script of consensus?

The Maoists won 50 per cent of the seats in the direct elections. They are the single largest party in the Constituent Assemby (CA) with 220 seats. Major political parties who have ruled the roost in poverty-stricken Nepal for years, (like the Nepali Congress (NC) and Communist Party of Nepal (UML) - CPN-UML) are in virtual coma after their decisive drubbing. Most of their top leaders have bitten the dust. The royalists have been eliminated.

But uncanny questions stalk the streets. Despite its formidable victory, will the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) be allowed to form a stable government which can last the two years of its tenure? Will the new Constitution be drafted through political consensus by the rainbow coalition of a 'national unity' government? Will the non-Maoist parties, often mentored by hawkish outside forces, betray the people's mandate and create a 'constitutional crisis' to block the Maoists? Will the king finally leave, and when? Will the army stage a coup or follow the protocol with the Maoists at the helm? Will the Maoist guerrillas be integrated into the Nepal Army, as agreed in the peace accord? Will the hardliners in the American embassy in Kathmandu toe the democracy line or are they manipulating something sinister - as are the fears - like what they did with the democratically elected Hamas leadership in Palestine in recent times and with Salvador Allende's communist government in Chile in the early 1970s?

Every day, every week, every night, before the first session of the elected Constituent Assembly on May 28, tactical shifts are yet again pushing realpolitik into the twilight zone of bad faith and murky politics. This can spill-over to the month of June and later. Between the first week of May to mid-May, there have been sudden hardening of stances across the political spectrum. pushing Nepal into an invisible whirlpool of uncertainty.