The issue of jurisdiction that has cropped up in the parliamentary special committee formed to investigate crisis-ridden cooperatives across the country is nothing but a distraction to take the attention away from the main agenda. According to Sishir Khanal, a committee member from the Rastriya Swatantra Party (RSP), it is unclear whether a committee formed by the federal Parliament can investigate the cooperatives that come under the jurisdiction of the provincial and local level governments. Khanal and the RSP are clearly fishing for a legal loophole to absolve the party chair and current deputy prime minister and home minister Rabi Lamichhane of the crime of routing money from various cooperatives into the Gorkha Media Network. There is documentary proof of money from at least four cooperatives being pumped into the network at a time Lamichhane was its managing director. Some of these cooperatives fall under the jurisdiction of the provincial governments. Khanal said the committee should work in a way that no legal questions can later be raised over its final recommendations. This is a flawed argument. A bit of context is warranted.

The committee was formed after the main opposition, Nepali Congress, disrupted parliamentary proceedings for nearly two months, demanding that Home Minister Lamichhane’s involvement in the cooperative scam, particularly in relation to the Gorkha Media Network, be probed. After long negotiations, it was agreed that a parliamentary committee would indeed be formed and while the committee’s ToR would not mention Lamichhane, it would name the network. The fourth point of the committee’s ToR mentions that it will “study the status of the funds transferred to various organisations, including Gorkha Media Network Pvt Ltd, whether the funds were obtained legally or illegally, and how the funds were put to use will be conducted.” Legal experts the Post talked to were of the view that though many cooperatives may be operating under local or provincial laws, the federal government can regulate them, and as such the probe committee should have no problem in this regard. They point to the country’s constitution which gives the federal government the mandate to regulate all cooperatives.

Here, we must again remember that the committee’s ToR mentions that all those entities from which funds have been transferred to the Gorkha Media Network will be probed. No distinction is made between the cooperatives that fall under the jurisdictions of various levels of government. Moreover, the committee had to be formed in order to meet the opposition’s central demand that the involvement of a sitting deputy prime minister and home minister in such an egregious crime be investigated. This is also why the name of the now-defunct media company he was once involved with is mentioned. As the seven-member probe committee has only three months, they should be working full time in determining those responsible for misappropriating hundreds of billions of rupees of common people. As a part of this process, the committee’s task will also be incomplete if it cannot either clear or implicate Lamichhane over the transfer of various cooperatives’ money into the accounts of a private media company.