The sound and fury of local bodies' election 2.0 irresponsibly restructured,

they only signify further entrenchment of wanton corruption 

By Bihari Krishna Shrestha The fraudulent politics of 'Singha Durbar in the Villages' The country is once again in the throes of the second round of election of the local bodies after they were reorganized into 753 Gaun and Nagar Palikas after the then state restructuring commission under Bala Nanda Poudel decided to drastically reduce the then existing local bodies -- village development committees (VDC) and Nagar Palinkas that then numbered some 3500. So the number we have today, 753, is nearly only one-fifth of what existed then. While the VDCs and Nagar Palika officials, like their earlier village panchayat counterparts, were already corrupt to the bone too, this drastic reduction -- that was never explained why -- was destined to make matters worse, by making the elected officials some five times more distant from the electors, thus worsening their sense of accountability to the people. That would mean making the new local representatives even more corrupt. But the strange thing then about Nepal's NGOs/INGOs and the self-styled, learned, civil society leaders was that they failed to examine this issue in its proper perspective. Soon after the government officially adopted the Poudel Commission report on restructuring, there was a chorus of politically motivated discussion in support of it, grandly calling it the "devolution of Singha Durbar to the villages", a hyperbole first concocted by the then UML Kaski MP, late Rabindra Adhikari, a politician with a very popular image among the locals but one who would later go on to be the chief collaborator in the Wide Body commission scandal and would, unfortunately, go on to lose his life in a helicopter accident (Fagun, 2075) while on a mission to help a businessman get monopoly contract for installing a cable car ferry to the holy shrine of the goddess of Pathivara in the upper reaches of Taplejung district. Minister Adhikari's duplicity regarding the "Singha Durbar" hyperbole was far too abrasive for a relatively young politician who also enjoyed the undeserved reputation of being one of the promising up-and-coming leaders then. After the first round of local bodies' election for 283 Palinkas was done in May 2017, the Development Committee of the federal parliament had brought together a few of the newly elected Palika presidents for sharing their experiences and stocktaking of their problems. The Palika officials then had complained of a lack of "even minimally required legislative rules and regulations and manuals for their functioning". While painting a bleak picture, they said, all they did then as people's representatives was "accepting congratulations and giving interviews". However, Adhikari, then MP, had the temerity to instead write in the Kantipur daily (June 29, 2017) that "the services rendered by Singha Durbar have now arrived at the villages". As relatively young as he was in Nepal's gerontocratic politics, Adhikari nonetheless had apparently already perfected the art of deluding people the fraudulent politics in pursuit of power and pelf. However, what was worse than already was that Adhikari was not the only one in Nepali politics, engaging in fraudulent politics for corrupt personal gain. Around the same time, an INGO, Prosperity Nepal, had organized a small discussion session at the Yak and Yeti Hotel chaired by former finance secretary, Rameshore Khanal, a political aspirant for some time after quitting the government and now a venerated civil society leader, and attended also by a former secretary of local development ministry, Khem Raj Nepal. But my contention then that the new restructuring of the local bodies was a turn for the worse had fallen on completely deaf ears. Clearly, the priority of these civil society stalwarts was to be seen as being politically correct too. There were also several TV reporters there who were interested in my opinion but would not record them. The new restructured local bodies were also a subject of a proposed two-part discussion organized by the Avenues Television at that time. The first part discussion was participated by some half a dozen experts who also included the chair of the Restructuring Commission, Bala Nanda Poudel as well as a joint secretary from the local development ministry. In that discussion, I made my point that the figurative expression of bringing Singha Durbar to the villages meant that the villagers themselves had the complete authority and control over the entire cycle of effective local development that would comprise of such steps as identifying their own priorities, drawing up their own plans and programs, mobilizing their own funds locally and from the government, presiding over their implementation and finally, taking stock of whether they succeeded. In order to make such locally-owned and locally-managed development a reality in the villages, the need would be to bring the local authority still closer to the villages, not distance them. To support my contention, I gave the example of the world-applauded forest user groups that have the distinction of dramatically restoring and further northing our forest wealth all across the nation. The difference between the erstwhile VDCs and FUGs has been that the latter are directly managed by the forest users themselves. After citing this example, I directly confronted Bala Nandajee by observing that bringing local bodies farther away from the villages was 180 degrees against the spirit of what was implied by the slogan of "Singha Durbar in the Villages". He was clearly evasive and had rather irrelevantly complained that they had to work under difficult conditions due to the government changing their mandate midway into their work. He did not address the relationship I brought up between the empowerment of the users themselves at the grassroots and the effective local development in the communities. As it turned out I was the last discussant in the debate and maintained that if "Singha Durbar in the villages" were to be the honest intent of the government, the new local bodies' legislation must be amended "now and