KATHMANDU: In the 2005 Bollywood superhit "Bunty aur Babli", Abishek Bachchan and Rani Mukherji, the con stars with hearts of gold, sell the Taj Mahal to a gullible American couple wishing to throw their wedding party inside the historical monument.
Six years later, there is an echo of the plot in neighbouring Nepal, this time however with sinister undertones.
In this plot, the hero, who turned out to be also the villain on Friday, is no other than Maoist supremo and former prime minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal Prachanda. The man who led a 10-year armed war from 1996 that saw the death of over 17,000 people, has now been exposed trying to sell Nepal's biggest human icon, the Buddha, to a fraudulent NGO with little credibility.
The hubbub worldwide last month after Hong Kong-registered Asia Pacific Foundation for Exchange and Cooperation (APECF) announced it had signed a $3 billion memorandum of understanding with the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) in Beijing to develop Lumbini, the birthplace of the Buddha in southern Nepal, into a Buddhist Vatican, has received the coup de grace on Friday with the UN agency refuting it.
"The UNIDO has not entered into any valid contractual agreement with the Asia Pacific Exchange and Cooperation Foundation, and therefore is not involved in any activities related to the Lumbini Special Development Zone in Nepal," the UN agency said in a statement issued from its Vienna headquarters. "An intended Memorandum of Understanding between UNIDO and APECF was never approved by the responsible UNIDO approval bodies. Any reference to a UNIDO involvement in the Lumbini Special Development Zone is thus without any legal and substantive basis."
The UN denial comes after an APECF team visited Lumbini this month and signed yet another deal with a Taiwanese telecom company. The government of Nepal, the host country, was not informed about any of the deals. With Nepal's foreign ministry and the culture ministry also denying any knowledge of the memorandum, Nepal's parliament this month began a probe into it.
Curiously, Prachanda seemed to be the only one defending it even though others pointed out that it was tantamount to selling Nepal's sovereignty. The Maoist chief also happens to be the co-chairman of the controversial APECF and has accepted three junkets from it, all of which were speculated to be about cloak-and-dagger businesses. Even this month, during the height of the Buddha deal controversy, Prachanda went to Malaysia on an APECF junket with little information emerging about what transpired at the meet.
The UN denial on Friday made Nepal's Foreign Minister Upendra Yadav call a press conference to say that the Lumbini deal now stood cancelled. However, matters should not end there, especially as Prachanda's party is once again seeking to lead the new government. Questions should be raised about the integrity of a leader who not only signed dubious deals with caretaker prime minister Jhala Nath Khanal to control the government but also did not hesitate to enter into pacts with a ghost NGO to sell a legacy that is of immeasurable historical, social and spiritual value to the nation.
