Participatory constitution-building for a new Nepal

Hopelessness and hope
We live in a globalised world where we all know what sorts of luxuries for life are available in some places. Ignorance is bliss they say, and in that sense our ignorance has been killed by the information of this age. We are thus well informed that there are cleaner streets in some places on earth. There are places that have supermarkets which never run out of sugar, gas stations that have never run out of fuel and never in the last decades has there been a power cut. What more? There are places with health insurance so that if you get sick you don't have to bother about having to sell your cow or your buffalo, education is free such that you don't have to sell your kidneys for a few thousands and hope that the operation goes smoothly and does not leave you with a deadly bleeding or a deadly infection; there is even unemployment benefit such that if you have no job you can still afford not just house, clothing and a couple of meals a day but also a few cans of beer. Now why should it surprise us that most of us apply for the DV card?- in the mean time openly. There is another part to the story though and that is that however many of us get "lucky" and get a DV card, or are successful in establishing the right channel to land in greener pastures, or whatever,...there will always be those of us who will be where we are, namely in the land of scarcity and insecurity and instability. So whereas I do not discourage us from dreaming of moving to better habitats, I would like to kindly remind us all that we should perhaps think about starting to dream of creating a better habitat.

In this place of adversities, we stand at difficult times with leaders who have constantly failed to fulfil our aspirations. And we are hopeless that anything will get better. Is there any hope left for us?

There is.

Where though?

The new constitution is a hope
Well for a start, we are in the process of building our constitution. In face of the big changes that have happened in the country (at least in paper we have seen some changes, like the crown is out of the government papers) it is justified that there is the talk of a new constitution. Not that our previous constitution was no good at all but yes, there were problems that gave rise to situations that were such legal deadlocks that the Supreme Court
1. failed to come to consensual decisions
2. even failed to act consistently in different instances.
The cases of a couple of prime ministers suddenly being in the minority in the parliament stand testimony to that.
There are many things beyond that. The most important being the lack of human rights in our country. Human rights have been bulldozered upon by hooliganism of all shapes and sizes, including in the name of political parties, security wings, tribes, etc. etc. Let us not vividly think on too many of these dreadful instances. It suffices here to say we know it, we have seen it and we are certain we don't want to see such atrocities upon human life. For life has a dignity, doesn't it?

Now there is an understanding as to what the basic human rights are. There is an international understanding. So we can perhaps take them for granted for the purpose of this article. Then if we agree that those rights are human rights, and we agree that those rights are not always secured by the Nepali state, it is fair to say that the Nepali state is a failed state. The first reason to have a state and a political system, a bureaucratic apparatus to run the state is to allow and enable peaceful co-existence of subjects of the state. Else we could all do with an unwritten "might is right" sort of co-existence. In which case we would need no government, no citizenship cards, no elections…which is, I suppose, not what we want.

Being the most supreme law of the country, the constitution has the right to rule upon us all but also the responsibility to ensure that the state lives. So the constitution essentially defines the state and the way it functions. And what a great joy it is to know that we stand at this moment in time, despite all the adversities in our country, where we can actually define the state. Define the country of Nepal. The demand on us now is to design a constitution that we all believe is best equipped to overcome the problems of this suffering population.

We need more participation
I hope I am not alone in wondering why we, the common people of the country do not get to have a say in issues as huge as whether the country needs a federal structure. It seems as though it is absolutely clear that the only way forward for Nepal is to adopt a federal structure. To say the least I am not sure. But again there seems to be no discussion anymore as to whether federalism is what we want. Just like we were not asked whether we want to abolish the monarchy. Now I am no believer in monarchy. No offences meant to him but I find it ironic enough to be in the same position as Mr. Kamal Thapa, a strong advocate of monarchy.

But my worry is that our political system has been reducing masses of individuals to a few leaders.

Now that might have sounded politically naive. There is obviously no arguing that not all of us can be involved in every decision in the country that potentially affects us. And thus we need representatives. These representatives are the ones that we call leaders. Representative politics is by its very nature reductive. Whereas a hundred people in an area could have several different ways of thinking about a given issue, the representative will have to favour one of them (or his might be completely different from all others prevailing in the community he is supposed to represent), leading to a possible lack of representation of several of the voices and opinions and running the risk of misrepresentation. Not only that, but such misrepresentation might at times be counterproductive to the people who the representative is actually supposed to represent. After all, the person representing is an individual limited by his individuality, that is to say his ambitions, greed, etc., all normal human attributes. And at times personal interest of the representative might lie somewhere very far away (which might even be in the wrong direction) from the interest of the population that he is supposed to represent.

The likelihood of misrepresentation and the risk of personal interest of the representative interfering with the judgement of the representative are inevitably larger in dimension in a society like ours where
1. life is seriously deprived of basic rights
2. insecurity prevails thereby making each one of us selfish and greedy…such that we try to accumulate wealth and power that might rescue us in case we are in trouble in the coming times. Obviously such individualistic and (because of the nature of our society) family-centred thinking is there in the politicians too.
In such a situation I believe that it is important to reduce the powers of the representative and diffuse it. And the first step towards that is to try and ensure that key issues are decided upon with increasing participation from the public at large. And the first place to start that is during constitution building.

Demanding more participation
Popular participation could be introduced in different forms. One obviously is to ask people individually on big issues. At this juncture I still hold that it would have been a wise decision to involve the public in the issue of removing monarchy, of making Nepal a secular state and on the idea of federal structure governing the country. The immense weight of these issues is there for all to see in that the name (I mean the full name) of the country has changed due to these decisions. And who made those decisions? The representatives in the parliament. And how did they do it? Through power negotiations. And what type of people are these? I need to sigh. These are the same old faces from whom we have seen more of criticism of the others than anything else. The same people who give the impression that their power contracts are signed in Delhi…oh Lord, bless us. But that’s what we have. There is no point constantly criticizing leaders using abusive words (there are some news sites where I get to see such comments). That won't take us anywhere. More importantly while we are content using bad names against them they are, driven by their individual limitations, doing things that will affect us and our children and our grandchildren, in ways that we might not like. So let us realize that we all need to realize the responsibility upon our shoulders. We need to write the constitution together, although our representatives seem not to be keen on asking us on key issues.

We could for example pressurize our representatives to hold constitution building discussions openly. Constitution building sessions of the parliament could be aired openly. We should get to see those discussions. We should get to see what they are signing upon.

Next thing is for us to make it mandatory for those representatives to attend a defined number of public programs where they can be asked about their stand and they can be suggested by the larger public.

And then at the population level, we could start holding discussions on constitutional issues, perhaps on a ward-basis and there should be a channel to forward suggestions coming out of such discussions to the representatives.

The press could also possibly shoulder some responsibility and start having forums where people could discuss on key issues. Conclusions arising out of such forums could then be voiced in editorials etc.

Is there enough time?
Little has been done until now other than trying to gather majority to rule the country. In essence this was all supposed to be constitution building time. So in fact there is perhaps not enough time for participatory discussions on all issues. But if we work on things with a plan we could still make it in time. After all there are issues that we all agree upon, like human rights issues. And big issues that need discussion ask questions. A random list of such questions could look like this: How should the executive power of the country be distributed? What check and balance mechanisms could be introduced to make sure corruption becomes less? How to strengthen the judiciary? Should the military be used in within-country conflicts? Who can call it an emergency state? Should an NRN be allowed dual nationality?

How about assigning dates to such discussions such that we actually start building up the constitution piece by piece?