King Gyanendra must be restored to lead the task of a historic revamp
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
NEPAL’S SICK DEMOCRACY
While most visiting American dignitaries are never tired of characterizing our sick democracy as “vibrant”, they, as the world superpower, must have their own reason for doing so in the process of managing the global chessboard of big and small nations towards the end designated by the White House.
However, for us, rank-and-file Nepalese, our political system has never been sicker.
Let us look at the few widely accepted indicators. First, the tradition of the largest party forming the government! The three biggest parties–the Nepali Congress (NC) with 88 seats in parliament, the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxists Leninists (CPN-UML) with 79 seats and the Maoist Centre (MC) with 32 seats, have been taking turns, mostly in ever-shifting coalitions, to preside over the government.
Since the last election in 2022, however, it has been the MC chief Pushpa Kamal Dahal, chair of the smallest of the three parties, who has anachronistically remained the prime minister all along by playing between the two mutually antagonistic parties vying for berths in the government. Mr. Dahal first became PM with UML support, then dumped it soon afterwards, ostensibly on Indian intervention in favour of NC, and recently dumped NC and allied with UML all over again.
Secondly, the reason such opportunistic and instantaneous shifts in alliances are possible is that their ideological differences are merely like, to quote a Nepali adage, “teeth of display of the elephant”, meaning the harmless protruding ivory tusks of the pachyderm, while it uses an invisible set of teeth for effective consumption. The common denominator of these parties is boundless corruption with impunity ensured by rigging the system by appointing their own men, often tainted too, in positions such as anticorruption watchdog bodies or even top police officials.
King Gyanendra at Patan Durwar Square on Monday, May 20.
While the NC officially claims to be social democratic, there is nothing that is “social” or “democratic’ about their performance. For instance, their first elected prime minister after the restoration of the multiparty system in 1990, Girija Prasad Koirala, now deceased, is most known for “institutionalizing corruption in the government” by legislating impunity provision for MPs that their prosecution for corruption required prior clearance from parliament.
Now, his illustrious successor, five times PM, NC president Sher Bahadur Deuba–so starved for resources as a student leader in Kathmandu some four decades ago that, as revealed by a civic personage recently, he shared the rented bedroom of his driver–remains the most spectacular rags-to-riches story. As revealed in the media, his young son in his 20s now owns property worth more than a billion rupees. Deuba as PM reportedly bartered everything for cash: appointments, promotions, contracts, ministerial berths, and election tickets in addition to cuts in the commissions other officials made.
The next major party is Marxist Leninist. But its unchanging chief of many years and two times PM is Mr KP Sharma Oli who has the distinction of being the mastermind of most major scams in recent years in the country, each worth billions, The latest is known as Girribandhu Tea Estate Land Swap scam reportedly worth over 100 billion. His glaring sense of impunity came in full display during Covid times when he as PM exonerated his corrupt health minister Bhanu Bhakta Dhakal in the massive medical purchase corruption scam, widely known as OMNI scam, by declaring that “there has been no corruption in this case because I declare it so”.
The third party in the troika is the Maoist Centre whose chief of some 30 years is Mr Pushpa Kamal Dahal “Prachanda’ who is the current prime minister and the former Supremo of India-aided armed insurgency that had killed 17,000 fellow citizens who included thousands of the cadres of the above two parties that have taken turns to hold Prachanda in close embrace for power and pelf to the complete neglect of the suffering and anguish of their bereaved relatives of those dead cadres.
Prachanda himself also stands accused of having defrauded the state treasury of several billion rupees in payment for Maoist combatants who never existed. And many of his fellow Maoist “comrades” are now in gold-smuggling business and a few of the young ones are even serving time in police custody. Even the sitting finance minister, himself another rags-to-riches story, is widely suspected of evidentiary links with the gold smuggling community.
Worth noting here is also the fact that all of these three “leaders” have legal cases of corruption standing against them mostly in the anti-corruption watchdog, the Commission for Investigation on Abuse of Authority (CIAA) for several years and they have remained non-starters ever since.
it has been regularly occurring and widely publicized events in Kathmandu that these party heads, who are invariably either in the government or in opposition in parliament, regularly come together mostly in the prime minister’s official residence to decide unanimously that none of their incriminating “files” shall be opened.
The UML and NC heads, the former heading the government about a decade ago and the latter heading the Opposition in parliament, had reportedly colluded in the sharing of the booty in the over-invoiced purchase of Airbus aircraft, now widely known as the Widebody scam.
While the people now hate these thugs with all their guts, come the general election, the choice is limited to these same scoundrels. In the last general election in 2022, all of these three corrupt politicos were returned with massive majorities, with millions and millions splurged to influence voters who too have become increasingly demanding in the knowledge that their precious votes only enable them to collect billions in new intake. Each of their votes apparently cost them thousands of rupees.
As things stand, just about every single politician is a corrupt man or woman in Nepal today. While there are many who made their debut in politics as “student” leaders, they have more to do with stone-throwing background than academic excellence, the reason being schools and colleges too have remained infected by this evil malaise of dirty politics in Nepal.
