Anil, I stand by everything I have written above. ICG may be your future employer, but -- let's be clear -- it is just another crisis-monitoring organisation, which now provides decent jobs to expats in Nepal and Nepalis with degrees in conflict studies of one sort or another. Nothing wrong with being upfront with that. No crisis = no crisis-monitoring jobs in Nepal. Hence, the incentive is to play up the crisis; get more funding, attract more attention, and so on and on. This is how the conflict-monitoring game gets played in Nepal -- roughly speaking. Why pretend otherwise and try to be be some sort of an agnostic political commentator? ***** You wrote: "Mind you, the Maoists killed the policemen -- NOT that it was the right thing to do -- AFTER the state failed to reciprocrate the truce offer and further enhance the opportunity for peace in Nepal." Since it did NOT happen, we really don't know what would have happened had the state reciprocrated the truce. Let's not go down hypotheticals based on past events that did not happen. The Maoists did the WRONG thing to kill the police. No need to contextualise Maoists' brutality by looking at the state. Let's simply condemn the killings -- and pronounce the Maoists as pure evil. Alternatively, had the state done something similar, I would have no trouble \condemning it too -- with no reference to the Maoists' atrocities. The trouble in Nepal is that everyone pretends to be oh-so-neutral, and makes a mess of things. You can't criticize the government, without saying one line against the Maoists. And you justify Maoist brutalities by saying the state is khattam too. And the result? When something of great sorrow happens -- such as the Nagarkot massacre -- it becomes a ramita for a couple of days, with everyone milking it for what it's worth politically and then REPEATEDLY failing to use such an event as a catalyst to START protecting innocent Nepalis. And to say something like: "No one need accept these [Maoists' gestures]at face value. But their truce had presented the state with a good opportunity to judge them by their actions" after 10 years of figting that has hurt the poorest Nepalis the most, this is like trusting the Maoist too much, and expecting wolves to be vegetarians someday. Good luck, you crisis-wallahs! oohi ashu