Democracy becoming tool for leaders!

Why a heady despair has seized the Nepalese people of late? People are highly sensitive. Nepalese leaders do not have the ability and courage to transcend their habit though they built their image on the repudiation of past. They forgot the lesson of history, they did not call their memory, a memory that helps one to survive. Is the rejection of past provide an insight into a better future? The paradox political leader(s) face now is: they live with the past but reject its existence. They summon the future, which no longer mean anything. Once leaders sever their social, economic and cultural ties with the past, what is left to them is nothing more than a void. We feel "pain" for their performance and we feel "shame" concurrently for their behavior. Nepalese people so far are repressing their pain and spending sleepless nights in the fear of terror and horror, in the fear of growing poverty and a paralyzing fear of death ultimately. Who shares the victim's solitude and sorrow? The cruelty of poverty is political creation. The outrage born of leaders' indifference defies easy comprehension of what they have become. Poverty itself is dreadful, but when it is graciously rationalized by economic philosophy it even becomes more saddening. Larry Elliot, the Columnist of the Guardian Weekly, for example, not long ago argued that "Market forces will not eradicate poverty at a global level any more than they were able to at the national level."

Over the last one decade, the efficiency of modern public institutions has been severely weakened by the combined effect of deregulation of internal markets and foreign trade, reduction of the role of state in economy and emerging social and economic crises. Destruction of state institutions and floundering of cultural life perpetually postponed a dream of ordinary people for justice. And traumatic suffering became a fact of public life and will perhaps continue for long time to come. Can one survive by the sheer emotional self-protectiveness? The clear-cut answer is 'surely' not. Democracy cannot be contrived as a hymen of certain political party. If it is made so, it ceases to be a democracy in essence. In Nepal, democracy confronts precisely this misfortune and became propaganda in the hands of rulers-the vision less and the merciless ones. In order that democracy safeguard the reason for its own existence and not become a tool of leaders, it must capture the voices of ordinary individual conscience. If power and ideology are fused into a force, it destroys everything democratic.

Clinically dead government!

The government under Koirala once again has come up with its annual programs for the country through the customary Royal address. Critics together with the opposition parties in the parliament maintain that there was nothing new in the Royal address and that it was only old wine in the new bottle. In essence, since the bygone Panchayat era, the successive governments have only be fooled the national population through the use of jargons contained therein in the Royal address. Coming down to the implementation level, what happens each year is unfolding of the same hapless situation which the population, albeit the innocent and the voiceless ones, is forced to gulp hoping against hope that a day will come soon which would take care of their long standing grievances. However, the fateful day will perhaps not come in our lifetime. In the process the men in government and the leaders manning the system will continue to benefit from the so called "brilliant and sustainable development programs" meant for the lay men and that too in the name of "democracy". The tragic part of the whole story has been that the donor community will yet again commit their donations to this corrupt country with a hope that their donated amounts would be this time properly utilized. They too apparently were hoping against hope.

The thrust should be now upon on how to implement the already agreed and promised agenda; on how to curb the menace of corruption; on how to penalize the declared corrupts through the extensive and intensive use of the laws of the land; on how to assure the donor community that their money would be effectively utilized and that too on the projects that are meant for the poor reeling under abject poverty; on how to enhance good governance and the likes. Understandably, to achieve all these goals the nation needs a strong and effective government which is not in existence at the moment. The government apparently is clinically dead.

Finally, the message: now is the time to dust off ourselves in the hope that something refined might come out of ourselves which could be used to save the face of this country. However, the million dollar question is: who will take the lead?

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