By Shashi P.B.B. Malla
For quite some time now, but especially since K.P. Sharma Oli took over the reigns of government, Nepal’s entire political system was under attack from several quarters of Nepali society.
If they did not agree on many things, they did on one: that the Himalayan Republic had become rotten to the core.
Money is the root of all evil, and the party leaders and their underlings became the Mammon’s slaves.
The monarchist’s movement was the vanguard of the protests for change, but they failed to highlight that the reform of democracy was the main agenda, and the restoration of Constitutional Monarchy came second.
People were questioning the whole system established after the ancient Nepali monarchy was abolished and a so-called new system dominated by people’s democracy – Loktantra came into being.
Unfortunately, the new Constitution contained the seeds of its own destruction.
Nepal has had various constitutions, and even the current one is not sacrosanct. The younger generation has demanded the complete overhaul of the prevailing political dispensation and even the scrapping of the prevailing Constitution.
In fact, according to the Constitution, Sushila Karki, as a former chief justice, could not – legally and constitutionally – have been appointed as the interim Prime Minister.
But circumstances and the needs of a crucial emergency demanded that the letter and spirit of the law be circumvented.
For all intents and purposes, the 2015 Constitution is no longer functioning as intended, and should, therefore, not only be suspended, but scrapped.
It should not be difficult for the new legislature to formulate a new basic ‘Law of the Land’ that incorporates all the new and relevant features.
The constitution-formulating process should be intimately accompanied by political participation of the people upwards from the grassroots level and include the district level.
Until a new constitution comes into being, the federal structure should also be dismantled and the vital question of the future state structure should be decided by the people in a referendum.
We cannot also skirt the lingering questions of the Hindu State and Constitutional Monarchy – after all these were and remain the basic ingredients of Nepali identity.
The framers of the 2015 Constitution arrogantly and imperiously did not deem it necessary to request the people for the abolition, but did so at the behest of a foreign power.
This time around, it is essential that the people be asked in a referendum whether they want the Hindu Constitutional Monarchy to be restored.
The protagonists would have to convince the people that it is the symbol of national unity that the federal president – a creature of the political parties – can never aspire to be.
The Hindu Constitutional Monarch would also be an independent arbiter in political crises, and the supreme protector of the nation’s sovereignty and territorial integrity as the Army’s commander in chief.
In this connection, it is relevant to point out that when the recent troubles erupted, the Federal President did not immediately mobilize the Army, when the then political establishment rained mayhem on the innocent people.
It was the Army chief Gen. Ashok Raj Sigdel who acted independently and averted a catastrophe.
Therefore, it would be opportune for Ram Chandra Poudel to gracefully bow out and make place for a younger colleague.
He is also a creature of the old regime and does not fit into the new order of things.
On the other hand, the Hindu Monarch would be a glorious past resurrected into the future!
The writer can be reached at: shashimalla125@gmail.com
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