Reverting to type

After an unusual month of May in which Nepal’s ministers were uncharacteristically busy and active, an air of normalcy seems to have returned over the country. This normalcy is chracterised by policy paralysis and political infighting. Hardly is a minister even talking about the constitution, and nor has there been any attempt to rectify the differences between the four key parties – the Maoists, the Nepali Congress, the UML and the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum – on the tricky issues of ethnicity-based federalism and the form of government to be adopted.


The Constituent Assembly had a truly historic opportunity to set the country on the path to stability and progress, and they blew it. With perfunctory admissions of failure, they seem to have already moved on, while the nation is still reeling from the (non-) constitutional crisis. 

On the one hand, Baburam Bhattarai speaks of a consensus government comprising of all key parties. On the other, he couldn't maintain unity even within his own party with Mohan Baidhya’s split. The Koiralas and Sher Bahadur Deuba are at loggerheads in the Nepali Congress and perfectly happy to tear the party apart, while it is difficult to keep track of how many Madhesi parties there now are. With such levels of infighting within parties, it is rather naive to expect that Nepal can have a national unity government, or one for too long anyway.


Bhattarai has said Nepal will go to the polls in November. Now Nepal’s Acting Chief Election Commissioner Neelkantha Upreti has said on record that if elections cannot be conducted in November, then they could potentially be postponed till 13 April, 2013. In a country where nothing happens on time if it involves political leadership, this is an open invitation to the political parties to care even less than they already do. This statement by Upreti could not have come at a worse time. The earlier the country heads to the polls, the less will be the damage the democratic set up, which has been made into some kind of a joke by the four big political parties.


This is the time for Nepal to get its act together. The political parties need to look within before pointing fingers at one another for their failure to write the constitution on time. There are no clear lines being taken by the political parties. While no stone is being left unturned to tear apart the points of views of other parties, no concrete attempts are being made to provide solutions either. Each party is stuck upon its own idea of federalism (whether Nepal should have single ethnicity-based, or multiple ethnicity-based states). The discussions around the federal structure are based on rigid party positions as opposed to the requirements of the country and its people.


At no point in any of these discussions are the prospects of the citizens of the country important. That these politicians are the “representatives” of the Nepalese people escapes them completely.


Post dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, Nepal has returned to normalcy with quite astonishing speed. It has reverted to type. 

We’re gonna make them a promise we can’t keep

Make that several promises. We will bring you federalism. We will bring about social inclusion. We will write you a constitution. We will deliver you the right to elect a government. There were other promises too – those pertaining to greater economic growth or an improvement in infrastructure for instance, but let’s leave those for another day.

Four years ago on 28 May 2008, Nepal’s Constituent Assembly met for the first time and promptly abolished the Monarchy and declared Nepal a Republic. Its mandate was to finish writing a new constitution in two years. It did not come close.

Writing a constitution for Nepal was never going to be an easy task, particularly considering a populace split along ethnic, linguistic, geographic, social and economic lines, among others. Cleavages in Nepali society have always run deep, but traditional power structures have only been challenged in recent years, owing primarily to the Maoists and the political parties of the Madhes which have picked up the cause of several marginalised groups of people. As a result, pretty much for the first time, the various divides in Nepalese society came to the fore in the corridors of power. The Congress and the UML, on the other hand, have sought to preserve traditional power structures which are largely beneficial to their interests.

That the political parties did not come to an agreement on the restructuring of the state is not very surprising. However, had they begun discussing federalism three years ago instead of three months ago, could they have reached an agreement? Perhaps.

But did they have the urgency to do so? Perhaps not.

This is why I think, not. The elected Constituent Assembly was also to act as an interim legislature for two years. What this meant was that the same people who were to write the constitution were also to govern the country. This meant a) too much responsibility on the shoulders of one organ of the state, and b) too much authority vested in one body. The former ensured very little good came out of the Assembly in terms of real policy and the latter directly led to a struggle to control the Assembly.

It is the latter which ultimately led to a failure of this magnitude. The leading political figures in the country (across the political spectrum), who had been elected and given a mandate to write a constitution for the country were more interested in controlling the Assembly, and by extension the government. That no political party had a clear majority in the assembly only exacerbated the problem.

The leaders of the key political parties, instead of striving to write a constitution in the best interests of the country, were attempting to write a constitution that would play to the gallery and appease their vote banks. The result was a politically charged Constituent Assembly, members of which were not willing to work together towards a common cause. There was no common goal and each party had its own objectives. Essentially, what should have been the task of technocrats was left to the politicians, while the technocrats themselves were reduced to sitting on toothless constitutional advisory committees.

Moreover, even the failure to write a constitution within the stipulated timeframe was not much of a concern for the key leaders of the political parties. Since the constituent assembly was also acting as the interim legislature, an extension of the assembly’s term meant an automatic extension of the terms of the elected politicians. It did not just stop at that – through various power sharing agreements, supposed “unity” governments, or just as a result of a leadership vacuum, the Constituent Assembly managed to give us five prime ministers from three key political parties over four years. Even as months passed by and common Nepali folk grew increasingly impatient, key political leaders continued bickering. Unfortunately, they bickered only over ministerial portfolios and not the constitution. At least not until it was too late.

Either advertently or otherwise, the whole exercise of having the same 601-strong body serve as a Constituent Assembly as well as an interim legislature backfired spectacularly. By the end of the four years, the Constituent Assembly had been reduced to an exclusive club, one which had blackballed the remainder of the Nepali population.