"Independent" MPs are mandated to tame the corrupt in the confines of legislative chambers By Bihari Krishna Shrestha The reason democracy remains the most preferred form of government around the world is that this system is endowed with the capacity to self-correct itself, that is, if a party or politicians in power fail to deliver, come the next election, they are shown the door and new, more promising politicians are installed at the helm. This is what recently happened in the UK with Rishi Sunak replacing Liz Truss as PM in less than two months at the helm. In the US too where democracy was seemly irreparably derailed at the hands of President Donald Trump, it seems to be correcting itself too with Joe Biden winning as president even as the January 6 Select Committee of the House of Representatives has caused hundreds of the Capitol insurrectionists to be clamped with extended jail terms even as President Trump himself finding the law catching up with him too with the increasing likelihood of being indicted.   NEPAL'S DEMOCRACY THRIVES ON CORRUPTION However, Nepal has not been so fortunate. Ever since the multiparty democracy was restored more than three decades ago in 1990, political corruption has been increasingly brazen and rampant with near total impunity, rendering just about every single politician a corrupt man or woman.  The recently concluded general election too returned the most corrupt of politicians to power. While the three leaders heading the three major parties, the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal (UML) and the Maoist Centre count among the most corrupt historically, all three of them won their elections with handsome margins. In other words, Nepal's democracy has been rendered the government of the corrupt, by the corrupt and for the corrupt. Just now, the NC's septuagenarian president,  Sher Bahadur Deuba is being challenged by younger MP Gagan Thapa for the leadership of the NC's parliamentary party--that would pave the way for premiership too eventually--on grounds that it is time for the leadership mantle to be passed on to the younger generation.  But, given that almost all NC wallas carry tarnished images and Thapa himself allegedly involved in corrupt deals of his own, it is no longer strange to find that the rationale for the proposed transition is not for the power transferred from the corrupt to the incorruptible.  However paradoxical it may sound, as things stand, the NC's battle for leadership is apparently for the transfer of power from the older corrupt to the younger corrupt, and this apparently passes for "democratic practice" in the GOP of Nepal RURAL STRUCTURAL STRANGLEHOLD FOR FORPERVERSION OF NEPAL'S DEMOCRACY The problem for Nepal's democratic failure lay in the fact that the country remains predominantly rural--over 80 per cent of the population living in rural areas as per the 2011 census--and the feudalistic order continues to reign supreme in the rural communities. Compared to urban conditions, Nepal's rural areas continue to remain more impoverished, have little or no access to education worth the name, remain inescapably subject to hierarchical and exclusionary caste and gender divides, and exist under the traditionally continuing despotic rule of the high caste elites, colloquially known as Thalu or the "terrorizing elders".  By their very nature, the Thalus remain endowed with the capacity to manifest themselves differently in different situations: local money lenders/ extortionists, local arbiters of disputes with known and corrupt biases, act as middlemen or influence peddlers to deal with government officials on behalf of the local powerless and clandestinely benefit from it, unlawful but unchallenged appropriator of the commons, and so on. Thus, with the community in their grip, it is these very Thalus who also get to lead the various political parties in the communities, and play a near decisive role in elections by swaying votes in favour of the candidate they chose to support, for a price. This is what makes elections unaffordable for politicians with modest means. It has been this ever-persistent feudal order that has been at the heart of why corrupt politicians get elected and re-elected in Nepal over and over again, this time too being no different; the same corrupt Deuba, the same corrupt Oli, the same corrupt Prachanda and so on.  THE LOOMING URBAN-RURAL DIVIDE AND THE CASCADE OF THE INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES  However, the recently concluded general election in Nepal seems to have brought to the surface what can be seen as the urban-rural divide in dealing with political corruption even as the urban voters seemed to take lead in correcting our own democracy too. This divide--i.e. the intolerance of the urban voters against the corrupt thugs masquerading as politicians and people's representatives--had first become manifest when the Kathmandu voters elected the independent candidate, a trained engineer, Balen Shah, as the mayor of the capital city in local bodies' election by a big margin with NC's and UML's candidates coming remote second and third.  This development laid bare the extent of disillusionment of the ordinary voters against the massive horde of corrupt politicians and set the tone for the general election that was soon to follow.  Many "independent" enthusiasts hastily joined what can be seen as the Balen Shah bandwagon and contested the general election mainly in constituencies in urban Nepal with little time for them to even lay out their manifesto in proper detail.  Of them, the popular TV anchor, Rabi Lamichhane even managed to hastily put together a rough and ready political party of independents, the Rastriya Swatantra Party or National Independent Party. Lamichhane himself draws his strength as a rebel politician from the popularity that he had amassed over the years during which he incessantly acted not only as the unhinged critic of corrupt politics and bureaucracy on the TV screen; he also went after them in person and put up ferocious confrontations to get the wrongs done to the weak and meek righted. It did not take him long to establish himself as the Messiah of the weak and the poor.  Compared to previous elections, this time, some 25 candidates managed to get themselves elected as independents and including the twenty that contested the election under the banner of the Independent Party. Many more would have been elected, had it not been for the fact that there were too many unorganized independents fighting each other out in the polls, leaving room for the loyal voters of the established parties to elect their own candidates. For instance, NC's Prakash Man Singh would never have been elected, had the votes of RPP's Rabindra Mishra and independent Pukar Bam not cancelled each other. PRACHANDA FLEES FROM URBAN RESENTMENT TO THE REFUGE OF THE RURAL VOTERS The potency of urban resentment against the corrupt politicians was most clearly in view in the case of Prachanda, otherwise, the "fierce" Maoist Supremo, who had to flee from his largely urban "home" constituency in Chitawan to the refuge of Thalu-dominated voters of the rural hinterland of the Gorkha district.  Emboldened by the massive support of Chitawan's urban voters, Rabi Lamichhane had announced that he would take on Prachanda headlong on his own home turf. It was clear that Prachanda, who by his own confession has the blood of some five thousand fellow citizens on his hand from his decade-long Maoist terrorist insurgency in the country, did not stand a chance. So, at the invitation of fellow Maoist, the native, high-caste Thalu comrade, Baburam Bhattarai, Prachanda contested the election and won handsomely in a Gorkha constituency for the structural reasons discussed earlier. THE HISTORY-MAKING ROLE OF INDEPENDENT MPs IN FEDERAL PARLIAMENT As things stand, the 25-odd-strong ragtag group of independent MPs in the 275-strong House of Representatives does not make for a massive political force. However, they have a historic role to perform: To expose the constantly occurring ill deeds of these corrupt thugs and send a message to the rural voters--as much as to the urban--that it is time to rise against the Thalu thugs in their own rural communities too.  At some point, sooner than later, the "independents" must come up with a governance agenda of their own based on which they must take on the corrupt brigade in parliament.  The independents must also choose to caucus with politicians from smaller parties in the opposition on agenda items that they find to be in common. In any case, the independents must not fall for the greed of joining any government whether NC-led or UML. It is not the mandate their voters had handed them.