--By Madan Lamsal

 

One of the electric waves of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Nepal visit that criss-crossed the border was all about electricity itself. Power Trade Agreement, transmission lines, Pancheswar, HIT, end of load-shedding in Nepal, and what not. The environment was perfectly electrified by the Indian proposal much before the southern External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj visited Nepal as prelude to Modi's during the last week of July. Thanks to the Indian proposal on power development (and trade?) that detailed how India and Nepal can create a tango in power connections, without allowing the third party even to watch the duo dance.

 

We have our great nationalists who do not see billions of cumecs of water flowing down to India everyday without a single penny of income, for centuries and millennia now but can instantly sniff the rotten rat in any proposal to develop hydro projects by any foreign party. And, our great southern neighbour has a different paranoia, as the critiques say, of constantly working for some mischief that only exposes the motive and ultimately doesn't translate to any substantive outcome. Then we cannot share power but exchange parodies.

 

There are moderates in our thinking brigade who consider that political nationalism is absolute pseudo thus power development must go on first in any shape possible. Other things can follow. And there are debates on models: Bhutan model, Khotang model, Ghising model and Kissing model. Bhutan model is easy: sit quiet, agree on what your neighbour says, and accept the rate she gives;— she will do all the needful. Khotang model is all about small is beautiful. First preference is micro-hydro, if not go for like Rawa Khola project that plans to generate 6 MW in six years. Ghising model is well-known, whose popularity was so painful to everyone from Energy Minister to NEA management. So they are now asking, who is Kul Man? Kissing model perhaps can fit best to India and Nepal as we often believe in behaving like fighting lovers that are thought to be intensely in love. Something they do in secret chambers and many things they do at public, without caring much about the shame. It was exactly the reason our Energy Minister Radha Gyawali had already decided to send her secretary to New Delhi to sign on the agreement proposed by India even without letting it know to her Prime Minister. And secrets got leaked but there was no element of shame on either side who sent the love letter and who reciprocated it. The gesture was 'Yaa! A kind of it happens in relations!! Whoop!!!' After all we are developing power in Kissing model.

 

Regardless of anything, including the one recent invitation from New Delhi to renegotiate the same agreement, our power minister is determined to end the load-shedding era in Nepal. For this, she has concrete plans. First, she wants to constitute a committee comprising of brilliant brains from her party, UML. Unfortunately this committee is likely to be short of a member as police recently gunned-down the party's real thinker comrade Chari in a shootout incident. 

 

She is, whatsoever, determined. And magical too. In any other country you need power supply to end the load-shedding. But in Nepal you need a committee to do so which with all its creativity is likely to conclude that Nepal needs power to end the load-shedding. Power cannot be transmitted from powerhouses to individual houses without transmission lines. We need investment to generate power. Nepal-India power cooperation is inevitable, etc. Some great likely findings.

 

If not anything, our power to sing parodies on power development between the parties within the country and parties across the border has not eroded. It has rather taken the shape of our own game of speaking parlour, popularly known in this subcontinent as antaakshari.