Why did the party fare so badly in the CA election? Instead of trying to cook up reasons for its failure, why doesn’t the NC do some honest soul-searching? Let me examine critically a few major actors and factors responsible for the NC’s fall from grace.
Leadership crisis
The NC leadership does not respect and promote vital qualities such as integrity, dedication, humility, creativity and fairness. A wannabe NC leader has to hang around a key leader and will be rewarded in due course. But the wannabe has to propagate the influence of the key leader by recruiting new followers who will form a coterie of cheerleaders to project him/her as an indispensable figure in the party. In fact, coterie-based politics in the NC produced many pseudo-leaders and both the NC and the country have suffered as a result.
There are about a few dozen such pseudo-leaders who are party central committee members. Interestingly, most of them were once rejected by the voters but handpicked by ‘their’ leaders.
In order to regain public trust, which is the only factor in successful politics, the NC needs to develop a bottom-up leadership model. In the coming days and months, people would like to see how the NC cleans up its mess and eliminates the mistrust between the party and various socio-political stakeholders.
Organizational ineffectiveness
Many well-wishers of the NC believe that the party is now weaker than it was before 1990. How can people expect anything new from a political party that is ever reluctant to hold its conventions and central committee meetings! These once-in-a-while formal meetings deliver nothing but half-baked ideas. Just imagine a party that has not been able to elect its parliamentary party leader almost one year after the CA election! It is painful to see the erosion of democratic values and norms in a party that claims to be the very torchbearer of democracy.
Indecisiveness and ad-hocism have become synonymous with the NC, thus hindering it from devising good strategies and programs. Will the NC be able to sustain itself by recycling its traditional membership bases? What’s the use of its so-called active membership criteria except for barring certain young enthusiasts from competing with the existing leadership? Are there any programs and policies to attract the new generation to the party?
Idealism vs individualism
The NC’s socio-political and economic models are being subjected to unofficial individualistic interpretations. Take an example: NC’s manifesto for the CA election was mute about restructuring and the republican setup. One had to assume it implicitly, though the party’s highest policymaking forum – Mahasamiti – had formed and approved an official view. Had the party machinery been functioning in democratic ways, such issues could have been dealt with quite easily. Unfortunately that did not happen because of the lack of understanding of the significance of planning, policymaking and programming in the top-down coterie model.
Party ownership
A final question is about the party’s ownership: is the NC a party of a few elites (both new and old) or of the common people? The NC like other democratic political parties in the world is public property, but its leadership coterie is enjoying a free ride at the cost of the present and future generations in Nepal who admire democratic values.
If a party with democratic ideals fails to sustain itself, then days of doom are a certainty. The NC can rise again only if it sincerely adopts a bottom-up approach to leadership development. All party portfolios from the grassroots to the topmost level must be filled through elections. Simply by looking at how Barack Obama succeeded in winning the US presidential election, one can understand that it is only a truly bottom-up model that ultimately works.
Related story
Destiny and Destination
-1782782519.webp)
