By Sudeshna Sarkar
Kathmandu, Oct 3 (IANS) Nepal’s new constitution, which is expected to be promulgated in May 2010 and cement the peace negotiations that ended a 10-year civil insurgency that left over 16,000 dead, is fast becoming a mirage, with the country’s major parties remaining at loggerheads.

Though only seven months are left for the gigantic task, the constitution-writing process is in grave jeopardy with its ruling parties, Prime Minister Madhav Kumar Nepal’s Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (UML), and former premier Girija Prasad Koirala’s Nepali Congress (NC) remaining at odds with the former Maoist guerrillas, who are currently the largest party in parliament.

The antagonism has been growing since May, when the Maoist government fell.

Since then, the former rebels have virtually kept parliament under siege, lifting it just once for the new government to table the budget.

“President Dr Ram Baran Yadav acted unconstitutionally when he reinstated the chief of the army, who had been sacked by the elected Maoist government,” says Maoist deputy chief and lawmaker Narayan Kaji Shrestha.

The presidential intervention caused the collapse of Maoist chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda’s eight-month-old government and since then, the Maoists have been on the warpath against the new ruling coalition in which the NC and UML are the main parties.

“We have sought to have a debate in parliament on the role played by the president but the NC and UML are not allowing it. As long as it is blocked, we will continue to block parliament,” Shrestha told IANS.

While the Maoists say their siege is a protest against the president, who with his action paved the way for military rule in Nepal, the ruling parties say they will not admit the debate against the president since the issue is sub-judice.

However, going by the parliament records, the reality seems to be different. Apparently, none of the top leaders are really interested in the new constitution.

Most of them are members of the constituent assembly that was elected last year with the mandate of writing a new constitution.

However, though the body held nearly 57 meetings, few of them were attended by the top leaders who have instead been going on junkets, attending internal party meetings and launching novels and poem anthologies that have no connection with the new statute.

Koirala, regarded as the architect of the peace pact that ended the Maoist insurgency in 2006, has not attended a single meeting, according to the assembly attendance register.

Prachanda, who led a 10-year ‘People’s War’ for the election of the constituent assembly, has attended only four while Prime Minister Nepal, who lost the election from two constituencies and was pushed through the backdoor by his party, has sat through only three.

Since the assembly was elected April 10, 2008, many of its members have been abroad on junkets that have no bearing on the drafting of a new constitution.

They include Prachanda, who went to Europe and Hong Kong, ostensibly to train Maoist cadres, UML chief Jhalanath Khanal, who went to Tajikistan, and NC member and health minister Umakant Chaudhary, who toured Germany while Nepal was ravaged by a diarrhoea epidemic.