Will there be polls this April?

By Akhilesh Tripathi
Posted on: 2008-02-11 09:35:06 at kantipuronline.com

WILL THE CA elections, which have already been postponed twice in the past, take place this time around, on April 10? This is a question which, apparently, everybody is asking everybody in Nepal these days, without anybody being able to give the answer with any degree of certainty. Nobody is sure. For everybody clearly knows that the major reasons which caused the past deferrals of the much-touted polls are very much still there. To make matters worse, some new and seemingly even more dangerous anti-election factors have surfaced in the meantime.
Yes, of course, the only kind of people who appear to be optimistic and are publicly claiming with full determination that the crucial polls will be held this April are the ruling seven-party lot including the prime minister, home minister, other ministers and leaders (Well, they were making the same tall claim, expressing the same degree of determination on the previous two occasions as well!). However, the simple reality is, the people are not convinced. They don’t believe the politician’s promise. Interestingly, even some seven-party politicians doubt the possibility of the polls during private conversations.
The seven-party 23-point agreement reached in December last year that resulted in the proclamation of Nepal as a “federal democratic republic” by the interim parliament may have ended the misunderstandings and differences among the ruling parties, providing the Maoists a good pretext to rejoin the government, and rekindling hope for holding the CA election in some political sections. But this agreement, too, like other previous SPA-Maoists accords and understandings, was based on the wrong and prejudiced notion that the seven parties were all that mattered in this country and that anything could be done if the seven parties including the Maoists were on one side. This agreement especially left the agitating parties and groups in the country’s southern plains feeling ignored and neglected once again as it had utterly failed to address their demands.
Perhaps such surface gestures led to the formation of what we now have in the form of the United Madhesi Democratic Front- an alliance of Mahantha Thakur’s Terai-Madhes Democratic Party, Upendra Yadav’s Madhesi People’s Rights Forum and Rajendra Mahato’s Sadbhavana Party—that is openly threatening to foil the polls if their six-point demand is not met.
Not to mention the nearly two dozen armed outfits which have mushroomed in the past few months, leaving the situation in the Terai region really appalling with their gun and bomb tactics. One group calls a bandh in one district, while another in some other district. And this is happening almost everyday. Sometimes, the whole of Terai is brought to a total standstill.
Amid all this, the home ministry can do nothing except act like a mute spectator. A legitimate government agency looking helpless. So much so that even the recent seven-party electoral campaigns in many of the Terai towns—though they were claimed to be held amid tight security—were not free from bombings. What kind of real message does this infiltration give? Do these bombings give the people any hope? How can you hold an election as crucial as the one to a Constituent Assembly in such a situation? Even if you can somehow, who will believe that they were held in a free and fair manner?
Leave the elections aside for a while, what’s happening to the state’s supplies system? Used to the long serpentine queues for fuel that have become an almost veritable landmark, do the people have the time to think about the polls?
Nobody had perhaps imagined that the country would be in a situation it is in today within less than two years after the historic popular uprising of April 2006. Worse, the country’s slide towards anarchy and instability could further continue, giving the twice-postponed CA polls a fat chance of success this April too.
There is, however, an even uglier and undemocratic side to the “historic” 23-point agreement and the resulting republic declaration by the interim parliament. A nominated body, which the current interim parliament essentially is, cannot impose a mandatory directive on the assembly of the people’s elected representatives, that is, the constituent assembly. An elected constituent assembly cannot be reduced to the status of a mere implementing body. But unfortunately, the ruling alliance and the nominated MPs have done just that.
There is nothing more democratic in a democracy than to seek the people’s mandate to decide issues of national importance.
The interim constitution issued last year had already clipped all powers and privileges of the monarch, depriving him of any formal/informal role in state affairs. What was wrong with the earlier constitutional provision which said the fate of the monarchy would be decided by the first meeting of a democratically-elected constituent assembly? What made the seven-party leaders take the Nepalese people’s sovereign right into their own hands?
To take such decisions in the name of the people without actually and exactly knowing the people’s mandate is doubtlessly undemocratic. No one should forget that an imposed change is not sustainable.
On the other hand, all this has only opened the door and encouraged other several groups and parties—on the margins or otherwise—to put forward new demands to even derail the CA polls or otherwise. The simple logic that is being attached to these ever-increasing demands is-- “If you don’t have to wait for the CA polls to declare the country a federal republic, why on earth do you need the very same polls to meet our demands?”
The ruling alliance doesn’t have a convincing answer.