E-Kantipur

A caretaker government is one that takes care of the state when a government has been dismissed and a new and more permanent one has not been formed. It cannot undertake any measure that has a long-term bearing on the nation or the next government. It is expected to look after the day to day affairs of the state and be prepared to face any eventuality of an internal or external threat to peace. However, there is a different scenario when a particular political system is dropped and a new one has to be created. Such a transition tends to take much longer than a mere change of government. The government mechanism for the entire period can be called a caretaker government.  

Nepal’s present case falls under the second type of transition. We have dropped the old system of constitutional monarchy together with the parliamentary type of government. But we have not made a new system for which an Interim Constitution had been designed and a Constituent Assembly (CA) formed with a mandate to create and enforce a new constitution within two years. In this sense, it is not only the government that is a caretaker, but the whole constitutional mechanism is also a caretaker.

Within this caretaker system, we have had a series of caretaker governments. The government led by the late Prime Minister Girija Prasad Koirala was a caretaker government whose task was to conduct the election to the CA and hand over power to the newly elected group. But Koirala transgressed his authority and overstayed by four months, delaying the formation of a regular government. The new coalition government led by the leader of the largest party, the Maoists, was a regular government even in the transitional period because it had the numerical strength to fulfil its mandate of drafting and enforcing the new constitution.

Mismanagement of the coalition led to its demise. It was succeeded by an unlikely coalition of 22 parties which did not have the numerical strength of a two-thirds majority to enable it to fulfil the mandate of the people. In that sense, it was just a caretaker government. The government led by Madhav Kumar Nepal was not in a position to draft and enforce the coveted constitution without the overt support of the Maoists. The fact that the CA had to perform the dual functions of drafting a constitution and working as a legislative parliament had confounded the concept of the CA.

The parliament could perform its business with a simple majority in all aspects except those provisions where a higher level of support was obligatory. But the CA could not carry out any substantive decisions except with the support of a two-thirds majority. If there had been two separate bodies of the CA and parliament, even the fragile coalition with a simple majority could have been called a legitimate full powered government. But, in our case, the government was expected to mobilise the support of two-thirds of the CA members which it was unable to do. So it was a caretaker government.

The coalition government was forced to resign amid claims by the opposition that it would be succeeded by a consensus government within no time. So its status was further reduced to a conventional caretaker government. The bid to form a legitimate consensus government having failed, an attempt was made to form a government with the support of a two-thirds majority. This too turned out to be fictitious. Then there was a race to elect a prime minister with a simple majority. A two-man race has been reduced to a one-man race, a rare case of power madness. Even if that mad race were to be decided one way or the other by a simple majority, the government would not be in a position to draft the constitution.

Here, a distinction is being made by the political actors between a caretaker government and a more legitimate government. The caretaker government was thus not allowed to present the regular budget. But the political actors ignored the fact that with their failure to form a consensus government, or even a government with the support of a two-thirds majority, their eventual success in forming a government with a simple majority would have been less legitimate than even the present one. On the one hand, the claim of a consensus turned out to be fictitious; and, on the other, there was a time lapse of over five months in trying to form a government. If a caretaker government is allowed to continue for more than five months, what was the status of the nation? Was it stagnant?

If some disaster had fallen on the nation during this long period of inability to form a government, who could have taken the necessary steps to rescue it? Could the steps of the caretaker government have been considered invalid because they were taken by an “illegitimate” government? The failure to present a budget was no less than a national disaster. That the budget had to be presented through an ordinance was a slur on the face of the people’s representatives.

Whichever way you look at it, a government without the required two-thirds support will be a caretaker. At this stage, even the process of forming a new caretaker government has been disrupted. That may be accomplished with an amendment to the Interim Constitution, but such amendments will be meaningless if the actors are not united to accomplish the task of writing the constitution. What benefit will the nation get by jumping from one caretaker government to another?

knsad66@yahoo.com

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