Ever since the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA) filed a corruption case at the Special Court against Madhav Kumar Nepal, former prime minister and current chair of CPN (Unified Socialist), there has been much speculation. Under a direct proposal of then Prime Minister Nepal, the Cabinet in 2010 had allowed a private company to purchase land whose area exceeded the legal ceiling many times over. Within a month, the Cabinet again allowed the company, Patanjali Yogpeeth and Ayurveda Company Nepal, to illegally sell a chunk of the land at an inflated price. The whole process smacked of a plot to increase the company’s profits. Nearly 15 years later, a case has been lodged against Nepal. Since the restoration of democracy in 1990, this is the first time that the country’s constitutional anti-graft body has filed a case against a former head of government. Earlier, all such ‘policy decisions’ of the prime minister-led Cabinet were exempted from oversight. According to the CIAA Act, “the commission will not conduct any investigation, inquiry, or take any action in relation to any policy decision collectively made by the council of ministers or any of its committees.”

Such a provision was deemed necessary to allow the executive to make prompt decisions in public interest without having to constantly worry about prosecution. It would also add to the efficiency of the government machinery. Or so it was thought. But successive Cabinets started approving all kinds of dodgy deals as their decisions could not be investigated. Even the decisions that were being taken in the interest of a particular individual or institution were now being labelled ‘policy decisions’. Moreover, while it became a custom to prosecute top bureaucrats on all sorts of corruption charges, the ultimate decision makers, the prime minister and ministers, were never held responsible. Now that a former prime minister has been charged with corruption, current and future executive heads will be more careful in their decision-making. This kind of equality before law is something to be celebrated.

Yet opposition leaders state that the corruption case against Nepal is nothing but political vendetta, with Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli trying to punish Nepal, his former CPN-UML colleague, for daring to engineer a split in the mother party and repeatedly speaking against Oli in public. Given Oli’s prickly nature, that is a possibility. But in the larger picture, a start had to be made to puncture the culture of impunity that had ballooned under the guise of ‘policy decisions’. Also, unlike in other cases of dubious Cabinet decision-making, the involvement of Madhav Nepal in the Patanjali case is more straight-forward: it was the prime minister who had directly tabled the Patanjali land purchase proposal in the Cabinet. Allowing the same plots of land to be sold at inflated prices, within a month of their purchase, further implicates him.

With contested claims being made, it is up to the Special Court to provide clarity on the issue. In its full text, the case against Nepal and the need to prosecute (or exonerate) him have to be clearly spelled out and there should be no room for ambiguity. The more transparent the prosecution, the greater will be its legitimacy and greater the verdict’s deterrent power for current and future prime ministers.