Now the Prime Minister has landed in such a political soup that his exit is the only path ahead
The nation was in deep slumber when two of the largest political parties in the Parliament, the Nepali Congress (NC) and the Unified Marxist-Leninist (UML), surprisingly tied the political knot on Monday last week to form a coalition at midnight. These parties did not see eye to eye most of the time apart during a few compulsive occasions like when the country was ravaged by the earthquake and the need of promulgating the new constitution. The parties which worked hand in glove to usher democracy into the country in the nineties always tried their best to edge each other out of power. They did not care even if it meant creating a situation of the tail wagging the dog by forming a coalition with the smaller Rastriya Prajatantra Party and conceding the coveted post of Prime Minister to its leaders Surya Bahadur Thapa and Lokendra Bahadur Chand.
This instance of the tail wagging the dog also entered republican Nepal. Consequently, Puspa Kamal Dahal, the leader of the Maoist Centre (MC), continued to lead the government despite being third in the Parliament by exploiting the political animosity between the NC and the UML in the Parliament. Such an incident had also occurred in Mauritius. Anerood Jugnauth of the Militant Socialist Movement became the Prime Minister by exploiting the rivalry existing between the Labour Party (LP) and the Mauritian Militant Party for 14 long years. This miraculous domination of the smaller party over the bigger ones came to an end in 1995 when the LP and MMM entered into a political alliance as have the NC and UML now. Nearer home, Nitish Kumar is enacting similar scenes in Bihar, India.
The maxim that one can fool a person all the time or all the persons some of the time but not all the people all the time appears to have come true after the NC and UML realised their political folly. Now the Prime Minister has landed in such a political soup that his exit is the only path ahead for him. Like a drowning man catching at a straw, the Prime Minister is hanging by the slender thread of the United Socialist Party and the Rastriya Swotantra Party (RSP), because its strength is far less than required.
The political coalition has been a kind of evil necessity in Nepal due to very little or no possibility to secure a majority going by the present constitutional dispensation. This has also been the case in other countries as well. For example, in Africa, more than half of the countries are having some or the other kind of political coalition. Such a coalition is based on the theories of size and ideology as well as institutionalism.
Theory based on size and ideology is further subdivided into office seeking and policy seeking ones. The office seeking theory believes that the main goal of the political parties is to secure power. For them, the government formation scenario is a win-lose scene in which cabinet portfolios are the pay offs. For this, they use the minimal winning hypothesis which pleads for the participation of a few political parties as it is easier to divide the portfolios and also to reach a consensus.
The policy-based theories, however, focus on the participation of parties with similar ideology or the nearest ideologies. The institutionalism theories point at the social cleavage-related factors, such as race, religion, cast and gender. Though these notions have now significantly been lesser in democracies, they, nevertheless, continue to exercise influence in some way or the other.
The former coalition of the UML and the MC was policy based as these parties call themselves communists even if found rarely so in practice. The present coalition of the NC and UML is, however, office seeking as these two parties profess to different ideologies. Whilst the NC believes in democratic socialism, the UML believes in communism.
The sudden change of heart between the NC and UML has raised many political eyebrows. They have ascribed it to the deteriorating socio-economic state of the country, glaringly marked by the escapade of all the youths, making the country an abode of the senior citizens, and the failure to spend the development budget thereby damping the pace of development. They want to address it through the formation of a national government comprising of as many parties as possible and then the amendment of the constitution as it needs a two-thirds majority.
There are, however, some who think that the duo learnt that the MC and RSP were contemplating opening the files that would implicate the leaders of the NC and UML in corruption and then send them behind bars, ultimately giving birth to this premature delivery.
If it is true, the double-edged sword initially aimed at the NC and UML supremos by the MC and RSP may now turn against themselves due to their alleged involvement in the Cantonment Allowance as well as the Cooperative Scams, respectively. But political observers opine that it will not have any meaning unless it comes a full circle by being extended to the present coalition leaders for their alleged implication in the Wide Body and the Din Bandhu Tea state scams.
It remains to be seen what kind of constitution amendment the NC and UML have in mind. If they seek to restore the monarchy and the Hindu state as well as annul federalism, which the Rastriya Prajatantra Party has put forward as a precondition for supporting it in order to form a national government, it will give pretext to the MC to mount a rebellion as it did in the nineties, which the country can least afford. The constitution amendment mooted by the newly-weds will receive support from the people only if they are convinced that it is meant for nation building and not for self-serving.
