The ultimate wish of every potentate is to secure a place in history. After his trip to Europe, Jang ordered the codification of Hindu laws extant in the country. Modeled after the Napoleonic Code, the Muluki Ain—literally the law of the land—turned out to be a 1,400-page tome. Since it would have been impossible to implement such a vast manual in toto, Jang’s successors initiated the tradition of covering inconvenient provisions with a layer of opaque paint. Thus was born the Rana technique of amending the constitution by obliterating problematic clauses with Harital paste. The tradition endures. We now have a High Level Political Mechanism to smoothen constitutional glitches.
Since Nepal is the oldest state of South Asia, it’s but natural that we have a very long constitutional history. Even if Jang’s experiments with a written set of laws is ignored, Premier Padma Shamsher promulgated the first constitution of Nepal in 1948 when newly independent states of India and Pakistan were still functioning according to colonial charters. In subsequent years, constitutions were made and unmade every few years.
The interim constitution of 1951 promised a road to republic but it led to Shah restoration instead. Famed British constitutionalist Sir Ivor Jennings was one of the brains behind democratic constitution of 1959, a document that promised constitutional monarchy and parliamentary supremacy but failed to function long enough to institutionalise anything. Under the influence of Cold War strategists of US universities, King Mahendra granted the Panchayat constitution in 1962 to establish what was then called grassroots or basic democracy. The royal charter was mutilated beyond recognition over the next three decades before being dumped into the dustbins of history in 1990 after a successful people’s movement for restoration of multi-party democracy.
The Constitution of Kingdom of Nepal, 1990 was touted as one of the best documents of its kind in the world. It probably was so, because the entrenched elite of Nepali society began concerted attempts to undermine it from the day it came into effect. Ultimately, when the constitution failed, the institution of monarchy fell with it in 2007 and the country got another set of interim laws. If everything goes on schedule, we shall have our seventh constitution in six decades. That’s a new constitution almost every nine years which matches our record of staging at least one popular movement per decade.
Unless earnest attempts are made to establish what Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) called ‘the imaginary institution of society’, there is no reason to believe that the fate of republican constitution would be any different from those of monarchic or democratic ones.
When it comes to making laws, the Nepali mind is phenomenally fecund. In the matter of forming constitutions, we are perhaps one of the most creative and productive countries of the world. But when it comes to allowing a constitution to function, our collective impatience is remarkable. Why do constitutions fail to take root into our political soil? Probably we have paid a lot of attention to hardware of democracy—elections, government, separation of power, independence of judiciary and even the notion of rule of law—but more or less ignored the software part that makes the machineries of governance run. Unless earnest attempts are made to establish what Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) called ‘the imaginary institution of society’, there is no reason to believe that the fate of republican constitution would be any different from those of monarchic or democratic ones.
CONCEPTUAL MALNUTRITION
Despite decades of relentless state-sponsored project of creating a national identity, the significance and meaning of being a Nepali remains inchoate at best. Court historians would have us believe that there is a history that we all share. Nothing could be farther from truth. History is mostly the record of what winners have authorized to valorize their kind and paint victims in uncharitable colors. History divides; a society needs myths to unite its diverse elements. Nepal has too much history and too little stories of collective struggles.
Then there are contradictory descriptions that we are expected to fit. Nepalis are supposed to be Hindu, which is hierarchical by definition, and yet be egalitarian. We are said to be of four castes and 36 ethnic categories, but expected to be equally committed to one language, uniform dress and a homogeneous culture. If at all that were desirable or possible, the country would resemble either a garrison or a mental asylum.
Once in a while, a resident elite or a Nostalgic Nepali Overseas—a typical NoNo person—opens the pickle-jar of fermented nationalism, takes a sniff, and begins lamenting the loss of tolerance and eruption of multiple conflicts. Ground realities in Nepal have always been a little more complex. It was never a peaceful nation; peace without justice is an illusion anyway. The concept of justice—the quality of being just and fair—has yet to find favor even among judges of the country who are better at ensuring right to inherited property of the gentry than protecting fundamental freedoms of ordinary Nepalis.
There is no secular monument in the country that every Nepali can claim to be a symbol of collective veneration and common aspirations. What we had instead were memorials to racial hubris that invited their own nemesis in the wake of multiple uprisings. When one after another statues stumbled from their pedestal, it had a cathartic effect on a very large section of the national population. All those empty platforms need new symbols of compromise and consensus. If that fails to materialize, dreams would begin to take divisive shapes. It has been said that monuments resolve in stone contradictions of the nations that erect them. We are still at the stage squabbling over symbols.
The poverty of imagination is most acute among legislatures of the mind: Poets, artistes, littérateurs, dramatists and academics of Nepal have largely remained custodians of parochial Gorkhalis values. The media reinforces the false consciousness of the masses that all the ills of society can be attributed to the only arena where ordinary folks have some say—politics. The natural corollary to that assumption would be that we need yet another adventurer to save us from ourselves.
(Henceforth, this column will appear every fortnight.)
cklal@hotmail.com
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