While the democracy gurus around the world tell us that democracy due to its provision of periodic elections is self-correcting. Not so in Nepal as described above. The same thugs get elected over and over again, making matters worse for the people with every passing election.
URGENT NEED FOR A TOTAL POLITICAL REVAMP BASED ON DOMESTIC EXPERIENCE
The main problem with our version of the Westminster system is that the electorate has failed to play its due role by refusing to elect the corrupt politicians who, more or less, buy them off with money.
Given the lack of education, widespread poverty, the persistence of feudal order and ethnic loyalties, secular and informed judgment has eluded the voters all along.
King Mahendra had laid out a reasonable experimental alternative in the form of a party-less Panchayat System in 1960 that he himself had borrowed from the then erudite socialist politician in India, Jay Prakash Narayan, who in 1958, already disenchanted with India’s own working of Westminster system, had written his widely read and criticized “Plea for the Reformulation of Indian Polity” in which he had propounded five tiered Panchayat System that organically rises from village-based panchayats, or self-governing councils. King Mahendra adapted it to what he thought was Nepal’s unique conditions then: the unavoidable role of the monarchy as the experimenter of the new democracy and keeping the system off from the evil effects of multiparty corrupt politicians.
The scorecard has been mixed for this unique experimentation that ended in 1990, more due to India’s retribution to Nepal for refusing to “Bhutanize” itself, i.e. to exist as its protectorate. However, while it lasted, for the first time, the nationwide network of village panchayat was established and sent representatives through district and zonal tiers to the national parliament, the National Panchayat. While inspired by King Mahendra’s call for national reconstruction, the Panchayat cadres, or the Panchas were a dedicated lot. but they too eventually became corrupt, although not the billionaires of today. When they stank too much, the king had a way of plucking them off.
However, the system’s singular achievement was its further evolution leading to the devolution of authority to the new institution of User Groups at the grassroots in which the users themselves of any development initiative participated decisively. Its most successful versions today are the ubiquitous network of Forest User Groups that turned the once-denuded forests of Nepal into most luxuriant woodlands that generated massive resources for local development in the communities.
Similarly, the nationwide network of Mothers’ Groups and their female community health volunteers catapulted Nepal as the top performer in the world of UN Millennium Development Goals in Child Survival and Maternal Mortality Rate Reduction in 2015.
The one single lesson of these success stories has been that in the persistently traditional social order of Nepal what works for good governance is that the people themselves at the grassroots must be empowered and that alone, like in the case of the forest and mothers’ groups, will see the back of the corrupt thugs that today masquerade as members of most local palikas.
What it would essentially mean in practical terms is that once the people themselves at the grassroots are empowered, it would create a new compulsion in the communities all across the country for the corrupt politicians of today to reincarnate themselves as accountable and transparent leaders dedicated for the cause of inclusive advancement in the communities. Otherwise, they are out, and these local high-caste elites cannot afford that.
The problem with the current constitution is that it, as it turns out, was written by an Indian consultant working in disguise in the UNDP and adopted by poorly educated or uneducated politicians crowding the 600-strong so-called constituent assembly. It was never based on the long experience that Nepal had already accumulated in state restructuring since 1951.
In order to make sense of our constitution based on our own successful experiences, what we need is a total revamp of our India-imposed federal order.
RESTORING KING GYANENDRA TO LEAD THE REVAMP
The revamp is not going to come on its own. It will have to be negotiated by an authority that enjoys the unconditional support of most people in the country. As has been in evidence all along, it is King Gyanendra who enjoys that support. The most impressive manifestation of this support had come a year ago in Dashain when the king went to pay homage to the Taleju deity in Bhaktapur. It was planned as a routine pilgrimage. But when the people of Bhaktpur found out that the king was visiting, the entirety of the Bhaktapur Durbar Square was filled with people, waiting to greet him. Nothing could be more spontaneous. Compared to it, the massive crowd that greeted him at Patan Durbar Square on his pre-announced visit on Monday (May 20, 2024) was only to be expected.
The Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) is the only political party that has the restoration of monarchy as its topmost agenda. But beyond that, it says nothing as to how the political ills of the nation are to be alleviated.
Therefore, the RPP must draw up a detailed outline of how Nepal’s polity was to be reformulated based on the nation’s experience of the last seven decades or more. They must commit to empowering people in the communities to manage their own affairs all across the board and restructure the governance system upwards so that the representatives at all levels find themselves structurally forced to remain accountable to their constituency below.
This new outline must be nationally deliberated. Once it seems to enjoy widespread acceptability, the RPP must go on the new offensive to enlist the support of all sections of society like teachers, businessmen and as necessary, police and the army to execute this revamp including the restoration of monarchy. Only King Gyanendra can be the authority to lead this new national campaign for Nepal’s rejuvenation.
This would further require taking immediate neighbors, India and China, into confidence as also the major world powers like the UN, US and the EU. Luckily, RPP has enough intellectual resources to lead this international foray too.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.
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