Nuggets of Nepali Political Culture

-Dev Raj Dahal

“...every Nepali of the present lives a vicarious existence, with the atavistic urges for political power and economic security and feels strongly that political rivalries among the political elite today are no less pronounced than they were two centuries ago.”  Mahesh C. Regmi

The beauty of this paragraph is that it precisely encapsulates the dominant character of Nepali citizens, both elites and the mass, their feeling and motivation. The pity of this is that vicarious existence of the citizens has an effect exactly opposite to the one intended for the modern visions of democracy and human rights. This pity has become an indivisible part of nation’s corporate identity. Unless Nepali citizens become capable of transcending the native tendencies of elite rivalry for political power regardless of national purpose, economic insecurity of the citizens continues to hit their participation in public affairs affecting their attitude and cultural formation. Once people tolerate their vicarious existence as a part of their fate, they imbibe them into their norms, values, ideas and beliefs. Political culture thus evolves as one aspect of the total culture of society.

Culture is not something quite different from politics. An excessive focus on this distinction amounts to be an error of social scientists. For politics to be wholly distinct from the cultural universe, the everyday life of the public would have to be purely spectator, which sounds absurd and, in any way, absolutely untenable. Citizens socialized in a political and cultural context sanskritik parivesh is not something individual, they reflect the consciousness of entire society, a world-view of their own, in which they participate and develop certain knowledge, values, attitudes, beliefs and orientation towards public and political life. Hence, the cultural milieu is important for a realistic conception of the art of politics, its roots, essence and directions. Culture is the determinant of systems of human social interaction. In this sense, the conditions of social interaction clench special meaning in determining culture formation and character building.

A good number of Nepali social scientists think that there has been no change in the culture of power orientation even after the change of so many regimes in Nepal. As political leaders wage a daily battle for media attention, the public increasingly views them as thalu, a non-productive class, which is driven by a vested interest in access to power in the state and the economy. Political class and elite of a society use formal honor to reproduce a system of inequality and exercise their prestige as a process of social control.

Once elected, they are submerged into the materiality of the state power and their politics set them free to ignore the popular aspirations. This is why two-thirds of the Nepali citizens are terribly consigned into dehumanized life almost deprived of any opportunity to participate in public affairs. An acceleration of the process of hunger, disease, earlier death, degeneration of children and many human-induced misfortunes continues to overwhelm their social security, national pride and self-dignity. A lack of advances in functional literacy, access to media and awareness of issues and events thus reflects an image of the photographic print of a social and economic negative. Under such conditions, feelings of psychological inferiority among the citizens have become intensely personal resulting in the formation of a culture of silence. This is diluting the sense of national identity.

On the contrary, party intellectuals and leaders often stalk a claim that the existing constitutional innovation is one of the best instruments of governance that has established a basic framework of democratic institutions. Perhaps, true. But it poses a question quite literally: are political actors acting in the direction of what the constitution visualizes? The ferocious competition among various political parties has polarized the public institutions, such as judiciary, education and bureaucracy and undermined their neutrality in decision-making in the interest of public. Good or bad governance is defined by the ethical qualities of the holders of power, not only by the forms of the constitution. The unfolding of harsh culture of dependency, debt and inequality led to the dis-empowerment of citizens. Grassroots pressure for democratization is suppressed. Major parliamentary political parties are deviating themselves from the real issues, conventionally held images and political identities as well as from the classical ideals of civic life and public realm. By seeking votes in the name of ethnicity, caste, region and religion, politicians have made citizens conscious on these lines and helped define them accordingly.

As a result, the political commitments of citizens are tempered by multiple identifications and loyalties to a complex set of institutions--political party, interest group, caste, class, language, region, religion, ethnic community, gender, etc. Multiple loyalties have proved to be an inordinate burden to citizens to construct a strong sense of nationhood as the foundation stone of a civic culture. In such an excessively complex society with individuals and groups pursuing a wide range of identifications and goals unconscious citizens are always tempted to involve in the politics of expediency. The problems, therefore, lies in evolving a stable pattern of national identity among the Nepali citizens that do not contest with their emotive loyalties to parochial units. National cohesiveness, the desire of the people to live together and inclusiveness of national identity, gives the citizens a stake in the polity that they are willing to protect. The way the democratic polity is being managed, developed and adapted, therefore, becomes a matter of enormous significance. The style of governance fundamentally affects the dynamics of political culture.

Until the political change of 1950, people’s participation in the governance did not exist. There was no parliament or assembly to sustain any conception of representative democracy except the appointment of the power holder from the bhardar and Rana ruling families. After the democratic change civic power was captured by new elite while the state power stayed with the old elite, enhanced after 1960, by an enormous boost to its efficacy, if not legitimacy. Nepal’s enduring pattern of evolutionary authoritarianism and economic autarky, especially after the collapse in living standards surged ahead, even after the assumption of legislative power by people themselves in 1990 and began to take a course of its own. Critics believe that multiparty has been confined to a set of mechanism just for leadership selection than democratization and devolution of power. And yet, there is not a sense of collective guilt in the political leadership for having done something wrong to the nation and the people. This lack of sense has foreclosed any prospect for reform in their attitude and behavior. As a result, widespread public despair about the nation’s future has taken hold.

