Governance Issue
Duty Of Political Parties

By Mukti Rijal

LAST week a national daily brought forth some interesting news concerning shadier and brighter sides of the activities at the local level. The positive side of the story has been the gains achieved by the forestry user groups at Banke where they have been able to help support infrastructure upgrading works at the local level. According to the news report, the Jyoti Community Forestry User Group has supported road graveling work and extended cooperation to the activities relating to sports promotion and cultural heritage protection. Moreover, the group is engaged in the tasks to further social mobilisation and development. The self help group has thus demonstrated an example to show how local initiatives and formations can contribute towards community development.

However, there are some news that shed light on the increasing incidences or irregularities at the local level. A news tells about the questionable activities of the technical personnel at Bara district. They, in connivance with school headmasters, embezzled funds allocated for construction works to upgrade and maintain local schools. The fund was provided under the Primary Education Promotion Project.

The local administration has remanded the alleged personnel into custody for further investigation.

A similar story highlighting the irregularity in the selection of local contractors at the instance of Sindhuli District Development Committee is published in the vernacular newspaper. According to the news report, the DDC has carried out haphazard selection of the contractors without regard to the basic criteria set for the selection. Likewise, another news item is critical of the Village Development Committees at Janakpur. The local bodies are accused of not carrying out a minimum of functions to help mitigate concerns and difficulties of the local people. They have compounded problems of local people neglecting basic functions as certifying deaths, births and vital events.

These extracts of the news items may be contested for their veracity and objectivity, but there have been the cases of mismanagement at the local level. The cases of fund embezzlement and misappropriations can be found in the local bodies, line agencies and donor funded projects. However, going into further details one can find that the cases of fund misuse and mismanagement do occur relatively more in line agency offices and donor funded projects. Though the cases of fund mismanagement at the local government institutions are treated very sensitivity and often blown out of proportion due to political or other reasons, it is fair to assume that such cases are less in the local bodies than in the line agency apparatuses. The reason is simple. The local bodies are popularly elected institutions and they are accountable to the people.

The elected representatives have every reason to abstain from committing misuse of the resources because this damages not only the individual reputation but also the image of the political party they belong to. There is, though not very effective, a mechanism at the local bodies - VDCs, DDCs and Municipalities-to provide checks and balance as a result of which elected bodies have to be transparent and responsible. Moreover, the Public Accounts Committee envisaged in the law is getting into function in local government institutions that can effectively scrutinise the arrears and irregularities. The opposition political groups and civil society organisations active at the local level tend to expose the cases of misuse of resources. The democratically elected institutions are, thus, always subject to popular scrutiny and checks as a result of which less scope exists for corruptions and malfeasance.

Political parties have greater stakes at local politics. The ruling Nepali Congress, and the main Opposition Party CPN (UML) and the National Democratic Party (RPP) have formed party department to look after the affairs of the local government. The departments especially look after the local government affairs and formulate party response to decentralisation and local self governance policy. Moreover, the departments are active to train the elected functionaries and make them effective in enhancing their performance.

In the write ups published in the Village Voice - a mouth piece of the National Association of VDCs in Nepal (NAVIN) Shiv Raj Joshi, Chief of the Nepali Congress Local Body Department and Rajendra Pandey, Chief of the Local Body Department of the UML have set forth policy and approach of the respective to make decentralisation process effective. Similarly, Rabindra Nath Sharma Chief of the local body department of the National Democratic Party has provided some categorical and fortheight observations on the issues relating to decentralisation and local self governance.

The national parties are sensitive to maintain fair play at the local bodies and promote tenets of good governance. Parties have initiated to impart training and orientations to the functionaries of local governments so that they produce competitive results to enhance popularity. This is good omen for the decentralisation and good governance strengthening process in the country.

Progressive Movement In Indian Literature

By Dr. Shreedhar Gautam

SOCIALIST realism is taken as the most important development of realism in the twentieth century. Maxim Gorky, who is generally viewed as the founder of socialist realism, played an exceptional role in furthering the literary movement which grew into a powerful and multifaceted phenomenon known as socialist realism. The main feature of socialist realism is its insistence that literature and politics are all of a piece, with literature providing a vision of a future socialist reality. It believes that politics cannot be separated from literature and treats the form of development and the changing form of truth as a part of struggle and picture of tomorrow.

