Why so desperate?

It is sad to see the likes of Dahal trying to counter royalist narrative with personal attacks.

At a press meet on Saturday, the Socialist Front Nepal, a grouping of four leftist parties—the CPN (Maoist Centre), the CPN (Unified Socialist), the Janata Samajbadi Party Nepal and the Netra Bikram Chand-led Communist Party of Nepal—announced a series of rallies. The rallies, to be held in Kathmandu on March 28, are aimed at foiling “the conspiracies of reactionary forces” in order to “safeguard the republican set-up”. The rallies are a reaction to the pro-royalist marches in the national capital last Sunday. That day’s marches saw better-then-expected public support, enthusing the pro-monarchy forces. While the country’s two biggest pro-republican parties—the Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML—have been institutionally silent on recent activism of the monarchists, the smaller opposition forces have decided that enough is enough. If the monarchists are not stopped, they seem to have calculated, the country might go into the hands of the regressive forces. It is their right to protest, too—just like the royalists had the right to take out pro-monarchy protests. Yet the tone being set by the front’s leaders is rather problematic.