The undesirable developments taking place on several fronts in recent times, such as the entry of an outsider in budget making, the offer of a bribe to the Supreme Court justice by a practising lawyer, and the partisan alignment of the Nepal Rastra Bank Governor are worrying indeed
The storming of the Sri Lankan Presidential Palace has stolen the limelight around the globe albeit for ironic reasons.
Myriads of people marched into the precinct of the palace, setting fire to the private residence of the Prime Minister Ranil Wickramsinghe. Though the Prime Minister resigned comparatively soon, President Gotabaya Rajpaksha relented only after fleeing to Singapore from the Maldives, where he was denied shelter.
Such events have been quite a few if we peep back into history. The most notable is the 1648 revolution in England, followed by the storming of the Bastille in France that occurred in Paris on July 14, 1789. This armory, fortress and political prison was taken over by the revolutionaries. It proved to be the flash point of the French Revolution which brought about the downfall of Louis XVI.
It was the time when Nepal was ruled by a rather eccentric King Rana Bahadur Shah. In fact, a mini storm had blown even then when the people, instigated by the then Prime Minister, Damodar Pandey, tried to stop the entry of the King to the country back from his brief stay in the holy city of Benaras. But the devout people gave up when the King asked whether they recognise their king or Pandey.
The most recent storming is that of the Capitol Hill by supporters of the Immediate past President Donald Trump, who believed that the election result was stolen from him, leading to his defeat and the victory of the present President Joe Biden. Several people made unauthorised entry into the building, which led to the death of four persons.
The French Revolution had its origin in the economic crisis that had come into being by the poor harvest compounded by the regressive tax rates and the cost of intervening in the American Revolution. In Sri Lanka also, the current crisis has been precipitated by an economic crisis, which was triggered by several injudicious moves, such as heavy borrowing, an abrupt ban on chemical fertiliser followed by unsustainable tax exemption.
The conversation often heard in the hallowed political corridors is whether Nepal will also witness a similar political phenomenon in future. The neighbourhood is certainly influenced by incidents occurring in its periphery. The Arab Spring revolution began from Tunisia in 2011, but it spilled to neighbouring countries such as Egypt, Libya and Syria as well.
Holger Albetcher et al have made a study of 165 authoritarian regimes, and they have concluded that there are four factors responsible for mass uprisings. These are a history of protracted low level contentions, the presence of personalist regimes, long tenure of incumbents in office and the showroom of uprisings in the temporal and spatial vicinity of states.
Though the study was made for authoritarian states, its findings have applied equally well to democratic Sri Lanka. For example, the country was in a civil war between the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic groups till two decades back. Moreover, the hold on the state of the personalist regime is very glaring. The government was virtually run by one family of Gotabaya Rajpaksha so much so that his family members took charge ofnine ministries. The Rajpaksha family also had a long tenure of incumbency beginning with Mehinda right from 2004 and now ending with Gotabaya.
What about Nepal then? Nepal is also a democratic country. It has recently seen off the local election, which was, however, participated by lesser voters than the last election. This has been portrayed as a gradual loss of faith in the political parties. The victory of the independent may oral candidates, that too in the capital city and in a few others, bears testimony to this fact.
Despite having democratic credentials, the Government of Nepal has displayed a few unbecoming characteristics by being a fiasco on several fronts.
Firstly, it could not make fertiliser available to the farmers at the peak of the rice transplanting season, leading to a possible poor harvest. Secondly, the spending of the developmental budget is far less than allocated. And this is not only this government that has been through such political stumbles one after another. The opposition party, when in the government, also had a similar plight. Poor harvest may invite an economic crisis, which may spur mass uprising as seen in Sri Lanka.
The long tenure of incumbents can be seen in Nepal, also. The present Prime Minister, Sher Bahadur Deuba, is in the chair for the fifth time now even though the recent one was more by compulsion than by choice. So are the towering leaders of the major political parties, who have been continuing for a long time despite no remarkable performance to their credit.
Past events show that mass uprisings can occur quite unexpectedly in Nepal as well. In the 1990 movement, several people took to the streets that led to the restoration of multi-party democracy. So did they in the movement against the monarchy. Such activities may crystallise in Nepal as they did in Sri Lanka due to the likelihood of an economic crisis that may snowball due to a poor harvest this year.
The undesirable developments taking place on several fronts in recent times, such as the entry of an outsider in budget making, the offer of a bribe to the Supreme Court justice by a practising lawyer, and the partisan alignment of the Nepal Rastra Bank Governor are worrying indeed.
There is, however, a glimmer of hope that Nepal will not go Sri Lanka's way due to the increased flow of remittance in recent times followed by the swift action of the government, such as the formation of an investigation committee to look into the alleged irregularities of the finance minister and even the call for the resignation of the Rastra Bank Governor for his political affiliation. But nothing can be said for sure as Nepal still rests on the fault lines of a likely economic crisis.
A version of this article appears in the print on July 19, 2022, of The Himalayan Times.
