News, Views From Nepal

 Yuba Nath Lamsal Results of the November 20 general election are out. No single party has secured a clear majority to run the country on its own strength. The kind of outcome the election has produced is no surprise to all. A hung parliament had been a foregone conclusion even before the polls. The Nepali Congress (NC) has emerged as the largest party in the House of Representatives (HoR), whereas the CPN-UML has secured the second position. The CPN-Maoist Centre is a distant third. A brand new party Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP) has come up as the fourth force which is a great surprise for many. However, RSP’s sudden emergence has been greater surprise and also a threat to the main and established parties as they had earlier underestimated this party and misunderstood the mood of the voters. The other distinct feature of the election is the slight rise of the traditional Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) that demands to turn the clock of history back to the old monar...

 Yuba Nath Lamsal In the global geopolitical theatre, Europe has always played a central role throughout history. The history of Europe is the history of wars.  European geography was shaped by wars right from the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta to World War II. The present European political constellation is the making of the Second World War fought between two groups of international powers in which the Allies — a group of countries including mainly the United States, Russia and Britain — badly beat the Axis of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan. Germany was divided, Japan was demilitarized and Europe’s map was redrawn splitting the entire continent into American sphere of influence and the region of Russian dominance giving rise to bi-polar world order. The disintegration of Soviet Union in 1991 brought about a tectonic shift in the global geopolitical map in general and the geopolitics of Europe in particular with the world or...