A decade of governance in Nepal: Political aspect

BY SHRISH S. RANA

The decade ushered in by a mass movement for the restoration of the multiparty system in the country can be deemed a success in terms of the agenda of the movement. It wanted the multiparty system restored, it wanted a constitutional monarchy and the basic democratic freedoms to be enshrined in a new constitution. It is this system that is now a decade old. One recalls an analysis concluding that the first decade is the most crucial for new democracies to the point that such nascent democracies even go to war in the first decade. We have not gone to war and the multiparty constitution and system are intact. In the process, the system has seen two general elections and one mid-term election. Two local level elections have taken place nationwide to man the district and village electoral bodies that are now ‘development committees’. Parliamentary sessions have been convened regularly for democratic legislation and even the constitutional provision for special or emergency sessions have been brought to use. This decade has been eventful in democratic exercise. We have seen majority parties in power. We have seen minority party rule. We have seen coalitions.

Democracy

The equation that the multiparty system is democracy has seen vibrant use in the country to the point that, ever since the interim government that oversaw the transition to the prevalent constitutional system, virtually all ‘national’ political parties have been flipped to government. Outside the Samyukta Janamorcha that was represented in the interim government, the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party — United Marxist Leninist, the Rashtriya Prajatantra Party have all headed governments. The Nepal Sadbhavana Party has participated in government. An exception after the Janamorcha is the Nepal Majdoor Kisan Party that has been continuously represented in parliament but has not participated in any government so far. Participation of the political parties in government apart, our decade old multi-party system appears to have been so representative as to include the several factions within the respective political parties separately in government too. The most recent example is the majority Nepali Congress, which saw the Krishna Prasad Bhattarai faction replaced by the Girija Koirala section. Party-wise, even the now separate CPN-ML saw themselves in government as UML partners to the RPP. The two RPP factions themselves headed governments under a single party name and the country’s two largest parties, the Nepali Congress and the CPN–UML, have themselves combined in the government and conducted the last general elections in the country which today has allowed the Nepali Congress its convincing majority in the parliament and brought the (splintered) CPN-UML the distinction of being the largest opposition party in the country. The last general elections conducted by the two largest political parties in the country appear to have been successful, moreover, in edging out the splinters from parliament. The CPN-ML, the RPP-Chand are examples along with all other minor political parties excepting the Sadbhavana, the Majdoor Kisan Party and the Samyukta Jana Morcha which sees representation in parliament this round in contrast to its total absence from the parliament in the previous elections.

The democratic exercise moreover has been so extensive as to call for constitutional interpretations of the very constitutional process and the judiciary has been allowed that binding necessary interjection. The CPN-UML minority government attempt to go to the polls was thwarted thus. Prime minister Surya Bahadur Thapa’s attempt as also prime minister Girija Koirala’s prompted notable judicial interjection in this constitutional exercise. The emphasis on the rule of the majority political party in parliament was maintained even when the first Congress government of a decade ago opted for the polls under Prime Minister Girija Koirala while it appeared that a significant majority including members of the Congress party petitioned the King for options. Koirala still headed the parliamentary party and represented the majority formally despite the contentions that should have been settled inside his party and not the parliament. And so the constitutional insistence on the political parties has been strictly adhered to in practice regardless of fissiparous trends within the parties. This is to the extent that the constitutional exercise has seen the democratic credentials of two significant constitutional institutions, the Monarchy and the Supreme Court, tested under very severe political pressures by the political parties represented in parliament.

A review of the past decade of Nepali democracy must also bring within its purview the political parties themselves. All major political parties over the decade have conducted their general conventions and elected their leadership. The process of organization appears firmly to have reached the grass roots where two local elections down to the ward levels have seen the major parties fielding their candidates. This process of organization appears to have been so pervasive as to even cover all sectors of society – the unions. Over the decade, therefore, Nepali democracy as equated with the multiparty system appears to have established itself and one must allow Nepal and the Nepalese a self-congratulatory instance on this account. The institutions and provisions vied for in the people’s movement and established by it have remained. As much as democracy was equated with these institutions, we have the democracy.

