What goes around comes around, more so in politics. Home Minister Rabi Lamichhane has been pretty active in the past couple of weeks after he assumed office. Apart from fulfilling daily duties mandated by his post, he has to rein in top politicians and bureaucrats into the orbit of justice. Under his administration, police have nabbed former Speaker and current vice-chairman of Maoist Centre Krishna Bahadur Mahara, who was implicated in a high-profile gold smuggling case, as well as former Vice-President Nanda Bahadur Pun’s son Dipesh Pun, who was implicated in a cooperative fraud case. Lamichhane knows and has admitted to the uncertainty of the length of his tenure as home minister, and so he wants to get things done. “Rabi Dai”, as he is popularly known among his followers, is in action, and the results are showing.

However, if not the folklorish “dirty game” altogether, politics is a game indeed. And he now has new checkmates in Parliament. The “Well” in Parliament, where he stood to seek accountability from leaders, has now been occupied by others, and he is now in the dock. He is being made to taste his own medicine, and alas, Lamichhane doesn’t seem to like it. The opposition Nepali Congress is up in arms against him, calling for a parliamentary probe into his alleged involvement in a fraud case related to Suryadarshan Cooperative Limited. The allegation is that he was involved in the embezzlement of hundreds of millions of rupees by channelling the savings of thousands of people into the Gorkha Media Network, with which Lamichhane was associated as a promoter.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal and CPN-UML chief KP Sharma Oli have put their weight behind Lamichhane, now that he is their major coalition partner. So, for them, the question of a parliamentary probe is invalid. But the baton of oppositional politics has gone into the hands of the Congress, which is raising the issue of a parliamentary probe against Lamichhane. This is the same party that maintained pin-drop silence even as the media and the public were raising the issue of Lamichhane’s possible transgressions and highlighting the enormous frauds taking place in cooperatives around the country. What’s more, the Congress was reported to have approached Lamichhane to form an alternative coalition when its coalition with Dahal’s Maoist Centre fell apart.

It is this opportunistic approach that has rendered the Congress’s attempt at discrediting Lamichhane morally inadequate. Be that as it may, it is the right and the duty of the Congress to continue pursuing concrete action on the allegations against Lamichhane. For his part, Lamichhane has lashed out against the Congress parliamentarians for seeking his resignation, telling them to continue to do so for the next four years. The Congress has announced its plans to disrupt the House if its demand for a parliamentary probe is not met by March 31, when the House meeting starts. If the tussling parties continue to stick to their guns, Parliament is expected to see the same old routine of obstructions. Despite the opposition party losing moral ground to question Lamichhane, it is legally entitled to do so. It is now up to Lamichhane, the Home Minister, to show which moral ground he stands on, for a normative investigation through the police involves a conflict of interest.