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Fundamentals of Nepali democracy
- STATE OF FLUX
JUN 14 -
The concept of loktantra, the political system that was to be established in the jubilance after the 2006 Jana Andolan was most obviously a rejection of the institution of the monarchy and the prajatantra that prevailed under it. But through the later months of 2005 and 2006, loktantra had come, through the process of mass participation and debate, to take on other connotations of all that was desirable in Nepali politics. The deepening of democracy to allow participation by non-Hindus, or non-Nepali speakers or non-upper caste hill Hindus was one such aspect. A radical shift in the manner in which political parties functioned - with emphasis on consensual government, a temporary cessation of power games until the entire old order was reconstituted, a greater attention to those who came out onto the streets in support of the parties - was another.
Loktantra, however, has, four years after the reinstatement of parliament come to resemble something very different from what was envisaged. The various mutinies by those who have been historically wronged by the state have been allowed, it is true, but the centre barely tolerates them and turns a deaf ear to their demands. These are considered law and order problems, which, if the state possessed the capacity, should be swiftly repressed. The monarchy has been abolished, it is true, but increasingly since the fall of the Maoist-led government in May 2009, power and politics has become intensely concentrated. And we have reached a stage where national politics is virtually indistinguishable from the private negotiations between a handful of political leaders from the three major parties, with little left for smaller parties, or newly emerged political groups, or even junior leaders from the major parties to do but publicly grandstand or focus on creating grounds for a new revolt against the state.
It may seem strange that we have a government chosen through the Constituent Assembly (CA), the most representative elected body in the history of Nepal, but that politics is so excessively centralized that is has by now narrowed to the question of who is to lead the next government. It may seem strange that with so much talk regarding the rights of the marginalized, every question regarding the lives of most of the inhabitants of the country - whether regarding immediate problems of development or livelihood, or longer-term ones regarding the establishment of a stable and representative system of government - is totally ignored. But given the incentives facing the political parties today, and the nature of the political culture that prevailed during the democratic decade of the 1990s, it cannot be said that the current stagnation was wholly unexpected.
The current struggle over power entirely suits the older political parties - the Nepali Congress and the CPN-UML. Having matured during the tumultuous years of the 1990s, the power circles of Kathmandu are their natural habitat and parliamentary power games their natural occupation. Having accrued immense political experience and wisdom, they understand that the purpose of the state is not the delivery of services or development, not economic growth, not the expansion of representation or the empowerment of the population. These may be the stated tasks, and the parliamentary parties may have believed in them sincerely in the early 1990s, but they soon realized after gaining power that these were far beyond their own capabilities and those of the bureaucracy. And the achievement of such goals was in any case impossible in the normal political state of state paralysis caused by the struggle between parties to form and topple governments.
The state exists, then, for the parties in power to partake of its spoils, and the rules of the game have it that all large parties get opportunities to do so. Democracy does flourish in Nepal: if the opposition in parliament is able to form a majority, those in government will willingly cede their place for the time being. The tragedy of the Maoists and the reason why there is unanimous consensus among others that they need to be kept out of power is because they have been unwilling to learn the rules of Nepali parliamentary democracy. They still believe that the state exists for other purposes than itself; they believe that it is possible and desirable to change society through the state. And they actually believe that popular representation means more than the maneuverings of the few hundred legislators.
The Maoists thus need to be taught a fundamental principle of liberal democracy: that the responsibilities and rights of the people end when they vote for their representatives. Until they again receive the opportunity to do so sometime in the distant future, parliament reigns, and it can form and replace governments at will. Non-parliamentary means of mass assertion, such as street protests, are dangerous and need to be opposed. But this is not a very difficult task: all it requires is for the government to ignore all that happens on the streets, or to claim that all such activity is caused by troublemakers who cannot even be considered to be part of the citizenry and to then wait for the protests to die down through fatigue. The lesson: street action is always impotent in affecting any kind of change. The UML learnt this lesson so well during the 1990s, that it has by now become incapable of even bringing a few thousand people out onto the streets. The Maoists are learning the lesson now.
Having been shown the ineffectiveness of street mobilization, the Maoists are now largely trapped into the system. They have no recourse but to negotiation and to attempts to wean away partners in the current coalition to form a majority. They are limited to Kathmandu: the peace agreements have forced them to give up their parallel state system in the districts, which, unacceptably made people believe that such structures could deliver what the state was supposed to but couldn’t. Their cadre in the districts has learnt, as befitting the principles of Nepali democracy, that their sole purpose is to engage in coercion to gain access to the resources that trickle down to the villages. But one problem remains: the Maoists are excessively powerful in areas outside of Kathmandu and control too much of local politics. They continue to disregard the democratic principle of an equal division of spoils. But this too will change: In Kathmandu the other parties will invoke the universal ideals of democracy to make the Maoists dissolve their coercive bodies. In the districts, in accordance with the principles of Nepali democracy as it is lived, the Congress and UML will seek to hire and organize all local goons to counteract the Maoist’s power.
The Maoists may have thought that they were victorious when, first, the other parties accepted their demand for a Constituent Assembly and, later, when they won the most number of seats in elections to the body. The other parties have realized by now, and the Maoists are in the process of doing so, that these were in fact major losses. Having given the CA such immense political weight, having imbued it with the impossible tasks of transforming the entire nature of Nepali state and society, they are stuck with it. What the creation of the body has done is make it impossible for the Maoists to go out and seek a mandate from the people through elections. The CA, with such great tasks expected from it, cannot be dissolved; fresh elections cannot be called until it completes its task. With no such outcome foreseeable in the near future, the CA is thus a victory for the other parliamentary parties: it enables them to avoid elections - the most inconvenient and painful aspect of Nepali democracy. Without having to seek the people’s mandate for the foreseeable future, the governing parties have been able to give up even the fiction that the state exists to serve the people. This, it appears, is the most enduring legacy of Nepali loktantra.
Aditya Adhikari
aditya.adhikari@gmail.com
Posted on: 2010-06-15 08:46
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