Political Boomerang

 

-By Kamal Raj Sigdel

You can call it a device, a craft. It's quite amazing how the Australians hunt their quarry with their boomerang which if otherwise misses the target bounces back to the hunter so that he could make use of it again and again.

 

A craftier boomerang, now a political one, has outdone that of the Australians here in Nepal. While the original boomerang used to swing back in case it misses the target, the political boomerang here is such an artful one that it returns back in either cases – no matter whether it hits or misses it.

 

Somebody, undoubtedly an accomplished hunter, devised the boomerang and threw it to hit the target. And it swung around the political arena, rustled through road to road, and it returned eventually after hitting the headlines. It was a political boomerang so it did not hit any of the wild animals out there in the jungle; it hit the headlines of the newspapers. Its hit was nothing sort of a surprise to the hunter, who was sure of it, however its hit choked others in the political arena who were feeling the swing of the boomerang passing through their ears.

 

More interesting is the miracle that the boomerang, so frail while it was thrown, ricocheted with a power and strength ten times greater than it had in its earlier times. Besides, it hit the target so badly that it seems quite impossible for it to return to its normalcy. Some of the companions being estranged by the violent hit of the boomerang, now a small group getting smaller, accumulating in one corner are staggering to define their existence, however.

 

The hit of the boomerang rated high to the staggering fives, now only fours, for one has been taken aback by the boomerang itself. Those hard hit by the boomerang who are still left in the streets, are reeling in their all fours.

 

Now the boomerang back with its master, who threw it, is grunting with a quarry. The quarry, it has brought with him is an important one – the one which has been estranged from its four accompanying parties. So the political boomerang is now a tiger, a lion that grunts to call its cubs out of the den while hanging a prey in its gnaw. However, the prey is supposed to be placed with the cubs in what is often called "Singha Durbar" (palace of lion).

 

Somebody, watching the game, most perhaps a saint, told that none of these games, preferably the hunting ones, are likely to do good to the nation. If they do, than it 'happens to be', he said. It is interesting to look at, but not to be inside the playground; it is rather like a fun house, a fiction that is for its own sake. 

 

[Originally published in The Kathmandu Post on 23 June 2004]