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Democratic principles, which were not indigenous, weakened the State-Society relations
-Ms. Pratibha Khanal, Germany (Currently in Kathmandu)
I am presently studying in Germany.
I have had all the schooling right in Germany as I went there at a very tender age.
At the moment I am learning Political Science at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universitat, Heidelberg.
My institution of higher education is located in the Southern part of Germany wherein, I suppose you know, the wooden Cuckoo clocks are made which have made a place for itself in the world.
To come to the point, my subject is the study of South Asia's politics and its history.
I favored to come to my own homeland as an intern at the Freidrich Ebert Stiftung, which would, I take for granted, provide me with the required "practical insight" into the themes, which I have selected for my research jobs.
In the process, I am here to study in details the relation in between the State and the then society during the erstwhile regime-Panchayat.
My curiosity also extends to understand as to how the system theoretically looked like and what were its advantages. I have been told or given to understand all the negative aspects of the Panchayat system but I believe the system as such should have certain basic advantages as well.
But so far of my short stay here in Nepal, what I have understood from studies, interactions and the likes that the Panchayat system should have been pretty weak at the "implementation" level. I could see that the system lacked what we call "coordination" in between various implementing agencies.
To me it appears that the implementation part what was in theory did not match in practice.
Let me tell you here that the main objective of my research paper is to examine how the political structure plays a role in the interaction between the state and its society as being the major structure of communication between the rulers and the ruled. The model I have adopted is David Easton's "black-box".
In addition to all these, I will be studying the Movement for Restoration of Democracy in 1990. But should this mean that during the Panchayat period, there was no democracy? Was this really the case? I will study in detail during my sojourn here.
Any system has its own sort of input from the society. The society thus has an impact on the entire political process existing at any particular time. And finally it is this political process that has its impact back on the society. Now it is the society that becomes very important and significant for the existence of any system.
Later the society thus gets divided wherein some section of the society approve the system and thus demand the prolongation of that very particular system and the rest who censure go in for demanding a different order or say an entirely different regime which they feel would be better than the existing one.
The question thus comes: Where did it fail? Was the social order then not appreciative of the Panchayat structure? Or the system itself could not provide the needed and the required output?
Since I am just going through the primary stages of the Panchayat system so it would be a bit premature to tell you why the system collapsed abruptly. Let me gain the inside stories of the system as well. Unless I get into the details, I will not in a position to tell you why the system failed? It would be foolish to rush to any decision at the moment.
Let me go back to the 1950s. Well after the change of the Rana regime in Nepal, the country suddenly embraced a democratic or a self-governing system, which demanded that the people would act according to the democratic principles. But since the leaders' of the system could not live up to the occasion in implementing the promises with the required sensitivities of the land so there cropped some problems. In effect the leaders should have taken into proper account of the Nepali sensitivities, environment, existing social and economic patterns while steering the new system.
The fact is that the "democratic principles which came from outside were not indigenous which, I presume, weakened more the state-society relations which should have been just the other way round".
I see one more feature that could have caused the failure of the democratic order of that era.
Either the State leaders ruling then were old land lords or were associated with the Rana clan in some way or the other plus the prevalence of the royal conservatives who combined did not allow the system to stabilize. And because the society then lacked the existence of a "middle class" also caused the foundations of the system to tremble from within. Let me tell you forthrightly that it is the middle-class which stabilizes the system and acts like a balancing factor whose presence was missing. The middle-class would have acted like a mediator or a sort of bridge in between the sources of power and the grass-root population.
To me it appears that the old-landlords and the royal conservatives wished the King to bounce back to power for their own political interests.
The middle class if existed would have brought the interests of the masses into the political spectrum, which in turn would have paved the way for the political processes to come on track ultimately stabilizing the system for good. Had it been so would have had its profound positive impact on the society.
As Almond and Powell argue that "accumulation and the aggregation of interests" does have its impact on the stabilization of any system. However that was not the case with the then Nepal and its affairs of state.
The result: since it weakened the society and the political paraphernalia at the center in turn lacked strong power holder who could have "hindered" the King from wielding the powers back, the state power came into the hands of the King.
The moment the King wielded the power, the society became weaker and conversely, the state became powerful.
During the 1950s, when the people opted for a democratic system, it was a period of the "return of the society" when the society became powerful and the state became weaker. By the same token when King Gyanendra is in power now means that the state has become powerful and the society weaker. We can call it the "return of the state" as was the case with Nepal between 1962 till 1990.
In the prevailing political and constitutional terminology let me put today's context as that if the de jure sovereignty lay with the people then the de facto were with the King. Mind it that the King is ruling the country as per the Article 127.
This means that sovereignty now is embedded in the state or for that matter in the King. In the 1950s for a brief period and after 1990 change, the sovereignty were embedded in the society and the people.
Coming back to the collapse of the Panchayat, well to me it seems that so many factors accumulated that time which apparently caused the failure of the then system.
For example, the East –West confrontation had already come to an end; the so-called Cold war era had already become a matter of bygone era and in addition to these, a sort of wave of democratization in the world was there which had its impact on each and every country and Nepal could be no exception to that wave.
Add to this the people of the world had already developed a sense for democratic system by then. All put together, I think the Panchayat system died a premature death. Had it been serious in striking a balance in between the theoretical aspects of the system with the implementation part, the system would have perhaps survived for a longer period.
All put together, well I will have to go deeper to find out which external factors (including those, if any, from the neighboring countries) too have had its impact on the over throw of the last regime besides the end of Cold war era and the wave of democratization that swept the world around the end the 1980s.
Ms. Khanal is working at the FES as an Intern-ed.
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