Editorial
Voting day for the local elections is merely a little over a fortnight away, the seeming social engrossment over what should have been routine local elections belies the fact that things are not routine. Long time coming, local elections this round is taking place all over the country in a single day. This has not happened since the bad old panchayat days. After initial jitters over what exactly the six-year-old constitution meant in stipulating routine five-year terms for local elected offices, the decision to hold the polls is itself a gain in efforts to legitimize a constitution with shaky legitimacy. This effort at consolidation will be further rewarded in the light of pre-poll alignments forged by the ruling Nepali Congress which has dared face cadre wrath by accommodating demands from the Maoist Center, the NCP Socialists and the other minor allies to make seat adjustments for the local polls. In essence, thus, the argument that actually two major parties are contesting. The UML being the other makes possible the evolution of a two-party system, in the long run, may have logic.
Provided, that is if the logic holds. Politics in Nepal take spurts into illogical territory. There is merely to recollect that, just in the previous elections, the Congress did partner with the Maoists who, immediately after its conclusion partnered with the UML to yield them a nearly two-thirds majority for the Left in the current parliament. It is another matter that then Prime Minister K.P.Oli’s leadership was so severely tested as to engineer a split that revived the UML and the Maoist Center and a newly stunted Socialist clone with questionable legitimacy still and the immitigable allegation of a government run by Supreme Court alignment. The task of the masters of the current constitution is to ensure that the elections are held. It should at least use the people’s fresh mandate to ride over the embarrassment of all three branches of government being in abject disarray.
In a sense, the election festivities provide a newly enlightened voting population with noise and a choice of alternatives. Top-down choices for grassroots positions by highly centralized party leadership have denied both the voters their independent choice of candidates and also the local level worker’s voice in the choice. The party bureaucracy is already being challenged in many constituencies triggering rebel candidates. As it is, it is the grassroots that bear the brunt of partisan discord. Yet another spanner to the alignment designs is the fresh spurt of unconventional candidates that have brought into the fray celebrities and non-celebrities, the well known and not so well-knowns who will bask in the spurious limelight of election festivities. How the vote will be diverted by these abstracts defies calculation at the moment. But, one sure vote diversion will be a resurgent RPP. It is thus that, if not the elections, it is the post-poll situation that promises to be explosive.
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