Pitfalls of Nepal’s Democracy

Nepalis are justifiably proud of their multi-party democracy which they claim to have achieved after a long struggle against an unjust, apathetic and authoritarian regime. In the political lexicography of post-partyless-Panchayat Nepal, the great change of 1990 and the attainment of multiparty democracy have become conterminous, although it is debatable how far that transformation involved different regions and sections of the population.

According to some impartial observers, popular participation in the Movement for Restoration of Democracy was more or less restricted to the capital, Kathmandu, and a few other cities. The rural masses of landless and subsistence farmers remained largely untouched. The cry for bahudaliya (partybased) against nirdaliya (partyless) democracy was elitist in class content, although it was to receive unprecedented response from the poorer strata of the urban population later on. To that extent, 1990 signalled the beginning of mass politics in the country.

However, the change was more significant because of the ideological conviction of the Nepali elite and intelligentsia that a political system controlled by Narayanhiti Royal Palace could never bring about structural reforms in the Nepali economy and society. In other words, a system that does not allow mobilisation of popular energy on the basis of organised public opinion cannot be expected to work for the benefit of the masses.

Back in 1972, Nepal´s well-known political scholar Rishikesh Shaha had written: "Political parties are the only effective means of formulating and presenting to government the demands of different sections of the people in the determination of policy and selecting candidates for public office. Thus, they serve as indispensable instruments of popular representation in the government and legislature. The party less system is a traditional system which cannot serve the needs of modern development."

Party politics of sorts certainly existed within the Panchayat system, but since parties in the sense of "an extension of politics in the modern form" were banned, such politics degenerated into factional intrigue, leg-pulling and personality clashes among the ruling Panchas.

Autocracy and Medievalism

Such a state of affairs was clearly unacceptable to the upcoming Nepali elite and intelligentsia, partly because it smacked of autocracy and medievalism and partly because of a deep-rooted conviction that a full fledged party-based parliamentary system alone could meet the desperate needs of a poor country.

It was thus that multi-party democracy came to be associated with a multiple of hopes and ideas. First, that it could make Nepal modem. Second, it brought accountability in government functioning. Third, it would usher in the processes of political modernisation for national reconstruction and development.

Today, more than half a decade after the 1990 movement, and four "people´s" governments later, are any of such "hopes and ideas" closer to fulfillment?

One fact is crystal clear: open, competitive politics in a parliamentary system has not ensured political stability. Nor has it brought about any end to factional politics as was seen in the Panchayati era. If anything, infighting and intrigues among factions have come to involve a larger number of people. Neither have personality clashes and unbridled lust for power seen the end of the day. G.P. Koirala´s Nepali Congress government fell because of personal rivalries among its top three leaders. The Communist Party of Nepal (United Marxist-Leninist) was toppled because of a marriage of convenience between the Nepali Congress and the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP), and the Communists, for their part, are leaving no stone unturned to encourage defection and pull down the present coalition government.

Nor has multi-party politics made public accountability any better. In 1980, newspapers widely reported the mystery disappearance of a ship carrying tens of millions rupees worth of goods which had been chartered by some of Kathmandu´s   biggest import-export business houses. The incident pointed at connivance at the highest levels of the Panchayat hierarchy, in which somebody somewhere made a great deal of money. Many such misdeeds of the Panchas (politicians of the Panchayat) gave rise to the belief that the party less system placed corruption "on the high pedestal of a new value of national life and culture".

But, if the Panchayat regime placed corruption on the high pedestal of "national culture", the multiparty system has gone a step further and popularised that "culture". In June 1996, a government-appointed panel named 175 business houses and commercial banks suspected of having sent out of the country two billion rupees worth of foreign currency against letters of credit without any goods having been imported. Several politicians and high government functionaries are suspected to be involved in the scam. This is just the latest in a series of corruption scandals that are appearing with an all-too-depressing regularity even as Nepal grapples with democratic politics. The trouble is that Nepalis had, and still harbour, exaggerated hopes on the capabilities of a transparent parliamentary system in removing corruption and associated evils. It is an open question why they could not see the ubiquitous criminal-politician nexus in India´s much-boasted "largest democracy in the world" and understand that Nepal was but a short hop away for such tendencies to register their presence.

