The choice in the upcoming election is largely between the corrupt and the worse
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
THE WESTMINSTER MODEL AT WORK IN THE UK
By all indications, the real Westminster parliamentary system, deriving its moniker from being housed in Westminster Palace in the UK remains strong and kicking in its birthplace. Just recently, Liz Truss had succeeded vulnerable Boris Johnson as prime minister, only to be forced out by fellow Tory MPs in 45 days in office, making her the most transient of British PMs historically. Her finance minister, Kwasi Kwarteng had presented his “mini-budget” that provided for generous unfunded tax cuts for the rich to the tune of some 45 billion GDP, the wide fiscal gap to be filled by borrowing.
The proposal set off a huge turmoil in the economy and unrest in the party ranks in the parliament even as the popularity rating of the Conservative Party plummeted. Liz Truss has since been succeeded by Rishi Sunak who pledged to raise the taxes back again even as he would also go for fiscal austerity that would include cutting funding for services that would hit the poorer people hard. While the measure was anything but popular in nature, the turmoil seems to have been laid to rest with the Sterling Pound regaining its lost ground. This is one instance of responsible governance that point to the strength of a genuine Westminster model of parliamentary democracy.
NEPAL’S CORRUPTED WESTMINSTER MODEL: ALL MPs COMPLICIT IN CORRUPTION
But in the highly perverted Nepali version of Westminster democracy, recently the country’s finance minister from the Maoist ranks, Janardan Sharma, illegally brought in two agents of private business houses to write the tax rates in the 2022 budget proposal for their own benefit and to the utter disadvantage of their rivals and the country.
As expected, the issue did raise a huge clamour in the country and the parliament, with the latter forming an enquiry committee to go into this criminal offence. While under popular pressure the committee asked for the CCTV footage that would have shown the illegal nocturnal entry of those unauthorized intruders. But the CCTV footage submitted by the finance minister was already willfully damaged. The parliamentary committee then wound down its enquiry for “want of sufficient proof” and the finance minister was exonerated and back on the seat again.
In our version of Westminster-style parliamentary democracy, even the so-called opposition was complicit in the criminal breach of the most sanctified rules of budget-making in a democracy.
Since just about every single member of parliament remains a corrupt man or woman, nobody objected to this breach seriously. For all of them, it was business as usual, the unstated rule being that the one at the seat of power necessarily making illicit money, parts of which would trickle down to other members in the parliament and in the parties, paradoxically, including those in the opposition. When the UML was at the helm, for instance, one of the biggest corruption scandals to hit the nation was the swindling of the treasury of billions of rupees in inflated cost in the purchase of wide-body aircraft for the national carrier, now popularly known as the Wide Body scam, under which, as the media reports went, the booty was shared also with the NC leadership in the opposition. That had made sure that there was no opposition to the skimming of the treasury in the parliament. That is Nepal’s version of the Westminster model, in effect, a disguise for what otherwise would be called a massive mafia.
GENERAL ELECTION 2022: PEOPLE TO CHOOSE BETWEEN THE CORRUPT, THE MOST CORRUPT AND THE WORSE
It is against such a sinister backdrop that people are being asked to go to the polls on 4 Mangsir (20 November). The two major parties are led by historically the most infamous old guards, NC’s Sher Bahadur Deuba and UML’s KP Sharma Oli. Then there is Prachanda, the one-time Maoist supremo, who, unlike the former two, has no stable base to call his “home district”. While the former two seem to have managed to keep their home-bound voter base more or less intact, Prachanda clearly has no such place to call his home constituency. Although he had spent the last few years cultivating Chitawan as his “home”, lately, a popular TV anchor, Rabi Lamichhane, had announced to take on Prachands headlong, and that was enough to scare the latter out of his wits, forcing him to flee to Gorkha to contest the election with the support and mercy of another Gorkha-based Maoist leader, Baburam Bhattarai, the two with the blood of some 18,000 fellow citizens slaughtered in their decade-long killing spree, erroneously called People’s War. Then, there is Madhav Kumar Nepal, who had split from the UML due to his failure to force Oli to go for “bhagbanda” or booty-sharing in the party.
Outside of these crooks, most party candidates in the fray carry no positive credentials to appeal to the voters too. With the exception of such candidates like RPP chair, Rajendra Lingden, who had the temerity to call a spade a spade and publicly brand fellow politicians as “thieves”, almost all candidates in the fray are known to have been corrupt. Even those relatively younger politicians — here we are not talking about the likes of 42-year-old British PM Rishi Sunak — who include those seen by some as “aashlagdo” (eliciting hope for the future) remain blatantly corrupt.