Governance

As much as it is convenient in the context of the people’s movement to state that ‘democracy’ has been achieved over the decade, an analysis of the political aspect of such in terms of governance becomes a daunting proposition indeed. This is especially in the light of growing academic concern on ‘good’ governance as distinct from governance. Now that the structures are in place, attention is increasingly being focused on such aspects as ‘civil society’, ‘good governance’, ‘transparency’, corruption and the likes. These words by themselves qualify democracy. In other words, they suggest the establishment of democratic structures alone do not signify that democracy has been achieved. This somewhat inhibits the above contention so profusely used in Nepali politics and intelligentsia that we have a democracy. Indeed, Western academics of the likes of Samuel Huntington and Larry Diamond who so enthusiastically welcomed the dawn of a new wave of democracy in the world and were so widely quoted in the context of our entry into this ‘Third Wave’ by Nepali academics now are prone to cite continued differences in the democratic content of ‘liberal’ and ‘electoral’ democracies. Diamond even went to the extent of questioning "Is the Third Wave Over?" in the July 1996 issue of the Journal of Democracy and Huntington in his article of October 1997 "After Twenty Years: The Future of the Third Wave" sums up Diamond’s requirements for ‘liberal’ democracies as distinct from ‘electoral’ democracies thus: "Liberal democracies not only have elections. They also have restrictions on the power of the executive; independent judiciaries to uphold the rule of law; protection for individual rights and liberties of expression, association, belief and participation; consideration for the rights of minorities; limits on the ability of the parties in power to bias the electoral process; effective guarantees against arbitrary arrests and police brutality; no censorship; and minimal control of the media."

Despite the sweeping good marks given by international election observers on the conduct of the three national elections that have taken place in the country over the decade, one must in analysis cite three separate phenomena in the three elections: Firstly, the use of the ‘multi-party’ organizations restricting the mobility of the RPP candidates in the first general elections as demonstration of popular antagonism to their association with the previous system. Secondly, the virtual wiping out of the Samyukta Jana Morcha in the second elections and, thirdly, the clean sweep defeat of the CPN-ML in the last general elections. These results appear to continue to influence the politics of the decade considerably. In the first instance the results appear to have influenced the manner in which the two separate RPPs combined, split and then prompted the recent Chand re-entry into the RPP. The second appears to have helped trigger a Jana Morcha split and, then, allowed the Maoist movement and insurgency to emerge and spread in the country. It is perhaps too early to delve into the impact of the ML sweep outside of the fact that it is generally concurred that it was made possible by the Congress — UML partnership in government conducting the polls and that it helped decide the status of the UML as the opposition parliamentary party.

In so many ways, the conduct of all major political parties after the second elections in order to form governments in the previous parliament appears to have made more widespread the charges of mal-government. One does tend to forget in the process that, until the ultimate Congress-UML government established a firm majority in parliament to go to polls, successive governments when being threatened out of power sought to dissolve parliament and declare elections; this, at the risk of the constitutional process. Even the majority government of Girija Koirala sought resort to a mid-term poll when threatened from within the party itself without resolution of the internal party conflict within the party. By all accounts, political analysis cannot afford to be blind to the fact, thus, that in our democracy there is an advantage sought by our political parties to go to the polls while in government. The connotation of such to democracy here, and to good governance ultimately, is surely significant.

After the first general elections too, one must recall, threats to Girija Koirala’s majority in parliament provoked the hasty polls. If, then, one may surmise that politics in the past decade has sought to secure the advantage of government in conducting the polls, another possible hypothesis that may emerge safely in analysis is that politics appears to have generally concentrated on the internal politics of political organizations. This would have come as little surprise given the fundamental premise of the people’s movement equating the multi-party system with democracy. Since the multi-party system has been secured, democracy has arrived. What of governance?

Party Obsession

This is perhaps too sweeping a comment in any analysis of governance of the past decade but the obsession with organization, political organization, in the past decade is nevertheless abundantly clear. Political organization is and has been and is likely to be the basis of political power in Nepali politics. It is political organization amidst the relative disorganization of the latter years of the Panchayat establishment that ultimately helped the movement for multi-party democracy succeed in Nepal. Congress and Communist student unions organized and recruited openly in the Nepali academic sector and it is these products that very much entered Nepali officialdom. Although underground until after the 1980 referendum, the last ten years of the Panchayat system saw such organizations now openly admitting their organized contributions to wins and losses in the partyless general elections. The strength of these organizations nurtured over the years helped in the restoration of the multi-party system and, in its aftermath, helped bring these political parties to power. Clearly, the organizations have been the source of political power in the decade. For politics to prioritize this would be to little surprise, more so given the past Nepali experience of how party presence was removed and the experience of how continued organization helped revive the party system. "The omni-presence of political parties" as Krishna P. Khanal sub-headlined a seminar paper "Political Parties in Nepal: Organization, Ideology and the Emergent Party System" is likely to be the trait of politics in the country as demonstrated in the politics of the decade. To be concluded.

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