Can we save Nepal?
The country is passing through a very critical juncture. Foreign powers have become very active and our political leaderships have shamelessly become the agents of the foreign powers. When the foreigners have become a dominating force, the patriotic and nation-loving forces have become very weak.
A democratic system is based on rule of law but in Nepal, parliament, the government, political parties, constitutional bodies, and bureaucracy have become the main organs to violate rule of law. When suspended chief justice Cholendra Shumsher Rana was interrogated by the Impeachment Committee in Parliament, he bluntly denied the allegation against him saying that he had to face the impeachment case when partners in the alliance government were afraid of a possible verdict against the former prime ministers Madhav Nepal and Baburam Bhattarai from the Supreme Court on the Lalitaniwas government land manipulation charge. Again, he blamed the five-party alliance government for registering impeachment against him when the date for the final hearing was fixed on the case against the MPs who quit UML and joined Unified Socialist Party illegally. The suspended chief justice openly challenged the political leaders and MPs being involved in many corruption charges. He also disclosed the reason behind the agitation against him launched by the BAR. He blamed the sitting judges and BAR leaderships bargaining for their share in different government appointments. Rana disclosed a political setting in the court, partisan politics destroying the significance of the court and the role of middlemen/brokers in the court.
Rana openly challenged the existence of the present government which was constituted following a court verdict saying, “if the court verdict under my leadership was wrong, formation of the present government is also questionable!”
We don’t believe, Rana is a clean person but he is one of the characters among the corrupt people in the executive, legislature and judiciary – the major three components of functioning present democracy. Members of the Committee interrogating Rana are also not clean. The present structure of the judiciary is a byproduct of the present partisan politics.
The impeachment prerogative in parliament is being misused time and again as a shield to protect corrupt political leaders.
Earlier, when Lokman Singh Karki, the sitting chair of the Commission for Investigation on Abuse of Authority attempted to catch big fish, an impeachment case was registered against him to save those corrupt leaders.
The present impeachment case against CJ Rana is intended to save Nepal and Bhattarai on the Lalitaniwas land scam and to save the five-party alliance government. Earlier, NC leader Minendra Rijal had also disclosed this episode that when attempts were made to finish Madhav Nepal’s political career, Sher Bahadur Deuba came to rescue him. Rescuing and protecting each other from corruption charges have become the beauty of the present loktantra.
The strength of the present parliament is 275 plus the members in the National Assembly. None of the members attempted to fail the controversial citizenship amendment bill having the provision of promptly granting Nepali citizenship to foreign nationals married to a Nepali citizen. Such a practice doesn’t exist in South Asian countries. We all know, this is just an attempt to please their Indian bosses. We all know that after a few years, the floods of migrated Indian citizens will dominate the indigenous Nepali citizens. When the Parliament is going to expire within two months and when the government has converted into a caretaker one, both the houses in parliament have passed the bill even by discarding the President’s quest. The UML, the main opposition party, could stop ratification of the bill but it also played a double standard.
The economy is the main base of a country. A selfreliant economy is the mirror of the prosperity of a country. But our leaders of the day are intended to destroy our economic base. All the economic indicators have gone negative, still, our Finance Minister Janardan Sharma believes that the economy is taking a proper course and there is no threat of collapse. However, immediately after the Minister’s prediction, the governor of the Nepal Rastra Bank, Maha Prasad Adhikari said that the economy is still not totally out of danger. When the balance of payments went negative and imports increased alarmingly, the government decided to stop imports of some luxury items. It was a good decision of the government as we could survive even
if such items are not imported, but under the pressure of some middlemen and brokers, the government lifted the ban on some items including paying cards. Playing cards are banned in Nepal. Nepal imports above one billion
rupees worth of playing cards from foreign countries. Even if Nepal doesn’t import playing cards, nobody is going to face famine or other problems. Maybe, to collect election funds, the government has decided to allow the import of such items.
The country’s debt burden is continuously increasing. It has increased by 300 billion rupees in one year. According to a recent report published by the Public Debt Management Office, in the previous fiscal year, the total debt of the government crossed 2000 billion rupees, in which foreign debt contributes 1025 billion rupees and domestic debt occupies 986 billion rupees. Compared to the previous year, in the fiscal year 2021/22, Nepal’s total debt has increased by 300 billion rupees as in the year 2020/21, the total debt burden was 1737 billion rupees. As the size of the debt has increased the share of debt in the GDP has also increased by 41.47 percent, which was 40.72 percent in the previous year. The debt burden on every citizen has reached 69 thousand rupees.
As the country has adopted an expensive political system, the government needs debts to manage increased expenditure on the non-productive sector or say functioning of the present system. It has already been proved that the present political structure of federalism, republicanism and secularism has failed in Nepal. If we try to continue further this system, the nation is surely going to collapse. To save the nation, we must abandon the present system; we must take action against those corrupt political leaders; we must end anomalies flourishing in the name of “loktantra”!