Year of missed opportunities

Despite a promising start, PM Dahal has had a rather mediocre one year in office.

Journalists love interacting with Pushpa Kamal Dahal, the country’s three-time prime minister. He can be uncannily honest, often revealing the inner workings of the government and his party as he gets into the conversation. In a recent meeting with a group of editors, Dahal was fielding questions about his government’s performance, which has now survived a whole year. “As you know, I am a prime minister with just 32 seats. Even if I want, I can only do so much,” he said. He has a point. At the start of his third term as prime minister last December, Dahal had promised to leave his mark as the country’s executive head this time. He started on a positive note, undertaking sweeping investigations into the fake Bhutanese refugee scam, the Lalita Niwas Land grab case, and even large-scale smuggling of gold through the Tribhuvan International Airport. Perhaps were it not for the sort of coalition compulsions he was hinting at with the editors, at least a few of the big political fish associated with these scams would now be in jail.