If you do not get it right the first time, it is very difficult to get it right at all. So said Menaka Guruswami, a young Delhi-based constitutional lawyer while commenting on the constitutional fiasco in Nepal. It appears that this young lawyer may be right. But if one looks back India has been a very lucky nation. If we not had the kind of larger than life people drafting our constitution, who had the vision to imagine what kind of India they wanted to bequeath and the sense of humour to overlook a few cartoons, we may never have had a Constitution. The present lot of political leaders inspire little confidence that they would have given us what we have; but perhaps we would never have reached so far anyway without this document. But back to Nepal.

This country of nearly 30 million is facing its biggest political crisis ever. It is bigger than the Rana Revolt, bigger than the assassination of King Birendra, the Maoist revolt that accounted for more that 16,000 killed, the Jan Andolan of 2006 and today, despite the Constituent Assembly elections of 2008, the country faces an existentialist threat to itself. In a way, the crisis today is because of these elections and the manoeuvrings and manipulations that have gone on ever since. Overvaulting ambitions of an essentially entrenched feudal polity, mutual suspicions of the players which have included regional and ethnic interests and diehard ideologues, have been the ingredients of a lethal cocktail and led to the present impasse.