Suppose, on one fine Sunday, young people
affiliated with your political party storm into a media house, beat up
managers and journalists and smash windows and furniture. The incident
makes national and international news. What do you do?

First,
you deny that the incident happened at all, and that even if it did
happen, your cadres were not involved. Pressed with evidence, you then
say that it was actually the media staff who hired goons to beat up
your staff when they had gone for a meeting. Later, you change the
story to say that ex-royalists who had infiltrated your ranks were the
ones who carried out the attacks, thereby giving your party a bad name.

A
day later, you make light of the attack, saying that only light beating
had taken place, and that no murder had been committed. But as
pressures mount, you finally send two named accused to surrender to the
police. For a few days, they are kept in police custody, where they are
served food from five-star restaurants and entertained by visits from
ministers. Once the accused are released on bail, which amounts to a
slap on the wrist, you make sure that they melt into the shadows.
Thanks to your art of spin you carry on as if nothing has happened,
while your henchmen gloss over details to paint the whole episode as
oppression by feudal capitalists.

Take another example. You
force temple priests to submit resignations. You replace them with two
local priests of your liking. You don't care about local sentiments nor
about hundreds of years of history. You justify it in the name of
nationalism, even though patriotism is the refuge of scoundrels.
Guarded by goons, you force open the temple gates so the new priests
could offer prayers to Shiva.

Still, when a group of
disgruntled junior priests stage a press conference to air their
grievances, you send your goons again to beat them up in broad daylight
in front of the media. Your hooligans also deliberately beat up some
reporters and damage their equipment. Then you tell the same
journalists on camera that your young communists were there to protect
the temple from violence. The Supreme Court issues an edict to you to
not touch the temple. But you carry on as if these man-made laws do not
apply to your decisions, and that these protests will run out of steam
soon. After a few days of intense protests from the public and negative
media coverage in India, you meekly withdraw your decisions.

These
two incidents show that in today's 24/7 media, you can't go on covering
one lie with another lie. True, you may shout the loudest by using
half-truths to your advantage. Sooner or later, you will be found out,
and voters and well-wishers will stop trusting you. When you are seen
as untrustworthy, you don't function as a government for long.

Sure,
you can harass those in opposition by issuing death threats, but that
is not why people elected you to power. They voted for you to get on
with the business of drafting the constitution so that 28 million
Nepalis can understand what the agreed-upon guidelines of the game are
for their success, prosperity and happiness in Nepal.