Perhaps the one silver lining in this dark dismal cloud of growing discontentment is the fact that all this sentiment is an indicator of the people of Nepal beginning to see political parties as their representatives and, hence, taking an interest in their activities and subsequently becoming frustrated at their lack of actions. That is an essence of democracy – understanding that we, the people have the right to determine our governance and to hold our representatives accountable to us. However, we also need to understand that this anger and name calling and the desire for rapid change have its root in the prevalent culture of activism. Driven by the success of overthrowing the monarchy and the increasingly successful bid for social inclusion amongst other things brought to fruit by activism, we might be guilty of impatience. Instead of patience and effort that is required in state building, we might be looking for quick gratification and thereby pushing for unrealistic quick results. Our political party leaders are no saints but let´s think twice before consigning them to the devil.
The concept of accountability is the idea of being responsible and answerable to someone. In the feudal structure that our society is used to one is answerable to the person higher up in the hierarchy. However, in a democratic framework, political parties and leaders should be responsible to those who have elected them and vested them with responsibilities and powers – the constituencies they are representing. The question is, are our representatives accountable to us? Political parties must endeavor to become more accountable to the public. Certain measures can be taken in that regard.
The first step must be to make the government more stable. Ever since 1951 we have had an astonishing 35-plus prime ministers; a rate of one PM in a little under every 21 months. The sheer number indicates the instability of and upheaval in our political situation over the years. In order to improve and ensure accountability political parties need to first bring stability. Firstly, granted that the tug-o-war ´diplomacy´ tactics of our giant neighbors have played a huge role in contributing to this instability, the political parties need to endeavor to take proactive and deliberative measures to manage the complex international relations. No longer can we sit on our behinds and have foreign ´diplomacy´ fed to us.
Secondly, in this race for pulling the rug from under the opposition´s legs and tripping even one´s own party colleagues to become prime minister, the political party leaders seem to be further alienating themselves from the constituencies and the public they are meant to be representing. The position to state power is practically up for grabs for anyone who can muster a relatively considerable alliance (think how the past two prime ministers brokered their positions) within the political parties and not because they have been given a mandate by the public (think Madhav Kumar Nepal). A directly elected head of state – be it a PM or a President would counter this problem. One solution present constituent assembly is deliberating is: A head of state directly elected by the people in order to eliminate the chances for political leaders to broker for the post and the people from being saddled with a person as a head of state whom we never voted for. Nevertheless, this is not a panacea for all our troubles.
Another measure to increase accountability is to move toward decentralization in governance. Our history is one of a long period of centralized and unitary governance – not just the Rana regime and the monarchy but even the subsequent democratically elected political parties have favored this. Even the early attempts at local governance under the Panchayat rule was one in name alone as almost all of the resources like budget and personnel for the local units were being allocated and thus controlled by the center. The 1998 Local Self Governance Act attempted to equip the local bodies with unprecedented rights and duties. However, these promising new developments took a huge blow as elections to Village Development Committees and District Development Committees were suspended in 2002 and has been neglected since. Several political leaders and analysts alike have explained that in the face of graver issues like peace process and drafting a constitution, several other issues like these will diminish in priority. Nevertheless once these more pressing matters are settled, the parties need to understand that the issue of local governance and hence decentralization cannot be shelved for too long. In addition, transforming into a federal state necessitates the need to draw up new and comprehensive structures and framework of local governance. The idea behind federalism is to divide governance between the central government and constituent political units (states or otherwise). In keeping with this essence, parties should ensure that local governing authorities and representatives should no longer be ´tourist´ representatives who don´t even live in the constituencies they represent and settle in the centre.
Perhaps, understanding this need of decentralization major political parties have tried to reflect this within their party composition as well. Two major parties, Nepali Congress and CPN-UML carried out intra-party elections in line with the amendments made in their respective party constitutions.
Finally, the political parties need to have value-based underpinnings. Blatant impunity, corruption and flouting of values add fuel to the fire of public anger. Dubious fund raising methods need to be countered with transparency in financial transactions. The funding mechanism and transactions of political parties is perhaps the most shrouded in ambiguity. Where does the fund come from? How is it raised? How is it utilized? These processes need to be transparent. The contributions made by party cadets are made in a relatively transparent manner; receipts are made out in the name of the contributors. However, it is when the private donations come in that the transactions become more and more ambiguous. Huge amount of money is poured into political parties by business houses and individuals and almost every other rupee goes unaccounted for. These funds are then utilized to create private nest eggs by party leaders or worse to influence future elections – intra-party or otherwise. The financial waters get even murkier as foreign funding to political leaders and the consequential issues of foreign leverage come into party politics. It is a widely speculated concern and that the fund is given to individuals and not to the parties as such, but it is the leaders who determine the party policies. How much truth is there in these speculations is a matter open to discussion but one must remember there is no smoke without fire. Backed by the power of such unaccounted finances parties can and have further veered off from being accountable to the people.
As mentioned earlier, the media daily regales us with yet another manifestation of power tussles, party fragmentation, intra-party fractions and fights. Every party seems to be plagued and at this rate, where previously united parties seem to be cracking under old and new fault lines, and new breakaway factions engendering their own breakaway factions, we seem to be ridiculously close to one-man parties. However, despite the utter helpless sluggishness of the current political progress and what seems like a veritable standstill and even a regression in political development, we must not forget that we have made a huge progress such as ousting the monarchy, ending the decade-long civil strife, a historical election to the Constituent Assembly etc. All these moves are quite significant. What we need to do is take this momentum further ahead. Ensuring and improving accountability is one such step. From feudal lords to sovereign citizens, military might to human rights, traditional rule to representative governance, elitist control to social inclusion, advancement in political belief has changed the role and norms of institutions in many nations around the world. And there’s no reason why we can’t do so, provided we hold the leaders accountable for their actions.
mohan.manandhar@nitifoundation.org
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