After all, the head of state had once shown little qualm in overruling the head of government to restore a dismissed army chief through midnight missives. The prime minister reportedly withstood intense cultural, diplomatic, economic, political and social pressures to have a chief secretary of his party’s choice. The chair of Constituent Assembly had shown exemplary patience in running a deeply divided house. However, all their convictions, resoluteness and passion combined proved inadequate to withstand the force exerted by a single decision of the judiciary.[break]
The phase of appropriating blame is pointlessly being prolonged. Long after vacuous politicos of major parties are done with their demagoguery, researchers would find enough evidence in the records of CA that the mother institution of federal democratic republic died as much of persistent attacks from remnants of the ancien regime in public life as from the sheer incompetence of vanguard of the new order. More than mistreatment, it was the neglect of midwifes that caused the demise of the CA just before it could deliver the long-awaited baby: A new constitution.
Autopsy has its uses in medical sciences, but only when death of a patient has been fully established. It seems that Dr. Rambaran Yadav still harbors some hope that a live baby can be retrieved from the womb of the dead mother. However, his diagnosis—lack of consensus—sounds simplistic to the point of being naive. Consequently, squabbling politicos treat his prescriptions with the mock seriousness displayed towards their family physicians.
There is no worthy elderly that hasn’t heard and ignored advice for lifestyle changes: “Increase physical activities, control diet, take medicines, abstain from excesses, spend time with family and friends, avoid conflict to reduce stress, lower ambitions to more realistic levels, etc.” Dr. Yadav has an additional prescription: Forge consensus. Little wonder, politicos observe obligatory meetings at Shital Niwas with the resigned exasperation often reserved for hospital visits.
Supreme Court can declare any of PM’s decisions unconstitutional as the interim constitution did not foresee CA’s dissolution without a constitution.
Other than causing spectacular devastations along urban arteries, Dr. Baburam Bhattarai is yet to show that he once excelled in the studies of urban settlements and human civilization. His learned understanding of causes of underdevelopment too has failed to find an outlet in any of government’s programs or policies. While it’s true that the old must first fall for the new to arise, realistic reconstruction plans must necessarily precede demolition drives. The scholarly premier is probably relying upon parliamentary conventions when he insists that he would vacate Baluwatar only when a legitimate successor has been agreed upon.
Of the triumvirate that let the CA bleed to death, only Subas Nembang has shown that it is possible to be a practicing professional and an astute politician without burdening one’s conscience with possible contradictions.
Nembang probably loves the life of locution in the name of law. Compensations of being an influential legal practitioner are also not too unattractive. However, the once formidable parliamentarian is too smart not to have realized that irrespective of the limelight hogged by Shital Niwas in recent days, the arena of politics in the coming months is going to be the premises of courts just outside Singh Durbar secretariat complex. Rather than presidential whims or the holy grail of political consensus, the courts would probably direct the course of politics for quite some time.
IN THE NAME OF LAW
In the age before the Temple Run and the Angry Birds had enslaved the young and tied them to their hand-held devices, print dinosaurs devoured Asterix, Archie, Tintin and similar other fare for the heart and mind. The eponymous protagonist of the Tintin series is such a mature teenager that he never needs to grow up. Captain Haddock, the alter ego of the young hero, entertains readers with his alcoholism and buffoonery.
What really separates Captain Haddock from lay mortals is a seemingly endless supply of epithets, insults and exclamations. Coming from a sailor, allusions to the ills of barnacles and typhoons make perfect sense. Intriguingly however, the old mariner lumps ‘technocrat’ with his other swearwords such as squawking popinjay, steamrollers, swine, sycophant, terrapins and toads. Apparently, technocracy did not have the halo that it was to acquire later.
Science is systemic knowledge. Engineering transforms that knowledge into practical applications. Technology goes a step further: It turns applications into useful and marketable tools. If politics is indeed science, as adherents of Weberian social analyses and Marxists theorists alike seem to aver, then the constitution and laws are its engineering derivatives and courts and legal practitioners some of its many practical devices.
Neutrality and efficiency, not values and principles, are the self-claimed strengths of technocracy. That could be the reason dictators of Cold War decades loved technocracy so much. At one point of time, 89 percent of politburo members in the Soviet Union were claimed to have been graduate engineers. They produced some of the best chess players, Olympians, astronauts, and space scientists but fell to the fatal charms of blue jeans, blues-rock and blue cheese among other products of pleasure.
Laws can do nothing to those that don’t honor them. Mahendra tore the constitution with disdain. Birendra got around constitutional provisions with the help of his minions in the legal fraternity. Gyanendra used a single clause to abuse an entire document. The constitution, however, becomes a powerful weapon in the hands of courts when technocrats are at the helms of government rather than hardboiled politicians.
The Supreme Constitutional Court dissolved an elected and Islamist-dominated Parliament in the name of national interest in Egypt. The Supreme Court of Pakistan unseated a Prime Minister enjoying the confidence of the house. Earlier, the court in Nepal had gone ahead and declared the use-by date of the CA itself.
At this stage, it is merely speculative. However, whatever decision the president or the prime minister takes, the Supreme Court can easily declare it unconstitutional because the interim constitution has not foreseen a situation when the CA would be dissolved without promulgating a constitution. Not only that, even if an election is held and results announced—either of a new CA or the new parliament—the court can easily deny its existence on the grounds of constitutionality.
THE ALTERNATIVE SOLUTION
The tragedy of politics in Kathmandu is that most rumours here ultimately turn out to be true. A technocratic model tried out in Bangladesh—a non-party government backed by the security forces to conduct elections—is the talk of the town with several noted peace activists canvassing the support of influential diplomatic missions to become the handpicked premier fronting for the army. It may appear harebrained scheme in a country as thoroughly politicised as Nepal, but there is no telling the extent to which the Permanent Establishment can go to prolong its hegemony.
Would the courts sanction such an arrangement? Perhaps the question itself is an explanation of contemporary political predicaments.
cklal@hotmail.com
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