Reviewing

This Weekly emerged several years after the reintroduction of the multiparty system. Ever since we have delved over policy issues. We have stressed that partisan priorities have overwhelmed the government and the business of governance and development have assumed a back seat at the cost of the state. Our analyses have come close to stressing that policy decisions have virtually undermined national potentials to the extent of sabotage. All along, to date, we have been witnessing the virtual withering away of national potentials to the point, now, when our sovereign parliament can decide to coalesce in banding together to prove an elected prime minister constitutionally wrong when he decides unilaterally that conducting parliamentary business is well nigh impossible and so he must be allowed to dissolve the house for fresh elections. The judiciary, of course, proved parliament right. However, parliament is amiss when it does not give the constitutional option of another government. It is thus that parliament too is eroding its prerogative of delivering an elected government. Of course, as is a fact, the constitution can merely give political parties a role in the formation of the government. It cannot envisage a constitutional role for the partisan interests of the many permutations of groups and interests within the political parties. That is for the parties to decide on their own with an eye to insuring that constitutionalism is not defeated by their inherent weaknesses. Well, it has. And, this has been an oft-repeated phenomenon in Nepali politics to the point of sabotaging constitutionalism as we have been saying all along.

Matrika Koirala was outdated way back in the fifties when he surrendered his presidency of the Nepali Congress party amidst demands from his younger brother B. P. Koirala and his coterie at the party’s Janakpur convention. K.P. Oli refuses to back out of his UML presidency and still retains his post as prime minister despite the mess his opposition within the party puts the state and parliament in by his refusal. Prachanda’s Maoist numbers in parliament will have virtually legitimized Oli’s bid to dissolve parliament and conduct elections if he retracts theoretically numerical support for the Oli government and so must work overtime even blatantly wooing his extra-national support to patch up parliamentary numbers to displace Oli from his government seat. Parliament has been stagnant. One can only admire king Mahendra for foreseeing what would have happened to parliament and the constitution had members of the Nepali Congress had decided to oppose president B.P. Koirala’s lone contest to the prime minister’s seat at the Birganj convention in 1959 after his party won an overwhelming majority in the first general elections. He had, after all, unilaterally reversed his public contention that party chairmen could not hold the prime minister’s post. This was how he wrested control of the party from Matrika in the very first place. Oli is wiser than Matrika no doubt. But does this prove he is a more adept democrat than B.P.? Merely a decade and a half earlier, Sher Bahadur Deuba had to concede defeat and rejoin B.P.’s Girija Congress after his splinter unsuccessfully defied the party president. One might well ask: what of democracy and constitutionalism now?