Democracies of any type might be less oppressive than autocratic systems, but they also carry a built-in propensity for corruption, nepotism and dirty deals in public life. The only difference is that whereas such scandals under a dictatorship usually lead to its fall, in democracies they are treated as non-events. How else can the continuing faith in democratic governance be explained? In Panchayat times, it was believed that i) a lack of political commitment of the government and ii) a lack of proper understanding by the foreign aid donors about the "dynamics of poverty" were the chief causes of Nepal´s deep-rooted economic, social and cultural stagnation. But the introduction of "participatory democracy" and its accompaniment of political commitment, populist rhetoric and greater appreciation by external donors has changed nothing.

Kathmandu, nowadays, is awash with literature, sponsored and published by foreign foundations, suggesting ways and means for achieving democratic governance and poverty alleviation. Some recommend the Scandinavian model of the welfare state, others draw attention to pro-poor intervention in health and education, while yet others call for a bottom-up approach and decentralised decision-making. This is the new vocabulary Nepali politicians are learning by heart while the politicised members of the intelligentsia, on the other hand, find it useful to attach themselves to the NGOs who pay them enough to construct new houses in the capital´s congested suburbs.

Parasitic Elite

Who or what has benefitted, then, from Kathmandu´s new dispensation? Definitely not the country´s productivity, which has been registering a continuous decline. Nor members of the peasantry, who keep losing land, or whatever they own, to landlords and moneylenders. A 1991 World Bank report showed that 5 percent of the landowners control 40 percent of the cultivable land, while 60 percent own about 20 percent. Attempts to redistribute land in the Rapti Valley and elsewhere in the Tarai have failed, while the lack of access to resources has resulted in unequal distribution of assets of all kinds.

There has been no change in the behaviour of Nepal´s politicians, and instead there has sprung up since 1990 in Kathmandu a whole new class of parasitic elite.

Observes a Nepal Foundation for Advanced Studies (nefas) study published earlier this year: "The behaviour and attitude of the people are characterised by greed, corruption, inefficiency, rent-seeking and mismanagement of resources under their control while the poor which comprise a vast majority have virtually no participation in the process of governance even after the restoration of democracy (emphasis added)."

"Give! Give!"

Democracy is a halfway house between dictatorship and mobocracy. It is a device which a minuscule political class uses to abort popular revolution, which was also the case in Nepal in 1990. This class claims to act on behalf of the people in order to deceive—only, unlike erstwhile despots, members of the class are seldom caught. As for multiparty competition, little difference can be found in the practice and precepts of the political parties to give meaning to such competition.

The Congress wants democracy but refuses to set up its own house on a truly democratic basis. That became evident once more in the recent election for party presidentship, which was an eyewash merely to re-establish the preserves of its top leaders. "We too are democrats," boasted an RPP minister who was once a member of the notorious Back-to-the-Village Campaign in the old days, which was used to intimidate recalcitrant followers to toe the Panchayat line. "But," he qualified, "unlike the Nepali Congress, we keep nationalism in our soul." When I asked a top Communist leader about this, he replied, speaking for his party, "All we seek to achieve is a perfect symbiosis between democracy and Nepali nationalism."

Where lies the difference? Yet, the parties keep fighting and denouncing one another in a free-for-all competition for power.

"I am more and more convinced," wrote Abigail Adams to her husband John Adams, later President of the United States, in 1775, "that man is a dangerous creature; and that power, whether vested in many or a few, is ever grasping, and like the grave, cries ´Give, give!´"

Hence, MPs of all shades and parties support the move to "give" themselves brand new, imported cars for personal use, with import duties cancelled. There had once been a similar offer made by the Panchayat government of Marichman Singh to the political and administrative officialdom, hoping to entice them into supporting him. That was the government against which the people had revolted in 1990.

Meanwhile, the politics of jobbery, intrigue, and patronage has invaded every walk of life. Seeing the free-wheeling ways and loot of state resources by their political bosses, officials and others who run important institutions too have become lax, irresponsible or acquisitive. Government employees seldom go to their offices, teachers refuse to teach, and students prefer to stay outside classrooms. The Sixth Plan, it is said, failed because planning itself had taken a holiday. "Will the Eighth Plan succeed?" I asked a member of the present Planning Commission. "It may or it may not," he answered, "for, as yet, half the members do not read the papers they find on their table, and the other half do not understand what they read."

Meanwhile, Nepal´s external benefactors are happy. For they see what they want to see: a fledgling democracy sincerely at work in alas a very poor country!