--By Achyut Wagle
Finally, the date for the elections to Constituent Assembly (CA) has been announced for November 4, 2013. This no doubt is a positive development in itself, but mere announcement of the date hardly ensures the actual possibility of the elections on the said date. Evidently, the possibility looks dwarf to the challenges.
While announcing the date, the government has chosen to tread a ‘middle-path’ on the contentious issues that the four major political parties -- UCPN (Maoist), Nepali Congress and CPN-UML -- failed to evolve a common point of view. For instance, in the new ordinance, exclusion of the provision of threshold on number of votes needed to be recognised as a legitimate political party and retention of provision barring the people with proven criminal records from contesting the elections are the strategy of trade-offs that the government adopted. From a narrow view, they appear fairly reasonable.
But the larger trade-off, so to say, between the factors that are likely to foil the election bids and the ambience that is needed to create, still remains completely untouched, let alone addressed. The challenges posed by the protests of Mohan Baidya of CPN-Maoist, Ashok Rai of National Socialist Party and Upendra Yadav of Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, among others, are not of the kind that could be ignored easily.
Just a formal call by the government, which neither has a political face nor has taken adequate and meaningful initiation to negotiate with these forces, is unlikely to bring them all to the election fold. There needs to more intensive political dialogues to sort out the differences. But the situation is such that the four parties cannot be the party to the bargaining as they are officially not in the government and official government doesn’t have the political acumen and intent to deal with them. This is first ominous sign that the distance between the state and the politics is widening.
There is no doubt that without involving all these political forces in the process, the polls are impossible. Nobody has the answer what happens if the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections could not take place in November. Given the strength of the forces determined to impede these elections, there is no ground to be optimistic. And the worst, there is no realization of the precariousness of the situation among the so called major pro-poll political leaders and the government operatives.
The most dangerous aspect of the differences among the parties standing for and against of the polls is that they are not all political. Much of the discontent stems out of personal hatred, evidences of betrayal and mountains of egos between the major leaders in the pro and anti election camps. The friend-turned-foes like Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Mohan Baidya, Upendra Yadav and Bijaya Gachchhadar and Ashok Rai and Jhalanath Khanal are not even ready to sit face-to-face and recognize as a political force in their respective strengths. Regardless of the fact how many seats these dissenting parties would get if they participated in elections, it is apparent that their strength is enough to disrupt the polls.
As it is, the polls are absolutely unlikely to be held on the proposed date of November. And, this failure will have a fundamental difference than the previous failures on one account -- it will put the political forces further away from the state of affairs of the country. This indeed is an extremely dangerous direction Nepal is likely to head to.
One may despise the politics to the hilt for all the miseries it has brought about in the current Nepal, but the fact again remains that the country cannot move ahead without political leadership. Of course, with unconditional commitment to a good, democracy-driven politics. But, given the recent developments, Nepal is gradually drifting away from the very possibility of political powers ruling the country anytime soon. This is one factor that the political powers of all shades, including the ones in ‘opposition’, must take into account.
Sadly though, the possible gloomy days not seen by our own leaders are visualized as if on the movie screen by our powerful neighbours and the foreign powers. That is why New Delhi and Beijing are competing to invite our leaders of their convenience and choice to ‘take stock of the situation here’ and offer some ‘useful’ suggestions. Regardless of the leader of which party or ideology, the questions posed to them, by all -- the North, South and the West are the same. They surround the real possibilities of holding next CA polls in November, its chances of writing the new constitution and, in the longer run, the kind of federalism Nepal is likely to adopt. It is China who reminds our leaders about the dangers of Nepal embroiling into anarchy in the event of ad hoc execution of the federal structure. And, it is India that has apprehensions about the possibility of the elections taking place in November. The West has its own concerns of human rights agenda, defined more in terms of Nepal’s treatment to the Tibetan refugees than anything else.
Why can’t our own leaders assess this acutely adverse possibility of political parties being sidelined altogether, if new elections didn’t take place? Whereas, the reality is as evident as the other side of the coin. It is perhaps because, the ‘political power blindness’ that emanates from gross insensitivity to the voices and needs of the people has engulfed our existing set of leaders.
When the ex-king Gyanendra brought in Dr Tulsi Giri and Kirtinidhi Bista to run the country in 2005, every commoner foresaw that the King’s rule was coming to an end. But he was so power-blinded that which he himself couldn’t see it. When Maoist launched the armed insurgency, every sensible mind knew that it would only take Nepal backward, not forward. But Pushpa Kamal Dahal and Baburam Bhattarai wouldn’t see that. Late G P Koirala also didn’t realise that very democracy was being put on perils by all his acts that were in detriment to democratic norms and values, that perhaps gave fuel to rapid rise to Maoist influence. At present, same sort of blindness is preventing the leaders of four parties to be flexible and accommodative to other smaller, opposing forces.
It is universal trend throughout history that every dictatorial-minded politician was incapable of gauging the true gravity of the situation and acted as if the way he thought was an absolute truth, until it was too late to correct the course. It is the same psyche that governs the hearts and minds of our leaders. So, they didn’t realize that the cost of their petty differences in the last CA that Nepal was made to bear was so big.
Economically it might need decades to fill the gap, and socially, we perhaps will never be able to regain the cohesion we enjoyed so far. They quarreled on the number of CA 491 versus 601 as if it were a choice out of 51 and 60. The recent disagreement in threshold of minimum votes required from next CA elections and abetting government to abandon it was true mockery to democracy. Still, the leaders of the four parties -UCPN (Maoist), Nepali Congress, UML and Democratic Madhesi Front behave as if nothing has gone wrong even after they handed over the reins of the country to bureaucrats, appointed notoriously corrupt ex-bureaucrat as the chief of the constitutional anti-corruption watchdog, CIAA and failed to address the issues that are hanging as the Damocles’ Sword above the election agenda.
The only way-out to restore the power of politics in running the country now solely depends on whether the polls on the stipulated date would take place or not. And, it is also clear that, it will not take place without making any sizeable force to agree to take part in the polls.
Only if the the democratic process becomes functional, the politics, and by virtue of it politicians, will return to power. If not, the rein of power the politicians handed over to bureaucrats on the silver platter would never return to them for long time to come. If democracy wins, there is always chance for any party to ride to the power saddles in future, but if the whole politics is resolutely distanced from the affairs of state only possible outcome is prolonged dictatorship. Nothing else!
(The writer is former editor of Aarthik Abhiyan National Daily.)