PERVASIVE CORRUPTION, BUT NOT AN ELECTION ISSUE
Directly resulting from the fact that almost all party candidates in the fray are known to be stinking corrupt crooks, one of the distinctive features of this Nepali version of the Westminster model is that no major party, other than the aforementioned RPP, has even mentioned corruption control as one of their agenda. In a country where just about every single politician is a corrupt man or woman and has collectively led to the whole government system being corrupt all the way down to the grassroots, the candidates, appealing for votes in the election, brazenly stay away from promising the voters about corruption control. In other words, although unsaid in so many words, they are telling the voters that you elect us again and we will once again go for all-out corruption, and to hell with national development or inclusive growth.
The unfolding scenario is thus for the repeat of unbridled and brazenly open political corruption that has characterized Nepal’s multiparty system from day one of its restoration in 1990.
The appeal of these undauntedly corrupt politicians this time around seems to read as follows: PLEASE VOTE FOR US AND HELP US INDULGE IN EVEN MORE CORRUPTION
In all fairness, it must be said that it is only the RPP that has a relatively well-articulated manifesto in that they clearly stand against corruption, want to do away with federalism and secularism, and restore monarchy as a much-needed countervailing force against the brazen waywardness of these corrupt politicians.
POPULAR ALIENATION AND THE EMERGING CAVALCADE OF INDEPENDENT CANDIDATES
For their part, the people of Nepal are sick and tired of this corrupt Westminster system and the nationwide corruption that it has spawned during the last three decades and more. This was in full view in the recently held local bodies’ election under which independent candidates trounced their high-profile party candidates in the mayoral races in the urban centres of Kathmandu, Dharan and Dhangadi. Of the three, Balen Shah in Kathmandu and Harka Sampang in Dharan remain the most talked about. For all practical purposes, their spectacular win as independents has demonstrated in no uncertain terms that these corrupt politicians have successfully managed to alienate people who are now willing to punish the former, given the slightest chance like the local bodies election.
Sensing this phenomenon rather correctly, there is now a new army of political enthusiasts who have since fielded their candidature as independents. It is so crowded that these independents would most likely cancel each other out in the end, thus surrendering the win to the same corrupt party candidates who could probably still count on the support of their registered cadres. Of the 165 constituencies for the FPTP election, a total of 2,142 candidates are in the race and this includes 867 independents. This works out to around nine party candidates and five independents per constituency. But they are not evenly distributed. For instance, Constituency Two in Kathmandu is reportedly being contested by as many as 20 independents. In any case, whoever wins in the end, he or she will do so with a miserable minority of votes, further undermining the very principle of popular representation in a democracy.
INDEPENDENTS TOO DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY STAND FOR
What makes this situation worse is that the independents themselves too do not seem to know how they would contribute to better management of state affairs in the event of their win in the election. Rabi Lamichhane for one has even organized these independents into a party of their own, an Independent Party. While the party candidates seem to have stolen the limelight in many constituencies, they, unfortunately, have done so under a slogan that remains fundamentally flawed in its logic. The point is, it says that they are there for “changing the awastha (or the hopeless situation of the country) and (emphatically) not byabastha (the system, or by extension, the rotten Westminster model).
However, in point of fact, the hopeless awastha the country has been condemned to live with all these years has been the direct outcome of the hopeless byabastha or the rotten Westminster model that has only spawned corruption and corrupt politics all these years.
The point is that given the perpetuity of the feudal order in Nepal — essentially characterized by a highly stratified social structure, little or no education, and acute and widespread poverty — people are simply unable to judge the ideological stance and performance of their representatives in the parliament and the government unlike in the Westminster in the UK. Instead, they are more easily swayed by mundane attractions — such as cash for votes, sumptuous meals with lots of meat and drink before the election, and so on. This then lays the foundation for blatant corruption by the politicians returning to power in the elections. A recent media report has it that the upcoming election will end up bringing some 60 billion rupees into circulation. Nepal’s Westminster democracy has thus been a vicious cycle: Corrupt politics breeding more and more gargantuan corruption.
In a few days, the new election too will be done, only to find that the country is once again back to square one, with the same corrupt politicians calling the shots for making more and more illicit money.
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