The point that I am trying to make is that those whose who are in politics will not notice how much time has been wasted in transition. What matters most to political actors is whether s/he has been able to secure a good position within his/her party or not. One can even argue that a politician will always be into politics even if the country is infinitely in a transitional phase. But let us think about, say, undergraduate students. Three years means a lot to them. And since we are still in the midst of transition and instability, it will have nothing but a negative impact on them.
It is becoming kind of irrelevant whether or not we have the constitution on time. It is almost certain now that the day we have the new constitution is NOT going to be the end of the transition period.
Maybe, every one of us was prepared to invest three years so as to ultimately see a stable Nepal. We all expected that the new constitution would be written and promulgated in two years’ time after the Constituent Assembly (CA) elections and that the country would move towards stability. But now, hardly anyone would disagree that the transition is going to prolong further.
The fundamental objective of CA has already been defeated. Maybe partially, but it has certainly been defeated. We could always have opted for a small group of experts to draft an excellent constitution. The idea behind the CA was that the country would write a constitution through an elected people’s assembly in a process that was inclusive, participatory and democratic, so that people would have faith in the constitution and this faith would generate a collective faith towards nation-building. Due to the political mistrust among key actors, to begin with, the very process of constitution-writing is now viewed by people as a burden. The process has lost credibility. So, even if we have the constitution on time, will it be owned by the people? This is the fundamental question. Hence, it is becoming kind of irrelevant whether or not we have the constitution on time. It is almost certain now that the day we have the new constitution is NOT going to be the end of the transition period.
This sounds pessimistic and painful but Nepal’s political/peace transition appears to be almost indefinite and infinite at the moment. We had a decade of Maoist insurgency as an excuse previously; this was followed by the years of transition. The two combined makes a generation in one’s lifetime. Nepal was 228 years old when the Maoists’ People’s War was launched in 1996. It is now 241 years old and all’s well with this. But think about an individual’s average life span and how much 13 years means to him/her. A significant number of educated youths from Nepal have fled to the West for further education and work. It would be interesting to see from their relatively detached eyes how they interpret the course of national transition by relating it directly with the transition in their own lives.
The political leaders have simply not been able to put their focus on the right priorities. They have even stopped talking about some of the major issues of the peace process. The Army Integration Special Committee has been dysfunctional but people don’t even talk about it. Neither the civil society! The formation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission used to be a major issue but nobody is even talking about it these days. The vice president (well, is he?) is there and isn’t there! It sounded like an important issue when he refused to take oath in the language prescribed by the Supreme Court but now everyone has conveniently forgotten him. These are just examples, which explain where our priorities lie. This only points to a situation where we may have a new constitution – because parties still seem to believe that having it is the end goal – but the country will be no better. What can be more saddening than the fact that three years after the peace process began, we have more questions than answers.
bishnu.sapkota@gmail.com
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