At least it's an ethos...

There still seems to be significant low-level violence across Nepal. Stories like this crop up every couple of days, except they're usually only reporting the murder, not an arrest. While it goes without saying that this is bad, it often feels like for all of the attention given to the problems of integrating the regular army with the Maoist troops, or of federalizing the police, or of disarming the Youth Communist League (YCL), the bigger threat to the Republic seems to be that political intimidation and violence continue on a smaller scale.

While both the Maoists and the government were likely guilty of just about everything short of ethnic cleansing during the civil war (a conflict of equivalent scale at home would kill about 200,000 people, or about 5,000 citizens of the Independent Republic of New York,)no one here talks seriously about the possibility of another armed conflict. No matter how long the Maoist cadres sit and wait in quasi military camps, everyone here thinks that widespread violence is unlikely to break out again.

People already speak of a Nepali Diaspora; while the country is not short of leaders right now, younger students increasingly go to India or elsewhere for their education, and there isn’t all that much for them to come back to here. As long as politics, law and business are occupationally hazardous, it doesn’t seem like that will change.

In sunnier news, the three leading parties, the Maoists, the United Marxist-Leninists (actually, far more mainstream than the name would suggest, but still pretty far left,) and the Nepali Congress (democratic socialists, although broadly supportive of free trade and market liberalization) agreed to some changes to the interim constitution, including allowing a simple majority, rather than a super majority, to dissolve the government (I’m not actually sure if this was addressed in the Interim Constitution, but the Maoists were insisting that the new government have the extra protection).