Election farce 2.0 under Nepal's zombie democracy

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THE PARTY CORRUPTS IN THE FRAY

As Nepal approaches another round of elections in three weeks, the one single complaint on the part of the people nationwide has been that Nepal is totally ruined due to massive and unbridled corruption at the hands of the politicians every single one of whom is known to be recklessly corrupt, many of them with unaccounted blood of thousands of fellow countrymen in their hands.

But as before, this time too none of the parties nor their politicians in the fray talk of corruption, much less about the imperative of controlling it as a condition for development that their chronically hollow promises seem to hold out. To add to the irony -and the hilarity -- of the situation, the recently released NC manifesto has promised to "strengthen the mechanism for corruption control", knowing full well that their own politicians in the government have made sure that the chief of CIAA, the constitutional anti-corruption watchdog -- that has all the necessary, even draconian authority to deal with corruption -- is first emasculated as a condition of his appointment so that he does not bother the top leaders almost all of whom have cases standing in the CIAA that accuse them of having defrauded the exchequer in tens of billions.

For instance, Prachanda has a case that alleges that he defrauded the government for tens of billions by charging the government for Maoist combatants who never existed. Similarly, KP Oli too reportedly has a case in the CIAA, now known as the wide-body scam, for masterminding the swindling of the national flag carrier of several billion by massively overinvoicing the purchase of two wide-body aircraft. Therefore, if the NC were, to be honest in its manifesto, it could have simply said two things. First, henceforth none of their members would indulge in corruption. Secondly, they would also go after those fellow members who have amassed vast sums of unaccounted wealth. They should then also say that they would start with their own president, Sher Bahadur Deuba, whose property declaration has not been made public despite the constitutional imperative to the contrary, and it reportedly vastly exceeds his known sources of income.

The particular tragedy for Nepal this time around in the case of NC's farcical manifesto is that its drafting team also included Nepal's first Harvard-trained economist, Swarnim Wagle, who unabashedly also went before the media recently to claim that the manifesto contained only realistic and attainable agenda. What a shame! But the poor CIAA chief, a former bureaucrat, limits himself to preying on small-time offenders of just a few lack rupees. Clearly, he cannot even look into the eyes of the big-time mafia politicians. Another shame for the country!

One wonders how these bureaucrats, who had taken their oath over the holy Gita for impartial and judicious governing, live with the realization that they have purposely committed this unforgivable dereliction of duty for the rest of their lives as they steadily move towards their eternal home.

To add to that disgrace, most of the CIAA chiefs in the past have been corrupt themselves. While at least one of them is living in self-exile, many have been incarcerated and are now fighting court cases. Needless to say, these very top fraudsters of the major parties had, as per media reports, sold those positions to the highest bidders in the first place.

ELECTORAL ALLIANCE: CARTEL OF THE INTRANSIGENT FRAUDSTERS

There are two distinctive differences this time around regarding the election. Firstly, this massive brigade of corrupt political thugs are divided into two camps led by two major parties, the NC and the UML. Secondly, most of the voters are sick and tired of the gimmickry of these political thugs and have made up their minds not to vote for them. Therefore, these parties are forced to depend on the support of the limited population of party loyalists. So, to make sure that those votes are not wasted by too many parties competing against each other, they have run into electoral alliances, the one headed by NC being the bigger of the two.

While the essence of political parties is the ideology they embrace, these alliances in Nepal are so "wildly inclusive" that the NC, theoretically social democrats and sworn enemy to the communists from BP's days, now under the stewardship of the NC's biggest money-making machine, Sher Bahadur Deuba, is now bedfellows to Prachanda's Maoist Centre--whose guerrillas had slaughtered thousands of NC cadres during their decade-long campaign of bloodletting. These two alliances also include a Madhesi faction each whose leaders had abortively colluded with India's RAW in 2008 with a view of dismembering Nepal by declaring "Independent Madhesh". While these Madhesi thugs should have been cooling their heels behind the bar for treason, they too pass for being "respectable fellow politicians" in this alliance led by the two big parties.

There is only one thing they have in common in these alliances: they all want to retain power and make more money.

THE BALEN ATTRACTION

However, what is palpable nationwide is the alienation of the people from these thug politicians. This has recently been spectacularly proven by the win of the independent candidate, engineer and rapper Balen Shah as Kathmandu mayor, and Harka Sampang in Dharan.

To capitalize on the widespread estrangement of the people from the politicians, and seemingly the emergence of a proindependent wave, there is now an unprecedented number of independent candidates in the fray, as a matter of fact, too many are concentrated in Kathmandu constituencies.

But these swatantras too are proving to be a problem by themselves. While some of them are known names with known agendas such as senior advocate Bal Krishna Neupane in a constituency in Kathmandu, most of these independents do not have any ideology as such which is supposed to be the bedrock of democratic politics.

There is even a Swatantra Party in the fray that loudly claims that they are out there to change "awastha" (living condition), and not "byabastha" (political system), whereas most of our political ills happen to be generated by the very ill-conceived byabastha. Our experiences have shown time and again that amidst our rural, impoverished and uneducated voters, one wins only by buying votes. And that has been the alibi argued by these corrupt politicians to blatantly make money in office through illegal means.

Making a pointed reference to this inherent fallacy, anthropologist Suresh Dhakal, Associate Professor in TU has taken one such candidate, in particular, Rabindra Misra, to task in an article in vernacular Himal newsmagazine (Kartik, 2079). While Misra has been in the fray with the slogan of "Bichar bhanda mathi desh" (country above ideology), it is hollow in that it has no substantive message as to how he would improve the current horrible state of affairs in Nepal.

THE LURKING "TEHRAN" CATASTROPHE: SECURITY FORCES BETTER WATCH OUT IN TIME

The point here is that in our zombie or fake democracy, whichever side wins this upcoming election, the corrupt party politicians or ideologyfree independents, it is going to do nothing to solve the grievous problems the country has been facing forever and ever: hunger, massive unemployment, hopeless health and education system, chronically backward agriculture and miniscule industrial and service sector, all of which are driving the nation's workforce to foreign lands, even as these politicians continue to fatten themselves at the cost of people and country. Given the palpable and widespread alienation of the people from the chronically corrupt governing system, the situation in the country is clearly explosive potentially, waiting for a spark for the country to descend into total chaos and anarchy, as has lately happened in Iran against the oppressive and corrupt reign of the ayatollas. The death of a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian Mahsa “Zina” Amini in police torture and custody provided the spark.

In Iran, just about every single citizen, women in particular are in the streets, calling for the "overthrow of a corrupt, brutal regime" as reported by The Economist. Hundreds have been killed by security forces, but there is no sign of the let up in this uprising. Lately, the most feared armed forces of the country, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps too has stepped into the scene with its own warnings and all that, but that has done little to send the women and protesters back home. It is not that Nepal is not familiar with such national scale disruptions; it has suffered them at regular intervals at great cost to the people and country. And in the end, it has been the security forces that have come out of the poor cropper.

As a matter of fact, one can discern a very inverse relationship between proper law and order situation and the unlikelihood of disruptive rebellions: the better the law and order condition, the less likelihood that the country would plunge into massive disorder, the latter requiring the security forces to go about killing people in their bid to control it.

Therefore, given Nepal's unique geopolitical situation between two mutually hostile powers, China and India, the country has to figure out its own solutions as to how to reorder Nepal's politics so that its democratic order will cease to become the government of the corrupt, by the corrupt and for the corrupt, and in its place, it does genuinely reemerge itself as the government of, by and for the people.