Amidst India’s policy of creating “controlled instability”, it is America’s double standard that is ultimately at fault
By Bihari Krishna Shrestha
NEPAL’S PERMANENT ZOMBIE DEMOCRACY
While the term, zombie, comes from Haitian folklore and signifies a dead body reanimated through various magical methods “but without human qualities”, “zombie democracies” are understood as “the living dead of electoral political systems, recognizable in form but devoid of any substance” under which “their leaders are indifferent to the publics they pretend to serve.”
Clearly, Nepal, qualifies as one such zombie democracy in the world. Briefly put, almost all of its politicians are corrupt with those at the top being the most corrupt historically. It is not that politicians are corrupt in their individual capacities; they are corrupt as organized entities too.
There is no other way to explain the fact that while the top three politicians of Nepal today–Nepali Congress (NC) president Sher Bahadur Deuba, the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxist Leninist (CPMN-UML, or briefly, just UML) president K.P. Sharma Oli and Maoist Centre (MC) president Pushpa Kamal Dahal, Prachanda–count among the three most brazenly corrupt historically, they also happen to enjoy a huge following in their parties that shields them from any possible threat to their position and to their continued penchant for more and more corruption.
While some concerned individuals or victims themselves have lodged one or more complaints of corruption against them in the anti-corruption watchdog, the Commission for Investigation of Abuse of Authority (CIAA), that body, while being constitutionally very powerful and autonomous, has yet to act on them all these years for the simple reason that it is almost always headed by the officials hand-picked by these very corrupt politicians. As a result, several such appointees too have had a history of being corrupt themselves. While the current incumbent happens to be one such tainted person, there have been others who have even served time in jail for corruption
The currently stalled cases of gargantuan corruption include what is known as the fake Bhutanese refugees scam that has been aided and abetted by the home ministry under the previous administration under UML chief, KP Sharma Oli. Hundreds of gullible people were swindled of several million rupees each for the presumed opportunity to make it to the United States under the garb of Bhutanese refugees. Several top politicians, and in a few cases, their wives too, including the wife of a former prime minister, reportedly made tens of millions of rupees each from this scam.
While the three scammers and many top colluding officials and senior politicians, including a few former ministers, are currently in judicial custody, it had resulted due to the irrepressible professionalism of a few senior police officers who initiated action on the large pile of complaints lodged by the victims. They got the ball rolling during the few hours of a power vacuum in the Nepal Police when the incumbent inspector general had retired and his successor was still to be sworn in. The case remains stalled just now due to the fact that many more of these powerful corrupt politicians could clearly be implicated.
Then, there is another case of government land embezzlement known as Lalita Nivas land scam under which two former prime ministers are clearly implicated but remain scot-free due to the support of the current government.
One social media posting in the recent past has alleged that the previous UML government had committed 39 different major scams involving a sum of 2000 to 3000 billion rupees during its two years in office.
As alleged by the parliament’s Public Accounts Committee this week, every single minister in the government views their time in office only as the opportunity to make illicit money exclusively. As things stand, Nepal’s political class just now remains the composite of thieves, dacoits, smugglers and murderers. Prime Minister himself has the blood of 17,000 fellow citizens on his hand who were slaughtered during a decade-long so-called Maoist insurgency launched from his command and control center in India and is now doing everything possible to escape transitional justice.
The tragedy for Nepal and the Nepalese is that these same corrupt thugs are returned to power over and over again during the “democratic” elections that are held every five years or earlier. As a matter of fact, the story of multiparty democracy in Nepal has been a story of brazen corruption from day one of its restoration in 1990. The first elected prime minister late GP Koirala has the historic distinction of being the first one to institutionalize corruption in the government. While democracy is believed to be self-correcting, it is not so in Nepal. Come general elections, these politicians splurge their purse in vote buying from predominantly rural voters who are mostly poor and uneducated.
Democracy therefore remains a vicious cycle that returns to power politicians who are increasingly ferociously corrupt with every new election. While the people are sick and tired of these corrupt politicians and their parties, they remain largely helpless and have no way to effect any change in it. Nepal’s democracy remains a zombie in its innate character.
The result of such a corrupt and murderous democracy is that Nepal remains a chronically impoverished country. While the world average of GDP stood at about 12,703 USD per capita in 2022. GDP in Nepal was only USD 1,337 per capita, making it one of the chronically impoverished in the world. Nepal, a land-scarce mountain country, continues to have the most people (62%) in agriculture, although the sector’s contribution to national GDP is a minuscule 23.95 percent in 2022, suggesting massive un- and underemployment in the economy. While the latest consumption-based data show that the population below the poverty line has decreased to 20.27 percent in 2023, much of this is fuelled by ballooning remittance receipts from abroad. Some 2.1 million predominantly male workforce is estimated to be working abroad, thus robbing the economy of the crucial advantage of demographic dividend, and that is most likely to doom Nepal’s prospects for economic growth permanently. This is what corrupt democratic politics has done to Nepal.
