The Nepal army is also suspicious of Maoist intentions. The Maoists have, time and again, demonstrated that the Nepal army is the biggest hurdle in its way and has used every excuse to demoralise it — the latest being a 24 hour ultimatum served on Army Chief R Katawal, accusing him of not cooperating with the Maoist government and acting in detriment to the peace process. But the move has only isolated the Maoists, as all other parties including the Nepali Congress and the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML) have threatened to take to the streets if arbitrary steps are taken to politicise and demoralise the army.

The army is not alone on theMaoist hit list. This is also a message to the Supreme Court, as two of the issues covered under the showcause — recruitment at the lower level and the service exension of eight brigadier generals at Katawal’s initiatives — are subjudice, and at least two Maoist ministers have threatened that judges going against government moves will be ‘impeached’.

The time for this message could not have been more appropriate. A new chief justice of the Supreme Court is to be appointed by May 2, and there are fears that the CPN-M (which has its senior central committee member as a law minister), may try to deny the senior-most judge in the line of succession a chance. Law Minister Deb Gurung has even suggested in the past that the Maoist members of the Kangaroo courts must be integrated in the judicial system of ‘New Nepal’ so that justice becomes pro-people. And the media that has of late been exposing Prachanda’s (and his son’s) lavish lifestyle, poor performance and non-implementation of past promises, has become the latest target of the prime minister’s ire. “Big media are controlled by smugglers”, he said publicly, a couple of days after a local daily brought out his son Prakash’s photograph in a ‘drunken state’. Prakash, a party office bearer and member of the prime minister’s secretarial staff, has been going around repeating what his father had to say about the media.

... contd.