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Journalism of Courage
As Nepal transits from over two centuries of monarchy to a new republic, what should our thoughts be? Here is a landlocked country spread largely over the mountainous terrain of the Himalayas, with a population of approximately 29 million people, strategically sandwiched between India and China, two rising economic giants with contrasting political systems, wanting to distance itself from its feudal past and daring to believe that its future lies in the institutions and politics of a parliamentary democracy. Here is a country that has experienced a ten year Maoist insurgency, that has experimented with some form of panchayat democracy, that wants to embark on the road to a new Nepal through the significant and bold historical gesture of abolishing its monarchy in the first act of its constituent assembly. How, then, should we see this moment?
Firstly, we must see it as a defining moment in the history of Nepal. A ‘defining moment’ or a ‘new dawn’? A ‘new dawn’ suggests that the path to the future is already set. The day breaks with the sun slowly tracing its fixed path across the sky. There are no uncertainties, we know its trajectory. A ‘defining moment’, in contrast, is a moment of hesitation, a pause at the fork in the road. Nepal is at one such defining moment where it has to make important choices which have great relevance for many of the big issues of today.
How does a society of very limited resources move from a conflict situation to a post-conflict situation, peacefully? What should its institutional framework look like if it is to accommodate and address the many claims that are being, and will be made? What are the policy instruments that need to be framed to reinforce its plurality and still make it inclusive? And, of course, what redistributive strategy should it follow to meet the heightened aspirations of its marginalised and impoverished groups who constitute the bulk of the population? And it must do all this when most of the world’s economies are interlinked, limiting the choices that are available.
Looking at history, and looking at it carefully, Nepal must recognise that the road from monarchy to democracy passes through oligarchy. Democratic revolutions have ended in oligarchies although we do not call them that. We persist in calling them democracies since many oligarchies (as kleptocracies) often masquerade as democracy. They adorn themselves in the rhetoric of democracy. Quite often we fail to recognise this masquerade because it is so good, and because democratic theorists have not bothered to give us the signage to distinguish between a democracy and an oligarchy-kleptocracy.
If one looks at the last three years of its political life, Nepal has accumulated a body of political practices that bode well for its future, from the hard negotiations between the seven-party alliance and the Maoists which ended the insurgency, to the agreement that the way forward is through a constituent assembly, to an acceptance by all parties of the rules of competitive electoral politics, to the acknowledgment of parliamentary politics as the best mode of dispute settlement. Nepal has done very well to stand, within a few years of the ending of the conflict, at the threshold of a constituent assembly.
This is the third big issue that makes up this defining moment. Nepal’s constituent assembly is reputed to be among the most inclusive such deliberative bodies anywhere in history. Most peoples have a presence in the assembly. It has in its power almost the ‘divine authority’ to grant thick legitimacy to the constitutional order that it will create for the new Nepal.
This Constitution, both in its broad outline and in its detail, must therefore emphatically perform three roles vital for any democracy. It must be a founding document which sets out the basic and fundamental principles around which the New Nepal will be built. It must be a guiding document which sets out the ground rules for regulating social and political life. And it must be a trumping document that, in a situation of dispute, becomes the final arbiter.
If the deliberations in the constituent assembly recognise this historic task of producing such a document, both in letter and in the new public imagination, then it will have made the defining moment into a new dawn. It will have protected the new Nepal from not just the politics of the palace but also from palace politics that plagues so many of our democracies, especially those in South Asia. The first big symbolic step has been taken today. The king has become a citizen.
The writer is director of the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla. Views are personal
