Voters' Education And Current State Of Affairs

C. D. Bhatta

In this piece, I am putting down some of the empirical thoughts on the current state of affairs that came into limelight during the course of my field visits to different parts of the country as part of voters' education and civic rights programme. The programme was organised by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES), a German think tank in Kathmandu, with the help of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Respect for others

The overarching aim of the voters' education programme was to train and educate the local people on contemporary political issues such as civic rights, democracy, constituent assembly (CA) election, current state of affairs and trickle down of knowledge to the grass root level. The central logic of this programme was to lay emphasis on the fact that democracy only works when it promotes local situations, local values based on social justice and solidarity, and there is a balance between two types of rules - written and unwritten - of society.

Equally important is the culture of respecting others (opposition parties) that play a great role in expanding the democratic sphere. It is because, in a democracy, every opposition of today moves into the helm of power tomorrow, and every party that is in power today might have to sit in the opposition bench tomorrow. This means democracy cannot be owned by a particular party for a long time but can only be rented for sometime. Likewise, democracy is all about sharing the burden of each other, that is, those in a society having a broader shoulder have a responsibility to carry those who have smaller shoulders. Dev Raj Dahal, a noted political scientist, is of the view that the decision to hold the constituent assembly election in Nepal has made Nepalese politics open-ended. There is increased citizens' participation in state affairs, but the state has or is not in a position to develop its own capacity to guarantee participation.

Political power has been transformed from the king to the eight political parties, but within this 'power transformation', neither is there intergenerational justice nor is transformation felt by the citizenry at large. Today various types of transformations are taking place in the Nepali society. For example, transformation in discourse (loktantra vs. prajatantra, ganatantra vs inclusive democracy); transformation in the political parties, that is, the rise of ultra communists forces; transformation in the actors, that is, the rise of political leaders of various ideologies and suspension of the king; transformation in subjects, that is, from a unitary to a federal system of governance; and transformation in procedure, that is, promulgation of the interim constitution and initiative to hold the election to the Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. Having said this, however, there is no clear agenda before the state as to what type of state and system of governance we really want to have at the end of the day. We talk about 'state restructuring', but it is still not clear as how we want to go about and what type of restructuring would work best for us. Merely playing with words by producing various types of political terminologies without any scientific justification is creating more confusion than resolving problems.

Principally, the main purpose of the state is to protect the weak in a society from the strong and that of politics is to address underlying problems of the society by engaging people in the institutional life of the state. Moreover, the state has a duty to maintain public order in a society, and politics should bring about changes in a society. The main logic of democratic politics, therefore, is to initiate dialogue, search for a common agreement and provide alternatives (choices) so that diverse societal demands/interests could be met. However, there is a deadlock in Nepali politics, which is apolitical. A great deal of conflict exists between the state and societal forces. The result of this conflict is that the parliament has been stalled for more than a month, interim constitution has been receiving the wrath of the opposition from different sections of society, and it had to be amended within 35 days of its promulgation. The amendment of the constitution on an installment basis does not necessarily herald a prosperous political future for the country.

We have signed a comprehensive peace accord, but conflict residues are still prevalent in society. Different types of societal groups are forming critical masses, and the state has not been able to play the role of 'state' due to which it is losing internal sovereignty to various non-state-actors. The best part of the April uprising was that the citizens have been given their rights, but there is no efficient mechanism to ensure these rights. In a sense, no attempt has been made to make the state machinery strong and prosperous so that they can meet the challenge generated by these rights.This has resulted in the erosion in the capacity of the state in different arenas - erosion in policy (no sovereign policy), erosion in state authority (rise of the non-state actors), and increase in competitive violence (rule of might). Because of these factors, the state is not in a position to fulfil the main duties of the state - protect the weak, resolve conflicts, maintain sovereign policies, including foreign, and deliver public goods.

Harmony

Against this backdrop, the challenge for the Nepali state is how best to reconcile harmony between all the conflicting ideas, concepts, norms and values without undermining the spirit of the age. An attempt should move towards providing political legitimacy to the achievement of the people's movement and constitutional legitimacy to the interim constitution in order to move the political process ahead.

Source: The Rising Nepal, June 1, 2007