FEATURES NEWS THE RISING NEPAL (DAILY)

By Prakash Dahal

WHAT did Winston Churchill mean when he said, "Although democracy has its flaws, it is the least bad political system"? Did he mean, one can have rights to go berserk and sound belligerent to anyone, be it an individual or an institution, that doesn’t agree to your ways and style! Or, he meant that one can rig an election in the pluralistic democracy and uphold the doctrine ‘end justifies the means’. Or, he meant that one can coerce Judiciary to have decisions in one’s favour! Or he meant that in democracy, the more one can deceive the longer one has chances to survive!

System

The recounting of one of the Nuwakot constituency’s ballots loudly speaks that ballot boxes alone don’t ensure democracy. Elections, in fact, can help a given system appear democratic.

But, they alone can’t make a real democracy. What can make a system functionally democratic is the arrangement and an affordable access to provisions like freedom to chose, freedom to express oneself, rule of law and an independent judiciary whose verdict is upheld by all. And such provisions are supervised and monitored by judiciary and enforced by law.

It may be intriguing to judge Nepal by placing it within these democratic parameters.

The democratic indicators don’t sound that frustrating.

As for instance, unlike Putin’s democratic Russia, no private press is throttled in Nepal, though free press have mostly mortgaged their freedom only to perversely erode their credibility. They are free to write anything for which they are held accountable to none.

To many Nepalese, rule of law still remains a distant and deceptive phenomenon. At least half of the country’s 24.6 million people think that they are ruled not by law but by fate. Many can’t afford and those who can afford are hardly a law-fearing fellows. In Nepal, most of tax-dodgers/evaders are those who hold the silver spoon in their mouth.

Political thunderbolts have quite often struck the supposed-to-be an independent judiciary. No Court’s decisions on political issues have remained immune from controversy, igniting political protests. The supposed-to-be democratic politicians and political parties don’t only disagree but they make attempts to bully the Court, at times. There are cases where people remain largely skeptic towards the Court’s decisions which they think are not rationally built on evidences but might have been influenced.

Still, Nepal remains a democratic country by the definition of the Freedom House. Because, it has what they call freedom of speech ( speak any nonsense for which you are never held accountable!) , free press ( financially dependent press barter away freedom for petty personal gains), independent judiciary and rule of law.

And, still we are in the list of 120 or so countries which the American think tank agency likes to call democracies.

We have still been successful in hiding our 10 long years’ of follies under the smoke screen of optimism and we tell the world, "we are still in transition".

The problem with us is we are not democrats in deeds but by definition only. Earlier, we needed a democratic mask to hide our benighted behavior and anarchic attitude, and no sooner we had it the mask is torn and we are exposed.

By definition, we are indeed a democratic country because we have people’s assembly called House of Representatives, their members are chosen through ballots inserted into boxes. And, this is what perfectly appears to be democratic.

No Freedom House or any other custodians of democracy would ever care whether the ballots are earned by showering voters with largesse; are collected through strong-arms tactic; pork-barrel tactic; blackmailing or showering menace! No one is there to say no even if the electoral results are manipulated by means of money and muscle power, and the winner becomes loser and the loser winner as in the case of Nuwakot, in Nepal.

Constitutionally, the rule of law is very much there; but the agency enforcing laws have jaws without canines. They can tighten the noose around the neck of those who have no option other than holding their neck voluntarily, and the no-law-fearing fellows have necks bigger than the noose.

The Judiciary is there to monitor and supervise rule of law in our democracy.

Notwithstanding these, we are still comfortably a democracy.

But no, every cloud has a silver lining! And, in our case, the silver linings are visible around the clouds of Nuwakot. If only those silver linings could spread around the dark clouds looming large in other parts of the region, this might help our democracy to move along the right path. A positive symptom it is though, to discourage and to punish the caterpillars of democracy, this should be the beginning of the end of the ills infesting our ailing democracy.

Transformation

More of such precedents can only transform our democracy by definition into a democracy in deeds.

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