Major Role

The doctrine of socialist realism found a receptive audience among Indian writers in the mid 1930s, and later developed into a Progressive Movement which played a major role during the freedom movement under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi. Indian socialist-realist writers of the time portrayed their protagonists repudiating the caste and communal differentiation which constituted two of the most pervasive and deep-rooted social phenomenon existing in the country for many decades. The heroes are shown battling to remove all social and religious barriers to a classless society. These protagonists identify themselves with the cause of peasants and workers just like followers of Gandhi did during the freedom struggle.

Indian progressive writers had a wide range of political, social, and economic issues. Many of these writers concerned themselves with progressive topics and became enamoured of Marxist ideology in the 1930s, and 1940s.

Ahmed Ali, Sajjad Zaheer and Mulk Raj Anand are regarded as the founding figures of Indian progressivism. They all were interested in reviving literature and arts and relating them to life. Zaheer and Anand were influenced by Marxist political thought, and they were well acquainted with the contemporary events on the European political and cultural front as they had stayed in London during the 1930s. To them the Soviet model seemed to provide a more suitable alternative than the Western capitalist model. Mulk Raj Anand's first two novels Untouchable and Coolie published during the 1930s came as the outcome of crisis of consciousness experienced throughout the world during the inter-war years.

In the meantime, an Indian Progressive Writer's Association was formed in London in late 1934 with the encouragement of British leftist as Ralph Fox. There were two versions of the manifesto, though both called for a progressive approach to Indian literature.

The Association had to face certain hurdles as some of the writers from upper-caste, or orthodox families, were opposed to the progressivism and socialist realism. Though there were very genius writers like Yashpal from Hindi language, the movement had become the property of Western educated writers. Unlike, Zaheer, Ali and Anand, Yaspal received his training inside a prison, and started writing only in the late 1930s, after his release. Another Indian writer in English, Harindranath Chattopadhya wrote five plays during the 1930s, of which one was dedicated to the Progressive Writers of India.

With the breaking out of war in Europe in 1939, the Indian progressive found themselves in a fix when they were asked by the communist parties to support an imperialist government in the wake of Hitler's armies attacking the then Soviet Union. By 1942 a significant number of socialist realist writers dissociated themselves from progressive movement when they refused to toe the party line. Moreover, Indian progressive writers had more liberty to leave the movement at their will as they had chosen to write in the tradition of socialist realism only as they were so inclined to a situation far different from the Soviet Union during those days. They could also stray too far in one's interpretation of progressivism. It was for this reason that the late Urdu writer Ismal Chuglai characterised the famed fifteenth century poet and mystic Kabir as a progressive writer because he was a weaver by trade and expressed a feeling for the masses in his poetry.

After the war's end, the independence loomed on the horizon and on 15 August 1947, India was partitioned into two nations causing untold carnage in large areas of North India, as Hindus and Muslims scrambled to reach safe territory. All this affected the literary situation, and the progressive writers suddenly found themselves divided and uprooted. The emotional effects of the sudden independence, partition, and communal strife had profound effects on the psyches of these writers.

After 1947, the Progressive Movement received a jolt as the writers had to find other concerns for their writing. Some writers became disillusioned with the Soviet Union's ideology after seeing it in practice on its own soil, others were taken aback by the Sino-Indian conflicts of 1950, and the rift between two communist giants, Russia and China. Moreover, some of the progressive writers were still status conscious despite their professed ideology of equality because of their family background. These factors weakened the Progressive Movement and with the passage of time, many writers who had been fiery in the early 1930s were by the late 1950s aging or deceased. By 1950s the Movement had become a mere shadow of its former self and many of the writers of this movement were condemned for their allegedly selling out the ideology for the sake of money. But unlike in Pakistan, this movement didn't face the government repression rather it was allowed a more lingering demise.

Now in India the socialist realism is no longer the potent literary force that it once was, but it has definitely left its mark on contemporary literature. Now Indian writers cannot afford to close their eyes to their social environment and to the problems of man as a whole. This achievement is not insignificant when one considers the lengthy tradition of "art for art's sake" in literature. There is perceptible evidence of contribution made by Progressive Movement in poetry, drama and novel.

Experimental

The progressive writers certainly opened up new experimental directions and showed their concern to the sorrowful fate of working class people and women in Indian society. They powerfully explained that no woman could be expected to remain virtuous if her family continued starving. What they meant was that if power and money could lead to corruption, helplessness and poverty also could lead to desperation. In fact, the progressives were trying to make an important point, and they have left a considerable literary legacy attesting to it.