immediately". But in line with the above examples of responsible people and institutions playing "politically correct", the Avenues TV never aired this first part. They had straight gone to the second. So much for the journalistic integrity of the media! The scorecard of the new local bodies--dozer-driven 'development' The new local bodies, given their drastically reduced numbers, represented lots of money, in government grants and local taxes, plus the possibility of unbridled run into the exploitation of local natural resources, mainly the sand and gravel from river beds. The 2017 election for the Palika officials was an unprecedented contest of money and muscle. The media then reported that, on average, it cost one crore rupees for a contestant to get elected as Gaun Palika president and 20 lakh rupees for Ward chair. Later, the Contractors' Association of Nepal announced that some half of the new Palika presidents were its sitting members who surely had the connection to the corrupt leaders of the parties and cash for buying nominations and then, go on the spending spree to buy votes from the electors who, given Nepal's chronically backward conditions, were mostly poor, uninformed and powerless. Given the heightened lack of transparency and accountability structurally allowed by the ill-conceived reduction in the number of the local bodies, the new breed of corrupt politicians who had bought their way to head these resource-rich Palikas, have almost nothing to show in terms of what they delivered as the government of the people at the local level. The plethora of grievous problems created by these corrupt politicians in the Palinkas is succinctly reported by none other than Upper House member, Khim Lal Devkota, a partisan and committed protagonist of federalization, in his Kantipur article a year ago (April 11, 2021). Devkota was writing on the findings of an interaction programme jointly organized by the Gaupalika Rastriya Mahasangh and the government ministry of federal affairs and general administration and participated by none other than the selected Gaupalikaa vice-chairs from one set of Palikas and chiefs of planning and revenue sections from another set from the Lumbini, Karnali, and Sudurpaschim Pradesh. An excerpt of the report read as follows: "They allocate budget on bhagbanda, refuse to give budget ceilings to wards, do not make subject committees active, are unmindful of tax and revenue collection, do not prioritize genuine development projects, focus on piecemeal projects (tukre ayojana), add more projects while ignoring proper completion of existing projects, prioritize the use of dozer in place of local labour, ignore proper management of office, do not make judicial committees active, do not follow up the performance of user committees, do not delineate the sphere of work between elected and appointed officials, do not formulate plans for improvement of public schools, and do not update and make public income and expenditure accounts." It must be noted that these complaints came from the elected officials themselves. Local bodies' election 2.0 The misery for our impoverished country, Nepal, is that the hordes of corrupt politicians managing our so-called multiparty democracy is that they have chosen to do nothing to improve the performance of the Paalikas even as they are now contesting the first reelection of these local governments. What is even more worrisome is that various parties with completely different and often mutually antagonistic ideological orientations have opportunistically come together in alliances to contest elections on the basis of their notorious culture of bhagbanda. Just think of it: The NC is in alliance with the Maoists who have the blood of hundreds of the NC cadres in their hand who were slaughtered during their campaign of terror, erroneously called People's War. This five-party alliance also includes another party with comparable notoriety, the Janata Samajbadi party that, in 2008, had tried to dismember Nepal at the behest of India's RAW by unsuccessfully having the whole Tarai region declared "Independent Madhesh". To add to the sinfulness of that party, one of its leaders is the former Maoist killer, Baburam Bhattarai, who shares the blood of the 18,000 innocent Nepali lives terminated during the Maoist terror mentioned above. Not only NC, the newly created party of bhagbanda-hungry Madhav Kumar Nepal and the anti-federalist Chitra Bahadur KC's SJM too seem to have no qualms joining hands with these killers and treason-mongers. Restoration of monarchy as the indigenous force for democratic reform It is clear that left to these political thugs themselves masquerading as politicians and people's representatives, the country is only bound to go from bad to worse. After all, this has been the story of our multiparty dispensation from day one of its restoration in 1990. While democracies are theoretically considered to be endowed with the potential to self-correct, this premise has lately been questioned even in America after former president Trump. In Nepal, the three decades of the endless saga of corruption and mismanagement of state affairs under the stewardship of these corrupt politicians have clearly established that there is now a need for a new nationalistic force to help Nepal's democracy evolve in the right direction. This is where the ever-louder demand for restoration of monarchy makes sense. After all, all monarchs from Prithvi Narain Shah down on have demonstrated their unqualified love and devotion to our land, very much unlike the present-day politicians who find great satisfaction in playing poodle to their handlers in India. Even more prominent among the kings had been King Mahendra who created the necessary condition for Nepal's sovereignty to be protected all the time by opening up to China geographically and diplomatically. In recent years, in many countries around the world such as Tunisia, Zimbabwe, Sudan and covertly even in America, their armies have played a role in redirecting their distorted politics to democratic paths again. Should such an exigency arise in Nepal, it would be a safer arrangement to have the non-partisan monarchy take the lead.