REPUBLICA Dinesh Adhikari case  Nepal Police is routinely demonized in the media and social circles. In fact, many seem to take vicarious pleasure in showing the ‘good-for-nothing’ police down. Our police personnel are ‘thoroughly corrupt’; they are good at ‘investigations’ but suck at actually ‘solving crimes’; they don’t get to sites of trouble on time; their disaster relief efforts are ‘forced’ compared to the honest efforts of the more committed army personnel.  Yet when Nepal Police finally does something right, instead of praising our valiant cops, the same naysayers start nit-picking. Take the shooting of Dinesh Adhikari Tuesday evening. The police managed to gun down the notorious gangster, wanted for over a dozen crimes including attempted murders and extortions, after closely following his trails. It must have been painstaking work. Kudos to the brave police personnel who chased him down by putting their own lives on the line. At long last, the most wanted criminal in Nepal is off the streets. Good riddance, one would have thought. But some of our lawmakers had other ideas.  Adhikari was a card-carrying member of CPN-UML, working directly under the patronage of its new chairman KP Oli. Adhikari was part of Oli’s efforts to ‘cleanse the society of bad elements by enlisting them in party duties’. It was his deep political connections which made Adhikari’s successful prosecution so difficult. Whenever the police had him in their net, the ‘higher ups’ would intervene to secure his release.  And soon as he was free, he set off on another crime spree, often fleeing to India to evade arrest. The entrenched politics-crime nexus and the open-border, it seemed, would offer life-long immunity to the hardcore criminal to freely carry out his thuggish activities. Thus when the police finally gunned him down, there was a wave of collective relief; some Nepalis were amazed even. “Wow, even gangsters are killed in Nepal! We thought only the poor people lost their lives here,” one passenger in a microbus in Kathmandu quipped. But such is the nature of the corrupt Nepali polity that instead of praising the Nepal Police for doing a great service to the society, lawmakers affiliated to the second biggest party in the country vehemently protested Adhikari’s ‘unlawful’ killing in the parliament. Oli was livid, wanting prompt redress for the killing of his protégé in ‘cold blood.’  Nearly 160 innocent lives have already been lost in the devastating floods in Sindhupalchowk. Thousands of survivors have been forced into precarious existence, making do without basic necessities like clean drinking water and a roof over their heads.  Thousands of other households risk being swept away if the dammed river at Mankha bursts. Yet there were few words of sympathy for the bereaved in the parliament; nor were there any protests at the government apathy in relief efforts and the delay in clearing the dammed water. Instead, in an open mockery of parliamentary democracy, the sovereign parliament resonated with demands from some UML lawmakers that Adhikari be declared a ‘martyr’. In the end, we would like to express our total support for Nepal Police’s new initiative to crack down on criminals. We will continue to criticize them when they err, but for now they deserve our thanks for making the society a safer place  Published on 2014-08-09 01:59:33