INDIA MAKES MATTERS WORSE WITH ITS POLICY OF ‘CONTROLLED INSTABILITY”
Geographically, landlocked Nepal sits between two major world giants, India and China with the former more predatorily involved in its internal affairs historically. For instance, India has so far clamped three prolonged blockades against Nepal and, as indicated earlier, had even sheltered, aided and abetted Maoist terrorism that cost the lives of 17,000 innocent Nepalese. One of India’s former ambassadors to Nepal has written in his recent book that India’s policy is to keep Nepal destabilized all the time through its policy of “controlled instability”.
While India too remains a poor country– the “biggest contributor to increased world poverty in 2023” according to the World Bank and the hungriest country in South Asia according to the latest World Hunger Index– given its superpower psyche, its relationship with all its neighbors remains largely hegemonic in character. All of Nepal’s corrupt politicians today remain friends of India. Nepal does not control its own politics. The introduction of republicanism displacing centuries-old monarchy a decade and a half ago too has been the handiwork Indian predators in Delhi.
AMERICA’S DOUBLE STANDARD IN THE PROTECTION OF DEMOCRACY AND IT’S UNWELCOME IMPACT ON NEPAL
While major powers of the world have almost always chosen to forget Nepal–leaving India more space for its hegemonic designs on the landlocked neighbor–except when talking about the only Himalaya on this planet, lately, this relatively small country sandwiched between China and India too has figured more frequently and prominently on America’s diplomatic radar due to latter’s “Pivot to Asia” policy that has evolved into its China-targeted Indo-Pacific Strategy in which the superpower seeks to recruit Nepal as a partner too.
Given Nepal’s own position as soft underbelly as much for China as for India, there would be limits on how much it can be drawn into the IPS vortex. However, what irks thinking Nepalese by the uncalled-for and irresponsible flattery of Nepal as a “vibrant democracy” by the burgeoning ranks of high-level US visitors to the country.
America even welcomed Maoist Prachanda who is escaping transitional justice with open arms a few years ago, whereas it refuses to even talk to other victimized groups using terror tactics to make themselves heard.
This has several unintended consequences that are unbecoming for Nepal. First, it tends to extend legitimacy to the corrupt thugs at the helm in Nepal, emboldening them further in their evil pursuit, and secondly, discourages the thinking public who are questioning the suitability of the Westminster model for this traditional backwater that is Nepal.
Equally consequentially, it relieves America–otherwise, the North Star for most democracies around the world–of its moral and intellectual responsibility for helping Nepal (and most other democratically struggling countries) to seek alternative options to strengthen and deepen democracy in its society.
This is where America is seen as adopting a double standard when it comes to its perceived democratic backsliding in its own country. For instance, Samantha Power, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development and former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, had in 2014 emphatically observed in her Commencement address to Harvard Kennedy School of Government graduates that “Democracy wins out in the long run because it offers a chance to fix its own mistakes. It is the only system built on the premise that if something is not working people can actually correct it, from the bottom up”.
However, with the onset of the US administration under its 45th president, Donald J. Trump in 2016, concerns about democratic decay in America had quickly grown from a trickle to a torrent. The long-held premise that democracy is self-correcting came under increasingly critical scrutiny.
After four years of the Trump administration (2016-2020), Fionna Hill, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council then, wrote in the Foreign Affairs magazine (November/December 2021), “As many Americans learned during Trump’s presidency, no country, no matter how advanced, is immune to flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions…Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention.”
What is even more noteworthy is that America’s academia too shared this concern within two years of Trump in the White House. Based on extensive research of America and a few Latin American countries, two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt authored a book in 2018, aptly and despairingly titled, How Democracy Dies (New York: Broadway Books), and characterized Trump as an “autocrat in becoming”. The authors argue that “in our time, democracies still die but by different means, less at the hand of men with guns and more by elected leaders”.
The authors used two concepts as the “guardrails of democracy” namely mutual tolerance and institutional forbearance. they defined mutual tolerance as the “acceptance of political rivals as legitimate competitors and leaders, so long as they abide by the law” and Institutional forbearance as “the idea that politicians exercise restraint over their power, resisting the temptation to act in a way that violates the “spirit” of the law, even if their actions are technically legal’. They contended that under Trump, those guardrails were compromised and that signified the possibility of leading democracy to its end.
But looking at it from the perspective of Nepalese own experience, Trump in Kathmandu would hardly be any cause for concern at all, not even remotely. After all, unlike his counterparts in Nepal, President Trump was not involved in gold smuggling, nor human trafficking in the guise of Bhutanese refugees, not even in colluding with Lockheed Martin to artificially inflate the price of F-35 stealth fighter jets to make illicit money for himself.
Time for America to be honest with itself! It must stop calling Nepal a vibrant democracy and if possible, help this longtime friend across the globe in the Himalayas in its quest for a genuine democracy under which politicians are transparent and accountable to the electors and delivers. After all, Nepal and America are also the two oldest countries on this planet, Nepal, born in 1768, predates America by just eight years.
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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