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Qualified Democracy
Although democracy does not need adjectives, nobody understands the reason behind Nepalese intellectuals’ and politicians’ love for qualified democracy
By KESHAB POUDEL
Democracy has a universal definition as it does not need any adjectives to qualify it. Interestingly, Nepalese intellectuals and politicians, who have experiences of living under a democratic system with an adjective of party less, seem to suffer from its hangover.
In the last few years, Nepalese have seen one or other forms of democracy with adjective in front like people’s democracy, party less democracy, guided democracy and monarchical democracy.
“Our struggle is for complete democracy or Loktantra. Civil society has launched the agitation nationwide to achieve it,” said Krishna Pahadi, a rights activist. Under the support of the followers of People’s Democracy, Nepalese civil society members want a new form of democracy with some adjective.
Although the democratic system has already been restored, the intellectuals still pursue the terms like inclusive democracy, complete democracy and full-fledged democracy. “As the democratic system is itself an inclusive system, there is no need to prove it as an inclusive,” said professor Dr. Surya Subedi, who teaches at Leeds University in the United Kingdom .
As democratic system consists of certain basic elements like sovereignty of people, freedom of expressions and so forth, democracy always comes as a complete system. When present constitution was formulated following People’s Movement of 1990, the leaders of that period, time and again, declared that the constitution of Kingdom of Nepal 1990 carried the elements of complete democracy.
“During that time, critics of Panchayat system were very correct to say that the democracy qualified by added adjectives do not remain complete democracy. So they avoided this word in the constitution. People have very short memory of facts and events.
Again the same debate is here and expectations have arisen that the new constitution will bring out Complete Democracy that is Loktantra in popular term. Most of the rigged and perverted forms of democracy have always high sounding adjectives like people’s democracy, guided democracy, grass root democracy, party less democracy and so on and so forth,” said a political analyst. “Whenever superfluous and high sounding adjectives are added with the democracy, that itself is a curtailment of the essence of democracy. The present euphoria is for the Loktantra that is in usual term a democracy. But a concept is being popularized that Loktantra will be more democratic than Prajatantra which is also a democracy, popularly understood by the people since the revolution of 1951.”
After all why play with words when both carry the same meaning except some narrow minded prejudice, no one has logical answer to it. But the leaders do not agree. “Loktantra is different than the Prajatantra,” said Nepali Congress general secretary Ram Chandra Poudel.
As B.P Koirala said, “To be very clear, my concept of democracy is democracy as it used to be understood in the nineteenth century – liberal democracy. This means that there are three basic elements of democracy. One is that the people have democratic rights- freedom of expression, freedom of organization, freedom of the press, and freedom of conscience so that people can practice whatever religion they want. Briefly, civil liberties. The second feature of democracy is that sovereignty of the state belongs to the people of the nation as a whole; the administration of the state should be in the hands of the representatives of the people. This means that government must be formed on the basis of widest franchise, and the government should be responsible to the parliament that is elected by the people. And the third feature of democracy is the judiciary must be independent.” B.P. Koirala said this in his interview to associate editor Theodore Jacgueney of prestigious US magazine World View in 1977.
Although B.P. Koirala had clear idea about democracy, his followers - who want to worship his portrait to lure the people at the time of elections - are yet to understand the basic principles of democracy.
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