Nepal must now resort to its historical instrument of Satrasal 2.0 to rebuild its dispensation

    By Bihari Krishna Shrestha THE SELF-CORRECTING CAPACITY OF DEMOCRACIES While democracy has been hailed as the most empowering form of government historically, it is also adored for its capacity for correcting itself through its system of periodic elections that theoretically throw out the bad guy in power and replace him/her with a better one. Thus viewed, democracy is bound to deliver to the people according to the latter's aspirations and priorities. For instance, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power told in her commencement address to the degree candidates at Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) in 2014 that “Democracy wins out in the long run because it offers a chance to fix its own mistakes. It is the only system built on the premise that if something is not working people can actually correct it, from the bottom up…self-correction is not destabilizing. It is stabilizing.” IN THE US TOO, DEMOCRACY STOPPED BEING SELF-CORRECTING However, after four years of the Trump administration (2016-2020), Fionna Hill, deputy assistant to the president and senior director for European and Russian affairs on the National Security Council then, wrote in the Foreign Affairs magazine (November/December 2021), “As many Americans learned during Trump’s presidency, no country, no matter how advanced, is immune to flawed leadership, the erosion of political checks and balances, and the degradation of its institutions…Democracy is not self-repairing. It requires constant attention.” What is equally noteworthy is that within two years of Trump in the White House, two Harvard professors, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, in a way announced the death of American democracy in 2018 by authoring an aptly and despairingly titled book, How Democracy Dies  (New York: Broadway Books), in which they characterized Trump as an “autocrat in becoming” and argued that “democracies still die, although less at the hands of men with guns and more by elected leaders”. The authors attributed the dying of American democracy to the dislodgement of what they called the 'guardrails of democracy", namely "mutual tolerance" and "institutional forbearance', the former defined as "acceptance of political rivals as legitimate competitors and leaders" and the second as "the idea that politicians exercise restraint over their power’. They contended that under Trump, those guardrails were compromised, and that signified the possibility of leading democracy to its end. NEPAL'S ZOMBIE DEMOCRACY AND ITS ELECTED AUTOCRATS If even the infringement of those behavioral guardrails means the end of democracy in a society, going by those criteria, Nepal's democracy can easily be declared to have suffered stillbirth when it was restored in 1990. The story of Nepal's democracy has been the ever-worsening story of corruption and more corruption all of the last three decades or more, with the first elected Nepali Congress prime minister, Girija Prasad Koirala—incidentally, a politician who, based on his own revelation, had printed fake Indian currency for supporting their party work while in exile in India--brazenly committing scandals infamously known, for instance, as Dhamija scam and Lauda Air scams, all of them designed to defraud the national carrier.  Today, the heads of the top three parties, the Nepali Congress, the Communist Party of Nepal-United Marxists Leninists, and the Maoist Centre remain the daredevil architects of little-veiled massive corruption scandals. For instance, NC president, Sher Bahadur Deuba, once a spartan student leader and now the rags-to-riches politician, is, as prime minister, known to have bartered all appointments and contracts for hard cash, and as opposition leader too in parliament, colluded with the sitting PM in sharing the spoils of corruption in such deals as Wide Body scam, a scheme hatched and executed by CPN-UML chief, KP Sharma Oli as PM to defraud several billion rupees in connection with the purchase of aircraft for the national carrier. Mr Oli himself stands accused of too many such scams, the most unbecoming one being what is known as the fake Bhutanese refugee scam. While as PM, his government had colluded with known scammers to defraud unsuspecting fellow Nepalese of several million rupees each under the false promise that they would be sent to the United States in the guise of Bhutanese refugees for resettlement there.  Crores and crores of rupees have changed hands among many high officials and politicians and some of them are in judicial custody too due to a highly professionally committed policeman, SSP Manoj KC, who dared to launch a criminal investigation into the case by seizing the window of opportunity of just a couple of hours of power vacuum at the top when the incumbent IGP had retired and a new one was still to be sworn in. That means, during that brief period there was nobody at the top to pile pressure on him on behalf of corrupt politicians not to initiate action on behalf of hundreds of unsuspecting victims defrauded of vast sums of money by these political thugs. By the time the new IGP took office, it was too late; he was presented with a fait accompli that could be delayed and stalled at present but could not be reversed. With the recent change in government and NC dropped from a governing alliance, Deuba's wife, Arzu Rana, one of the alleged recipients of the fraud money, has since fled to India. The sitting PM just now, Prachanda, the Maoist Centre head, has so far successfully evaded facing transitional justice for the slaughter of some 17,000 victims during the decade-long armed insurgency. He also stands accused of defrauding the national exchequer of tens of billions in payment for non-existent Maoist combatants. There are many cases registered against each one of them in this corrupt troika in the anti-corruption watchdog, the CIAA. But the CIAA chief being the favorite of one or the other in this troika, the cases have remained dormant all the years. While death did away with the ever-unbending NC autocrat, Girija Prasad Koirala, the current troika of Nepal's super corrupt manages to get elected over and over again with massive majorities that they procure for money even as Nepal suffers under the throes of never yielding grip of this corrupt lifeless electoral system, the Zombie democracy.  Nepal's land scarcity and low-productivity agriculture no longer remain the country's economic mainstay, and massive unemployment has been pushing its workforce into an exodus to many foreign destinations. Health and education suffer continuous decay and to top it all off, the country has the distinction of being one of the most corrupt in the world. THE AMERICAN DOUBLE STANDARD This is the democracy that our American friends, the high dignitaries of the US government call "vibrant democracy" every time they step into Nepal, lately, in their bid to woo Nepal to be recruited as their foot soldiers in their attempted encirclement of our northern neighbor, China. But such lies and flattery come to the ears of our corrupt politicians as sweet music and end up encouraging them further in their single-minded mission of robbing the people and nation.  This is blatant and mindless dishonesty on the part of our long-time friends from America who had described Trump's rule as the dying of democracy in their own country. TINY MILITARY 'COUP" IN AMERICA Unlike Nepal, a relatively smaller country, America is big and powerful, and whatever it does affects the whole world one way or the other. With unpredictable and unrestrained Trump as president, America's military wing led by Gen Mark Milley, then Chairman of Chiefs of General Staff, found it necessary to respond to the “concerning intelligence” that "China was worried about a U.S. attack.' Gen. Milley apparently assured China on October 30, 2020, "Stay calm, steady, and de-escalate. We are not going to attack you.” At the request of the Chinese, the General also called his counterpart once again on January 8, 2021, two days after the storming of the Capitol Building by Trump's MAGA armed brigade.  While Trump himself, the President of the country later complained that "Milley never told me about calls being made to China", in the US Congress too, "Some U.S. lawmakers have said Milley overstepped his authority" in common parlance, it could be seen as a tiny little coup, staged by an honest soldier in the interest of nipping a possible world catastrophe in its bud. TIME FOR NEPAL TO STAGE SATRASAAL 2.0 The year 2017 or satra saal in Nepali, i.e. 1960 by Common Era calendar, remains a major landmark in the history of our nation when late King Mahendra staged a coup against the then erring political parties with the help of the Nepal Army and laid the foundation for strengthened sovereignty and 30-year run of political stability and participatory national development under an experimental model of grassroots democracy without political parties in it. Like in our own history and as in the US, Zimbabwe, Sudan and Tunisia at different times, their militaries have played a role in rationalizing their dispensation in favour of better governance and augmented popular well-being. So, clearly, it is time for Satrasaal 2.0 to redesign our own democracy too in the interest of Nepal's ever-suffering humanity. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.