News, Views From Nepal

Yuba Nath Lamsal Politics is said to be the art of possible. In other words politics is the practice of exploring the best out of many probabilities. The tryst with many probabilities in politics, may have given birth, rise and fall of many political ideologies, systems and regimes on this planet since human civilization germinated. In the period of more than two hundred years of Nepal’s turbulent history, many trials and experiments were made in our political front. We experienced and experimented systems and governments of different colors and nature in the past. But none of the previous systems lived up to popular expectations and eventually failed in the test of people’s court compelling people to seek better alternatives. In the quest of seeking better alternative, Nepalese people dumped Shah’s dynastical absolute monarchy, Rana’s oligarchy and multi-party system under monarchy into the trash of history. Now we are making yet another experiment of republican democracy

Yuba Nath Lamsal  Book Review Nepali Politics In Crisis of Identity and Ideology Authored by Dr Gopal Siwakoti Published by Pairavi Prakashan Page-614 Price-495 This is a new book authored by Professor Dr Gopal Siwakoti, who is known widely in the academic field and the field of journalism in Nepal. He taught political science in the Tribhuvan University, country’s pioneer higher academic institution, for more than three decades. He was a professor before he retired a couple of year ago. Dr Siwakoti is equally known and revered in the field of journalism as he edited several journals and also worked as a columnist in some newspapers and journals. Although his health is feeble in his late sixties, he is active in writing on various pertinent issues like state restructuring, constitutionalism, political development and many contemporary issues. There are already more than two dozen books of political science to his credit and he has been continuously producing bo

Yuba Nath Lamsal   The leaders of the eight Western industrialized countries, which are also called as the group eight or G-8, met recently in the idyllic surroundings of a secluded lakeside resort in Enniskillen of Northern Ireland to purportedly seek a way to discuss the global economy and prevent it from further sliding. However, they devoted most of the time to Syria issue in which the Western leaders and more particularly the United States tried to adopt a uniformed approach on their strategy of regime change and also seek wider international support to achieve this goal. The major agenda for which the Summit had been convened was pushed to background. In the end, the leaders of the western world, as usual, concluded with issuing an agreed statement temporarily brushing aside some of their key differences just to send a message of unity. It was their time-honored tradition of diplomacy to hide the truth under a thick blanket of mistrust and come out with apparent statem

  Yuba Nath Lamsal Iran, an oil rich Middle Eastern country, had a presidential election last week, in which the 64 year old Hasan Rohani was elected. The voter turnout was estimated 73 per cent of nearly 50 million eligible voters. Or more than 36 million Iranians had cast their votes to choose their president. According to the election results, Rohani secured more than half of the total votes cast. A cleric, known to have close link with Iran’s supreme leader Ayatolla in the past but had kept distance with the Islamic cleric in recent years, narrowly cleared the margin that would have forced a two-candidate runoff. Teheran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and Saeed Jalili, who was a tough nuclear negotiator with the West, came in distant second and third, respectively. Rohani secured 50.7 per cent of the votes while Qalibaf came second with 16.56 per cent and Saeed only managed to gain 11.35 per cent. At the bottom of the list is supreme leader Khamenei’s foreign affairs adv