Nepal's persistently feudalistic order demands the proliferation of direct democracies at the grassroots.

By Bihari Krishna Shrestha SAVING INDIA'S DEMOCRACY 2024 India, a country of 1,4 billion people and a 543-member strong Lower House of Parliament recently conducted its 18th general election whose all pre-poll predictions including the findings of exit polls had concluded that PM Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) would sweep the polls for the third time in a row, this time with even bigger margins. BJP's own rallying cry was winning over 400 seats, in Hindi: Abaki baar, 400 paar, for its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) in which BJP remains the dominant partner. However, when the actual results came, it belied all those optimistic predictions and expectations. For the first time, the BJP failed to win a simple majority in its own right. It could win only 240 seats, that is 32 short even for the majority in the House. More than the BJP loss, the results dented BJP strongman, Narendra Modi's stature in the party as well as in the country. The party did not do well even in constituencies where Modi spent time campaigning. While UP was always seen as BJP citadel, that was where the party suffered its most humiliating defeat at the hands of the regional Samajwadi Party. Several factors were at work. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta, India's eminent academician wrote in the Foreign Affairs magazine (June 14, 2024) "Voters seemed to be turned off by what was one of the most vicious and vitriolic BJP campaigns of recent years, replete with explicit hate speech directed at India’s minority Muslim community". Even more importantly, BJP, despite its massive welfare schemes that reached out to some 80 percent of its massive population (free food, gas connections, toilets, access to water, and cash transfers), BJP's performance was bedevilled by continuous high unemployment, wage stagnation, and widening inequality. The problem was also exacerbated by BJP's emphasis on winning more than 400 seats turning it into pathways for possible amendment of the Ambedkar-written Constitution that provided for generous reservation provision for people in the lower rungs of Indian society, categorized as Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. At the opposition's suggestion, a fear was sparked among these poorer segments of the Indian population that the BJP with elitist tendencies might just do away with these provisions and leave them high and dry. The election was fought against the backdrop of growing Hindu nationalism and deepening authoritarianism that seemed to assure a sweeping victory for Modi "that would have all but converted India into a one-leader, one-ideology, and one-party state." According to Mehta, "the BJP’s humbling at the ballot box has saved Indian democracy." NOT SO IN NEPAL What happened to the BJP in India in terms of its setback at the polls seems to fit the larger pattern of the self-correcting capacity of democracy in that when parties or politicians fail to deliver, people punish and change them in the next election. But not so in Nepal! While the top three politicians of three major parties, the NC, the UML and the MC, count among the most corrupt in the country, the MC leader Prachanda with even the blood of 17,000 people on his hand and systematically evading transitional justice, all three of them were reelected with massive majorities in the last election. Prachanda's case was even extraordinary. At the time of the last election, Rabi Lamichhane, the popular TV  anchor-turned-politician and chair of the newly established Rastriya Swantra Party was so very popular among the people that any old-time politician stood little chance against him at the polls. Capitalizing on his own popularity, Rabi was even more admired by the people when he threw the gauntlet against none other than the one-time Maoist Supremo Prachanda who, once a very popular politician himself, had since lost all of his earlier charisma of power and persuasion, and was planning to contest election from his home constituency in Chitawan. But the new hero on the scene, Rabi, announced that he too would contest the election from Prachanda's constituency to give the latter a sound defeat. The challenge was real and potent. If that happened, Prachanda did not stand a chance against Rabi. So, to save his skin, Prachanda migrated from Chitawan and went to Gorkha-2 constituency with the help of his former comrade-in-arms and Gorkha native, Baburam Bhattarai, Prachanda contested the last election, and surprisingly, won massively even in this new constituency where he had very little prior familiarity and working relationship with the local voters. By and large, almost all the corrupt and infamous in the three major parties were reelected. So, in contrast to neighboring India, Nepal's democracy did not turn out to be self-correcting. It must further be emphasized that these three corrupt leaders have been reelected not for the first time; they have been reelecting themselves for decades. In other words, Nepal's multiparty democracy, or its Westminster system, has been stagnating ever since it was restored in 1990. FACTORS AT WORK For one thing, huge sums of money are spent during elections. For instance, in the Nepal election of 2017, as per the Election Observation Committee, a sum of NRs 96.9 billion was spent as election campaign finance and together with government expenditure to conduct polls the cost amounted to a whopping NRs 131.62 billion. Of these two categories, the more concerning is the funds splurged by the political parties, much of which is used for directly or indirectly buying votes from the people. While Indian parties too are reported to have spent vast sums of money in campaigning, it seems they have not been able to buy votes as effectively as in Nepal. Two variables could be possibly identified. Firstly, Indian constituencies are much bigger than Nepal's. For instance, the population per constituency in India comes to an average of 2.6 million people which makes it far more difficult to buy votes amidst these vast masses. In Nepal, the corresponding population is only 109,000 on average per constituency which makes it far easier for money to make rounds amidst this limited number of people. Secondly, India is far more urbanized than Nepal. Amidst large urban voters, it is the performance of the parties that seem to matter. For instance, in the last 2022 election, the alienated urban voters elected independent candidates in local elections in a few urban centres like Kathmandu, Dharan and Dhangadi. In contrast, rural voters, who also happen to be poorer than their urban counterparts seem more amenable to traditional forces of group and kinship loyalties including attraction to cash. It is this factor that seems to have played a crucial role in returning our rich and corrupt politicians in the last election, thus making our democracy stagnate over the decades. PROSPECT FOR CHANGE As mentioned above, while India's democracy seems self-correcting, Nepal's is not. The same old faces, now totally tarnished in their image, are managing to get reelected over and over again, even as they become brazenly more corrupt to make money to fund their own election and those of their party members and more. Nepal's democracy has turned into a stubborn and self-perpetuating vicious cycle that has only made people's lives increasingly miserable and difficult. However, Nepal does have tremendous experience in terms of the fact that genuine democracy-- i.e. a system of representative governance under which elected officials find themselves in a position with the compulsion to be inescapably accountable to the people--does deliver. For instance, the nationwide network of forest user groups--in which all forest users are members and control the elected officials from deviating from their duties--have not only regenerated our devastated forest wealth, the FUGs have established themselves as the major financing institutions too for funding various local development activities in the communities. The lesson here is that in our kind of feudalistic social order, it is the direct democracies that work. So, the challenge for us is to restructure the Westminster system that we have into a system that builds on direct democracies at the base and makes the higher tiers accountable to these grassroots democracies. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect People’s Review’s editorial stance.