Nepali Times

If the autumn festival season of Dasain, Tihar, Eid, and Chhat were supposed to lend a joyful air to election campaigning, it didn’t happen. And that wasn’t just because of the unseasonably wet weather. Most Nepalis in Nepal right now are still not sure the polls on 19 November will change anything for the better. Discredited candidates with inflated egos and enormous senses of entitlement travelled back to home districts they had abandoned for the last five years.

Ordinary Nepalis have a pretty good sense that this is an election foisted on the country. But the interesting thing is that they don’t blame the outside world: the public sense is that foreigners are trying to save us from ourselves.

So, 12.3 million registered voters have no illusions about this election. They doubt it will resolve the knotty issues of the constitution or lead to better governance, better service delivery, better living standards. One reason is the process itself: so many rules have been broken to get a Chief Justice to head the interim election government, and a corruption watchdog headed by a character with shady dealings with spooks and godmen is on a political witch-hunt. The goals of a bloody revolution and the ideals that drove the 2006 People’s Movement have been forgotten and abandoned. The mantras of secularism and federal republicanism have become meaningless buzzwords. The war was a needless killfest and the past five years have been wasted in endless political bickering.

Since all other options were exhausted, the powers that be decreed that there be elections again to cobble together another Constituent Assembly and let the chips fall where they may. The trouble is that we haven’t learnt from recent history, haven’t drawn any lessons from why the first CA failed in the first place, and are rushing headlong to elect a similar assembly with the same number of identical figures. The only difference is that it is going to be even less inclusive than before.

The electorate has reason to be confused. Proportional representation is a fantastic idea to give legislative power to historically excluded groups and balance the inordinate clout of the entrenched and privileged. But in the hands of the neo-elite of the Four Party Cartel, PR has become a formula for rigging the power arithmetic in the CA. Frequent and last-minute changes in the list announced Wednesday was a farce. Like the last election, there will be 335 indirectly nominated seats and they will far outnumber the 240 directly elected representatives. Most voters, if they ever figure out what to do with two complicated ballot sheets, have no idea who they are voting for in the PR, how they made it to the party lists, and there is no time to gauge their relative merits.

There are other undemocratic characteristics of this election. All four political forces are infested with internal dissent, rebel candidates are creating havoc. The party leaders are justifiably worried that they may be voted out. They needn’t worry, since they have manipulated the process by standing in multiple electorates in constituencies with which they have no ties. Almost all the top leaders have become ‘tourist candidates’ in districts different than last time. Since they have done so little for their constituents since 2008, they didn’t dare go back to their original voters.

There is justifiable fear about the removal of the separation of powers between the judiciary and the executive, but what is more alarming is the removal of the separation of powers between big business and politics. Tycoons are PR candidates for the parties because the private sector figured out that if it is going to be extorted for campaign financing, it may as well get something in return.

International election observers have fanned out across the country and are filing reports about the ground situation. On election day they will be on the lookout for voting irregularities. Actually they needn’t bother, the irregularities are already built into the process of conducting an election for the sake of elections.