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Nepal is witnessing a surge in cases of sexual violence, divorces, and relationship breakdowns during the prolonged lockdown. The longer the lockdown continues, the tougher it gets for everyone. Yet there seems no respite in sight. New cases of corona are being reported with increasing frequency, right around the country, including in the national capital of Kathmandu. Some areas have been sealed off while curfews have been imposed in some other areas. Even as the fear of isolation and relationship breakdown grows, the dread of getting the virus is far greater.

So how does the state go about implementing the devilishly difficult decision of lifting the lockdown, which has to happen sooner or later? As reliable tests for the virus have been in desperate short supply in the country, how do you assess which areas are safe and which not? At the same time, can people be forced to stay holed up in their homes for months on end without a significant impact on their physical and mental health? And how do you provide for those without savings and who live almost exclusively on daily wages? All these things will have to be considered before lifting the restrictions on people’s movements.

Hard choices will have to be made. It will be dangerous to relax the lockdown much. Evidence from countries like Germany and South Korea suggest that such a relaxation almost instantly leads to a spike in the number of corona cases. So like it or not, most of the restrictions will have to remain intact. In this condition, as essential will be a huge economic package—something along the lines of India, which has set aside a Covid-19 relief fund that is 10 percent of its GDP. There has to be a calibrated income support for those in the bottom rungs of the economic ladder to keep them from falling into hunger and destitution. Again, international evidence suggests cash handouts are the most effective form of support for low-income groups.

There is no need to wait for the next budgetary cycle to announce the relief package. Also, the seeming lack of urgency to get China to export the medical equipment and testing kits that Nepal has already paid for is hard to understand. How can paperwork hold up such vital delivery? We need those medical goods here, instantly. Without mass testing with these imported test kits, the extended lockdown, however hard it has been on everyone, could go to a waste. There is not a moment to lose.

The writing had been on the wall. Over the next month and a half, 150,000 Nepali migrant workers in the Gulf and Malaysia could be repatriated. This first batch of homecoming workers will comprise those who were working abroad illegally and those who have lost their jobs because of the novel coronavirus pandemic. Host countries like Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have offered time-bound amnesty for illegal workers registering to go back to their home countries. Many Nepali workers are taking advantage of this one-time offer of pardon. For instance, over 3,000 of them in Kuwait have registered for repatriation after the Kuwaiti government granted them amnesty and vowed to rehire them if the corona threat dies down. 

Nepal will have a tough time managing these workers. The government says it is working on arranging Covid-19 tests for 150,000 people and on building reliable quarantine facilities for them. But most of these workers are to undergo the unreliable rapid tests. The more reliable PCR test kits are scarce, and it is still unclear where additional test kits will come from. Likewise, the quarantine facilities at the local and provincial levels are without even bare minimum facilities, which is why many folks quarantined there run away. A new spurt of Covid-19 infection is likely if this first batch of returning migrant workers is not managed well. The long-term picture appears bleaker still.

Bar India, there are 1.5 million Nepali migrant workers in the Gulf countries and Malaysia. Many of them will lose their jobs and will be forced to go back to their home countries. Back home, in the economy badly depressed by the corona pandemic, they won’t get many gainful jobs. Even if they get some work, it won’t pay nearly as much as they earned abroad. This sudden income transition will be tough on their families. The government blueprint for creating fresh jobs in agriculture, where people can be immediately employed, is a good start. There is not much time to work out its nitty-gritty. Meanwhile, there could be a minimum income guarantee for all the jobless. As the federal budget for the current fiscal remains mostly unspent, parts of it can be reallocated for things like income guarantee and agriculture modernization. Realistically, with tourism and foreign employment, the two mainstays of Nepali economy, on a downward spiral, things could get progressively harder in the days ahead. But one thing at a time.

Transitional justice in Nepal just got more complicated. This follows the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a government petition asking for a review of the apex court’s earlier decision. There could be no amnesty for those involved in grave rights violations during the decade-long Maoist insurgency, the court had ruled on 26 February 2016. Two major parties back then, the Nepali Congress and the UCPN (Maoist), contended the verdict was against the spirit of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) that had peacefully settled the armed conflict. It was up to the two transitional justice bodies to rule on all conflict-era cases, they argued, not the normal criminal justice mechanism.

Now, by throwing out the government petition, the Supreme Court has closed the chapter of general amnesty. This has come as a relief to conflict victims and the human rights community. They feared the political parties, in the excuse of completing the peace process, could otherwise trade away the rights of conflict victims. Yet this latest apex court move threatens to further complicate the transitional justice process. Neither the two major parties, whose leaders were directly or indirectly involved in the conflict, nor the Nepal Army, itself accused of grave rights violations, is now likely to cooperate in the TJ process. The top leaders of these institutions fear being implicated in grave rights violations without a get-out clause of amnesty in transitional justice laws.

The process should never have taken this long. The CPA had provisioned for the formation of the two transitional justice bodies within six months of its promulgation—it would be nearly 11 years before it happened. The major political actors had made the peace process a tool of political bargaining, and were never serious about bringing justice to conflict families that had seen their loved ones either killed in cold blood or ‘disappeared’ during the insurgency. The sad fact of the transitional justice in Nepal is that any perceived progress for the conflict victims is seen as a setback by the political parties and the army, and vice versa. The two sides would be wise to quickly and amicably resolve all conflict-era cases. The internationalization of the process will be to the detriment of the aforementioned state and political actors, who will forever fear the long arm of international law. It will also be a long and torturous road for conflict victims who have already waited so long for justice.

On April 21, the news of detection of 11 new Covid-19 cases in Nepal added to public unease. They were already struggling to digest the federal government’s untimely decision to amend some important laws. The previous day, the KP Oli-led cabinet had proposed legal changes—swiftly endorsed by President Bidya Devi Bhandari—that made it easier to split political parties. They also made the role of the leader of the main opposition party redundant in the constitutional council, a body tasked with making appointments to vital constitutional bodies. Whatever gloss PM Oli tries to put on these changes, they are unmistakable signs of his desire to cling to positions of power.

If co-chair Pushpa Kamal Dahal and other senior Nepal Communist Party leaders gang up against him, Oli can now split the ruling party with the support of 40 percent of its federal lawmakers. He can then potentially retain his top positions in the government and the breakaway party—in what will be a classic case of cutting off the nose to spite the face. Nepalis are struggling to understand the need for such legal shenanigans when government attention should have been firmly on the Covid-19 crisis. The hope was that this government, with its near two-thirds support in the national legislature, would serve out its five years and give the country much-needed political stability. But untamed ambitions of individual leaders could yet again upend this hope.

The pair of new ordinances makes us question the ability of the NCP-led government to collectively fight the corona pandemic, and threatens to snuff out any hope of the country’s swift post-pandemic economy recovery. Instead, if and when the corona threat dies down, the country could see a repeat of the kind of mad scramble for power that had become a hallmark of the post-1990 polity. Oli can offer no credible justification for his creeping authoritarianism and for inviting yet another era of instability and uncertainty—and certainly not at this time of national emergency.  

People had overwhelmingly plumped for Oli and his communist coalition in the 2017 elections, rewarding his resolute stand against India during the blockade. How fast has Oli’s star fallen! His calculations that the new amendments will allow him to cement his power could be wrong. Oli seems to have learned little from the self-inflicted wounds of Nepali ruling parties over the past three decades. Moreover, with his latest attempt at power-grab, the near-septuagenarian prime minister has run a bulldozer over democratic norms and done irreparable harm to his party and his country.