Editorial
‘Tyranny of the majority’, it is said of Western democracy. The use of the law on a population on the basis of a majority in parliament also forms both a critique and strength of democracy. Lest we forget, though, that such use of law can also yield tyrants. The past fifteen years of Nepali politics borders tyranny since organized political forces junked constitutional provisions and institutions on the strength of the organization and replaced it arbitrarily with a system that refuses to work democratically. As we saw last week, it is now the judiciary that props up a parliament and government and tyranny smell at the ease with which two-thirds majority can slide from one side to the other in order to fulfil the pretence of the democratic vote in the (s)election of the government. Indeed, as the past week should jerk the K.P.Oli faction of the UML, the manner with which his supporter was threatened to be ousted from a parliamentary committee on grounds of regression should remind him how he, too, coalesced in silence a government whose strength was nothing other than a constitution that he and his allies were bent on tearing at foreign prompting. What has emerged since is a politics insisting on the sharing of spoils. Where Oli failed, perhaps Prime Minister Deuba will succeed but the Nepali Congress factions ponder over how much gain the party will incur without inviting further wrath from his partners in parliament which is virtually everybody.
K.P.Oli’s use of the constitution may have been tyrannical enough to invite the judicial interjection. Its cause however may be traced to the same share of spoils within the party whose two-thirds majority was engineered at Oli’s insistence with Prachanda’s Maoists. The unification could not be retained also as an alliance and the resultant split encouraged a further split in the original UML with the Madhav Nepal faction emerging in alliance with Prachanda. Oli’s bet that the laws of the land and his party’s regulations would suffice to prevent a whip. Tyranny lies in the fact that regulations were changed through judicial injunction in course of the interpreting a constitution that must engineer a defection to appoint a new prime minister. Deuba is now in his seat thus. If K.P. lost his two thirds in a matter of hours, one terai party must now be split into two to keep him there. Such repeated tampering of the rule (changing the goalposts, one could day) can only invite a tyrant who will ultimately have to ignore the rule outright because of the frequency of such practice. This will matter little to Deuba’s foreign mentors who would rather gain from the ensuing instability. For the population at large and the politicians themselves, the resulting unpredictability would only destabilize further as a result of which tyranny would be the only solution. We are no alarmists. But the course is clear. When laws cannot prevent, they cannot suffice.
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