Failed by academia, it perpetuates at people’s cost
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
While our party politicians with the self-appropriated brands of being social democrats or outright communists had managed to restore multiparty democracy with India’s hegemonic intervention that included the second and extended blockade of Nepal in 1989-90, the new polity has been a sustained torment for the people due to the politicians plunging full throttle into boundless acts of corruption from day one of its restorations. It has been due to this corruptibility in particular that the country continues to remain “dirt-poor” as characterized in a recent Economist article, even as the rank-and-file Nepalese complain that the once “chappal (cheap plastic slippers)-wearing” politicians count among the richest in Nepal today. Even the so-called promising young faces in the parties too are already tarnished faces. Probably to account for these grievous fallibilities, lately, Nepal’s foreign minister Pradip Gyawali is quoted to have described our corrupt multiparty polity as Nepali swaad ko prajatantra or “democracy with Nepali flavour”.
While the Oli government, tainted with allegations of mega scams, remains one of the most corrupt historically, they have also been the casus belli lately for plunging the UML into an existential crisis. The Oli government has since been facing a stiff challenge from his own party colleagues led by the former prime minister, Madhav Kumar Nepal, reportedly seeking their own share in the spoils of governing, a practice now infamously known as bhagbandaa or booty-sharing. While the opposing faction has ingenuously couched its protest in a manner that makes it sound like a serious organizational issue. They had claimed that Oli failed to honor and act by the party’s bidhi (norms) in running the government. But the PM himself understood it to be nothing more than a metaphor for bhagbanda. In actuality, their demand remains very mundane, a share in the government’s appointments and award of contracts among others to be able to dole out favours to the members of their own faction. After all the Nepal faction had done or said absolutely nothing when the Oli government had strayed from the election promise of “good governance and prosperity” from the very start of his tenure. They waited patiently until the end of the two-year honeymoon period provided under the new constitution that disallows any no-confidence vote against the prime minister. The disgruntled faction had thus acted as soon as that threshold has been passed and did so with all their ammunition that included crossing the floor and allying with opposition parties. The Oli government was thus deposed in a confidence vote that he himself sought in parliament on May 10.
Corruption prevails even in pandemic procurement
One recent tragedy to befall this “Nepali-flavoured democracy” has been that the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic has been taking an unprecedented toll due to shortages of all kinds for the treatment of the infected — PCR test kits, PPEs, oxygen cylinders, oxygen, ventilators, hospital beds, vaccines and so on — compounded by the sinking morale of over-worked and underpaid medical staff. As a result, patients have been dying everywhere, at home, at hospital gates and even on the streets while hankering for hospital beds from one hospital to the next. But the politicians, one and all, remained focused on seating and unseating PM Oli even as the health minister himself is alleged to have stalled the procurement of the urgently-needed vaccine in his bid to extract hefty commissions from the suppliers.
After all, the incumbent health minister may have been trying only to follow in the footsteps of his recent predecessor who was known to have delayed such procurement at the early stage of the pandemic so that, once it assumed crisis proportion, he could then award the contract to his favoured supplier, the OMNI group, for highly inflated prices in return for a handsome commission. When the minister was subjected to criticism from all around, PM Oli himself had found it fit to come to his defense by announcing that “there has been no corruption in this procurement, because I said so”. Clearly, no more proof needed! Height of impunity!
Total impunity
This attempted thievery, now known as the infamous “OMNI scam” has since been registered with the anti-corruption watchdog, the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA). But in our Nepali-flavoured democracy, this agency too has long been headed and manned by the favourites of these same corrupt politicians in power and has, therefore, been acting more as the graveyard for such corruption cases, thus further enabling the sense of impunity on the part of these corrupt political thugs. Just for this reason, no politician has gone to jail for corruption in a country that Transparency International has dubbed as “the most corrupt in Asia” in 2020.
An extreme embarrassment at the world stage
Since this colossal mismanagement of the pandemic had become headline news lately all across the world, the reputed international media such as the CNN, BBC and the Guardian reported Oli’s ouster as the direct consequence of his failure to deliver during this national crisis. For a while, it gave the impression to the international community that the Nepalese parliament had acted responsibly in the interest of the people. In the meantime, Oli, the master manipulator, managed to woo this greedy gang back to his fold and the opposition’s much-cherished dream of forming an alternative government just came crashing down. Thus, even as Oli as the leader of the largest party in parliament was sworn in as PM again less than a week of his ouster, the international observers must be dumbfounded and scratching their heads to make sense of this utterly unique “Nepali-flavoured democracy”. For this reason, this corruption-fuelled political system that continues to be called “democracy” in Nepal has since turned into an embarrassment too for Nepal at the world stage.
The deplorable letdown by the academia
However, more than these corrupt mortals masquerading as politicians and people’s representatives, the basic problem lies in the blind adoption of the Westminster model of democracy in Nepal’s chronically feudalistic socio-economic context. Nepal’s traditionally deriving socio-economic order remains basically characterized by vast impoverished and largely illiterate masses belonging to lower rungs in the ruthlessly rigid caste hierarchy struggling to make their ends meet, even as the handful of high caste and relatively wealthy feudal elites, locally known as Thalus, perpetually run roughshod against the former but still manage to emerge as their “leaders” and “representatives”. Given such socio-economic relationship, elections under our kind of democracy have always been reduced to vote-buying exercises, either directly for cash or indirectly through cash-induced benefits like gorging on meat and drinks on election eve, an absolutely rare indulgence for the impoverished masses.
While this has been the story of the Nepali-flavoured democracy from day one of its restorations in 1990, the Nepali academia — which has been known mostly for recycling and sore lack of primary research — has always shied away from addressing these carcinogenic fault lines in our democratic polity. Instead, they too have mostly latched on to one or more of these corrupt political thugs and have only tried to deflect the nation’s attention from this structurally deriving problem in our polity. For instance, a well-known professor of political science has recently written the following in a prominent vernacular daily. “While judging from the governance performance of the last three decades the parties have indeed failed in their task”. But he went on to add that blaming the parliamentary system for it is “prejudicial thinking” (Krishna Khanal, Oped: Biswaas ko mat: Antarya ra Abhista, Kantipur May 8, 2021). He argued that the problem lies in the “organizational structure, working procedure and the behavior of the leadership in the parties” and that what is needed is “political honesty and result-oriented economic and social policies and programmes “.
But the fact of the matter is that such hackneyed commitments have been made by all parties all the time, and the opinion writers in the media too have done the same fruitlessly all these years. To use conceptual tools from social science research, the author has presented the “behavior of the leader” as an independent variable, whereas, in practice, it is sorely dependent on the extent to which the leaders are structurally forced to remain accountable to the people.
As things stand, the parties have always promised the moon in their manifestoes, but have never been taken to task by the people for their failure to deliver on them. Instead, the same corrupt politicians are elected over and over again, because they have the resource and resourcefulness to organize vote-buying during the election as described earlier. Neither the voters nor the politicians themselves take their election promises any seriously. Elections in Nepal have never been more than mundane transactions between the vote buyers and vote sellers most of the way. The parties themselves have many middlemen, flatteringly called “cadres” or “frontline workers”, who too need to be paid and fed handsomely to facilitate the transaction. Thus, despite what the learned professor has to say in defense of our corrupt politics and politicians, the problem surely lies in the Westminster model that has always been contaminated with “Nepali flavour” of unrestrained corruptibility to the callous and total neglect of the hapless people of Nepal.
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