Reflecting Intention
Do you think Prachanda, Baidhya, Bhattarai and their colleagues started ‘People’s war’ popularly known as Nepal’s civil war back in 1996 to come into power and accumulate all the resources of Nepal? Or you think leaders from Nepali Congress and CPN UML started their political journey with the hunger of earning money and getting their dear and near one’s into public position? What was the reason behind them to struggle for democracy and justice when authoritarian regimes were putting a price tag on their life? What motivated them to keep their life into an edge of a knife and struggle for democracy repeatedly? As a rationale thinker, I can argue that while starting their journey of politics their primary concern was not to earn power, position or money, but to end inequality, discrimination, and establish co-governance, justice system and most importantly develop our country as a free, peaceful and prosperous one. As a result, we witnessed a significant change in governance where these major parties (NC, UML and MC) took our country over from dictatorship to federal republic where the people’s and institution’s freedom has progressed significantly. But, despite of significant change in political system why justice, equality, development, human rights, good governance, and prosperity still lacks in our country?
Fight vs. Make
Primarily, it should be clearly understood that, ‘fighting’ and ‘making’ is two different things. Fighting is easier, it takes bullets, ballots, blame or/and brain, but making needs collaboration, coordination, compromise and capacity. To make governance system work properly ensuring people’s participation, economic progress and ending culturally and socially deep-rooted inequalities is not an easy task as doing people’s movement or organizing civil war – it is complex art of managing socio, economic and political dynamics which has diverse effect on one over another. During civil war, you encourage and manage ten thousand of rebels to wage war against government stressing into demands to fulfill by government and convincing rebels to fight for better tomorrow or for justice and equality. In peoples’ movement you organize and mobilize millions of people against dictatorship for protest. Most of those protesters are the one who feels that their basic rights has been curtailed and assumes ‘living is difficult in coming days’ with the same system. But development and progress, doesn’t work this way. Here, people don’t have one common goal that they can unite upon. Every people have multiple of interest and multiple actors are active to gain out of it. For development, you need to work with each individual and every institution (including international) which has different feelings, interest and control over the resources and decision. The management of this complexity and building up confidence to rule has not walked together in case of Nepalese politicians.
Complexity and Corruption
Now, when these leaders and political parties put their footsteps in a new political system, they get two things, first power, second complexity. Power gives them position, prestige, resources and recognition whereas complexity hinders them to achieve what they have dreamed of. By being in power, they try to manage system, but because of paradox of democracy that you need majority to rule, leaders start compromise. To remain in power, they need to hear about national and international powerhouses and if not, they are likely to be kicked off. Thus, they try to maintain relations and country becomes as is it, with new leaders in power but no newness in structure and system. No leaders are far from corruption, whether it is favoritism or bribe, every leader have witnessed corruption in the name of earning resources or saving power.
Expectation with new parties
What I personally believe is that, the process of getting the power and ignoring the commitment to remain in power is not a disease but human nature. Because until and unless you don’t remain in power you can’t do any significant change and to remain in power you need to compromise, compromise takes you again to this vicious circle of surviving as a politicians. Similar goes with new parties too, until they reach to the power they will commit of change, with strong voice, but to do actual change is not an easy thing to do, as commitment. We don’t need to get too far, our neighbor is good example for this, Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) arise as an alternative power in Delhi and swipe away more than 90% of seats in state assembly, but after two years of election Delhi people has not got opportunity to see progressive drastic change. Why? Because political system doesn’t work in isolation, it need to work with socio-economic, bureaucracy, diplomacy and other system which are in most of the situation are in the pockets of big and established parties.
Vote for Stability
Undoubtedly, people are desperately wanting for stable government in Nepal and there are high chances of stability in Nepal if the current developed situation last honest and unified. If one of the recently formatted ‘alliances’ i.e. Left alliances and Democratic alliances get majority in the parliament, then there is likely to have stable government for 5 years, where a government can plan and formulate policy as desired whereas strong opposition will be ‘Watch-dog’ inside the parliament for governments action.
Finally, I want to say is that not only trust the big dream of a party and their election manifesto, choose the leadership and their attitude of governing strategically. 😊
Mr. Kharal is a graduate student at Department of Politics, University of York, England.
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