KATHMANDU, NOVEMBER 23
If every man were good enough to rule the state, said Socrates, election would be unnecessary when people would choose their leaders by lot, and, if voting changed anything, said Baige in 1983, they would make it illegal.
If the first situation looks utopian for Nepal, rendering an election not just necessary but the choice of a certain type of ideal electoral regime, the second condition remains an ever-receding mirage, where the political parties and the governing regimes that have come and gone in the past seven decades have stubbornly refused to restructure the mode of electing the representatives to the parliament in a radical sense.
The overall impact that this refusal has brought is forestalling a major political shift in Nepal's evolution as a modern state of the 21st century. The first major political shift came in Nepal's evolution in 1950 when the people's status changed from Subjecthood to Public (from the King's Raiti to Janata). That the political parties still regard the people and refer to them as Janata suggests the second shift in that evolution,from their public status to that of citizens, is yet to come. This civic shift will, however, be uphill and of consequential significance to make the state genuinely democratic and capable of developing its potentials in an optimal sense. That shift in turn will demand a radical restructuring of the whole electoral regime here, an issue discussed endlessly in the course of every case of constitutional engineering.
The impact this negligence has brought is there for everyone to see, suffer from, complain and criticise. Take the polls to the House which has just happened, for one example. The changes in Nepal's electoral regime that have been made so far have pruned off the leaves and branches but have left the roots of the problems almost intact. This also explains the central paradox of Nepal's elections: there is hardly any other political institution so central, so significant, and so frequently emulated, but at the same time, there is hardly any other institution, which has been more abused, misused or under-used impacting lethally on the evolution of Nepal as a democratic and developing state.
The foregoing arguments set the background to propose the core premise of this article: the need for an effective, efficient and efficacious electoral system, the rationale being that the existing electoral regime bears none of the three features just cited, which makes it not just sterile, but also deleterious to the evolution of this new-born republic. The 21st century demands electronic voting by citizens that alone can render voting not only easy, quick and meaningful, to make the electoral regime not only really representative, responsive and responsible, but also one which could minimise electoral quarrels and conflicts at the same time, saving the nation's financial investments of billions of rupees.
But the political parties will be least interested in installing electronic voting by mobiles now virtually available to every Nepali voter, because the stake of the parties lies in defending the status quo. The higher stake, here, of concern to every citizen, however, is of the whole country, rather than of just the parties to the election.
The clearest evidence of the parties as spoilers in the game of electoral stake-building came in the resistance they recently posed to the 'No, Not Again' campaign imbued with the spirit of NOTA ('None of the Above') agenda, aborted by these same parties earlier, and it is obvious they are interested least even in installing Initiative, Recall, Referendum, or even Ombudsperson, because they remain stakeholders of a long-outdated mode of electoral regime.
Given such a context, what is the recent election to the House going to unfold, one wonders? Very little.
Obviously, certain changes have been made nearly 400 polling booths rendered otherwise able-friendly; the National Election Commission and META cooperating to control dissemination of false information and hate campaigns through the social media; the Electoral Code focused on civilianising mass voting behaviour; and prisoners now enabled to vote, if inadequately.
But gaps remain, some of them yawning wider than before. Voting still demands a three-hour walk in a certain constituency in Gorkha; a youth in an electoral rally in Morang beaten on raising a question by a pro-Alliance group; despite a majority share in population, female candidature hovers between 5-10 per cent; expenditure on elections rising over 18 times; at least two million domicile voters (12% of the total) unable to vote; nearly a third of the respondents dissatisfied with the electoral system; most and much of the party manifestoes virtually reprinting their former selves with promises to deliver that rarely materialise; and those in governance disbursing billions of rupees from the state's sinking coffers on non-budgetary items to spoil and influence their would-be voters.
Pressed between these constraints and opportunities, false or genuine, the voter is stuck in an acutely agonising dilemma.
Whether to vote at all, why, and whom to vote for? Among the 2,412 candidates contesting for the House this time, 60 per cent (1,458 in all) are below 50 years. With the young winners (16-40 years in age) snatching over 41 per cent of the share of the votes in the local elections, the aspiration is spiraling upward among the youth, and the wave of independents contesting is sure to claim more than the share gained by them in earlier elections, if still too little to make the difference in the overall output of the House.
But electoral intertia is likely to bring up the Alliance with a majority, and the UML club scoring second in the seats and votes garnered. Vote fragmentation among the independents will leave them, however, divided and unable to claim the outcome on their strength and presence in House delivery. Cybernating the vote remains the only alternative to resolve most of the problems of the ballot box already outdated.
The clearest evidence of the parties as spoilers in the game of electoral stake-building came in the resistance they recently posed to the NOTA agenda
A version of this article appears in the print on November 24, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.z