The question as to whether all the Nepali people have become constituent unit of legislative power is abstract one for the notion of legislation in Nepal is associated with the process of representation and decentralization rather than possessing direct legislative power by the people. The first-past-the-post system of election has established the hegemony of majority rule rather than distribution of power to all, a sort of non-zero sum process. The inviolability of the fundamentals of the constitution, such as human rights of citizens, parliamentary system, constitutional monarchy and multi-party democracy stipulates that sovereignty lies with the people and, therefore, they are the end in themselves, not reduced to some one else’s will. This envisions the notion of participatory democracy, not mediated by any other person, that is, direct participation of people in decision-making affecting their lives. There is an impediment, however. The sovereign citizens cannot exercise their sovereignty to change these fundamentals and the sovereignty of people is not above the sovereignty of the state. As a result, Nepali citizens are feeling the relativizing of their sovereignty and, consequently, calling for the devolution of power.

Evidently, multi-party dispensation has not made citizens feel that they are equal to their leaders giving them a sense of independence and completeness. Varying degree of sovereignty by caste, region, age and gender especially in political representation has made the just and inclusive governance difficult to experience. Sovereignty, hence, became a vague proposition because people cannot negotiate in fervent faith with the government on the basis of a misleading legality. The continuity of Panchayati acts and regulations in local governance until its substitution by new Local Self-Governance Act 1999 has tended to facilitate the functioning of the state culture and institutions and the maintenance of social order with impunity and deflect demands for mass politics at the grassroots level. The new act also offered a recipe for expanding disharmony between the central and local authorities.

An increasing obsession of successive post-1990 governments with their own survival and  “law and order” suggest that Nepal is being turned into a pre-democratic state that underplays the basic aims of life-- human rationality and fundamental rights of people. The use of state for the maintenance of law and order while minimizing its social contribution made it look like predatory before the eyes of public as ordinary citizens do not know the distinction among the state, the polity, the government and many institutions of governance. As the political change centered on the continuity of traditional practices, many of the ideals and aspirations of the movement are submerged into power-blindness of political class. Nepali citizens are, therefore, deprived of basic public goods.

The new politics created its own establishment and the leadership has slipped into a bureaucratic mode of thinking and, accordingly, lost its ability for desirable governance. So the people’s power, the ideological spring of that movement, was pulled into different directions by the bureaucratically encrusted political parties and interest groups. The narrow social base of people’s power, mainly urban and limited by the institutional and material context of middle class professionals, also lost its mission to build this nation. Most people feel that they cannot solve their problems just by identifying themselves with one or the other political party and factions. Paradoxically, however, the public opinion polls show that there is a sense of hope, of confidence among ordinary citizens that their and their children’s life will be better under democracy because it provides individual freedom and economic opportunity.

A new experience of democratic existence, a renewed rooted-ness of leaders in their political sphere, a newly grasped sense of higher responsibility to the public rather than avidity for power and a new found social arteries of civil society bolstered by media and intelligentsia and to the commitment of human rights set the directions in which Nepali democracy must go. In this sense, the political education and mobilization program of political parties instead of becoming a means to instrumentalize the cadres and followers for jockeying for power and personal benefits should serve the spirit of democratic consolidation. Ironically, the message of party manifesto of each political party projects its image as the most democratic and innocently good and other’s irreducibly anti-democratic and demonic. This attitude has undermined any respect for opposition party thus preparing the citizens for a sort of senseless fundamentalist confrontation. The changing internal and external environment demands a concrete political vision capable of transforming Nepal into a nation able to face what are sure to be rough times in the future.

The fundamentals of Nepali psyche “Nepaliness” as distinct from the Indian and the Chinese have been succinctly provided by renowned Nepali historian Baburam Acharya in Nepalko Sanskritik Parampara (Nepal’s Cultural Tradition). It in no way is restricted to particular Nepali culture rather it situates Nepal’s cultural identity in a broader context of forming humanity and the order of the universe. Many Nepali intellectuals find in this simple book forceful message of what fulfilled their psychic need, independent self-constitution and an unending self-discovery. Part of the essence of this book is that it draws every Nepali into the sphere of a nation-state and their collective participation in the formation of a single identity Nepali. The cultural construction of the nation-state as mother is vectored on to an organic view to it and several psycho-historical and cultural threads were added into it to hoist nationalist sentiments.

A collection of similar vignettes, drawn from a variety of primary and secondary sources of data, offers another window on the attitudes of Nepali towards politics. Yet, the diversity of culture, uneven dynamics of various social groups and contentious data prompt any concrete generalizations of national character of Nepal as a whole a Herculean task. (Excerpts from a forthcoming book “Thinking Nepali Political Culture” by the author-chief editor.