Every year, Canadians eagerly await for the summer to arrive. During a family visit this summer, we went to see the Canadian parliament in downtown Ottawa. After visiting the House of Commons, we went to the temporary Senate Assembly nearby. As the new parliament building is still under construction, an underground tube station has been transformed into the Senate\u2013the upper house of the Canadian parliament.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During a free, guided tour of the Senate building that was on recess, an American tourist in our group asked our guide how the Senate called witnesses for hearings. He was, however, not happy with her answer. \u2018Truth is the casualty of politics,\u2019 he said. His utterance, perhaps, resonates more true in the present day Nepal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A parliamentary probe committee recently completed its probe into the allegations that Finance Minister Janardan Sharma sent some unauthorized people to decide about the tax rates on the eve of his annual budget speech on 29 May 2022. When a Nepali national daily broke the news, after much hullabaloo, Minister Sharma resigned from his post and the House of Representatives formed a probe committee. Both Sharma and senior officials of the Finance Ministry claimed in front of the Committee members that the incident had never happened. The Ministry also claimed that the CCTV footage of the said incident has already been deleted. As expected, the committee said that it didn\u2019t find any conclusive evidence to prove that unauthorized people were in fact involved in altering the tax rates.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n Interestingly, when the probe committee was summoning senior government officials (including then former Minister Sharma), student activists affiliated to the ruling alliance organized a protest in Kathmandu demanding that Nepal Rastra Bank (NRB) Governor Maha Prasad Adhikari resign from his post. The demand came in the wake of media reports that Mr Adhikari in fact was the person named as \u2018M Adhikari\u2019 in one of the committees of the main opposition CPN (UML). The NRB Act prohibits any person with political party affiliation to hold the top position of the central bank. Both Adhikari and the UML refuted these reports. Interestingly, student protests subsided as soon as the parliamentary probe committee made its report public.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, was there any quid pro quo <\/em>between the ruling alliance and the main opposition in these two recent controversies? As the country is heading towards elections for the federal as well as provincial legislature, many believe that the UML did not want to antagonize the CPN (Maoist Center) party. Finance Minister Sharma (who was reappointed to his post early this week) is a senior leader of the Maoist Centre.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a country like Nepal where civil society as well as most of the media are said to be close to one political party or another, making government officials accountable is a huge challenge. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n This is not the first time that truth has been a casualty in Nepali politics. When asked by reporters what happened to arms and ammunition held by his comrades (that were not disclosed to UNMIN-a UN agency), Maoist supremo Pushpa Kamal Dahal \u2018Prachanda\u2019 said casually that they were swept away by a river. Nobody in the government or opposition asked him any further questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In a country like Nepal where civil society as well as most of the media are said to be close to one political party or another, making government officials accountable is a huge challenge. So, what should be done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n