Since Pushpa Kamal Dahal became Prime Minister on December 26, 2022, he changed his political bedfellows on March 4 for the third time. He had withdrawn from the electoral alliance his party, the Maoist Centre, had formed with the Nepali Congress before the parliamentary polls held on November 20, 2022, to form a government with the support of the CPN-UML. Within six weeks, he deserted the UML to form another coalition, mainly with the support of the Congress and other fringe parties. After a year, as a surprise, Dahal has chosen to lean on the UML again, leaving the Congress in a lurch.

The Maoist Centre, with only 32 out of 275 (11.6 percent) seats in the House of Representatives, is fully exploiting the hung parliament and the bickering of two larger parties, the Congress and the UML, which have 89 and 78 seats in the Lower Chamber, respectively. This reduces the very fabric of democracy to crude arithmetic of 138, the magic number required to form or change the government. While choosing the coalition partners, ideological or programmatic similarities/divergences are apparently a redundant idea in the political “life” of all parties and players alike.

Chicanery rules the roost while democratic norms, values and integrity all take the backseat. The implications of frequent making and breaking of coalitions at the centre snowball into all seven provincial governments, most of which hinge on the balance of a mere couple of votes to survive. It happens when the federal system is increasingly criticised for emptying state coffers and adding nothing tangible to public service delivery through subnational units.

Adversity galore

The political influence is divided at least among half a dozen political outfits, new and old. The constitutional design of proportional representation in the voting system and the presence of too many contenders resulted in a hung parliament. This created a vicious cycle of unhealthy bargaining for power, political instability and the resultant toll on the economy, which appears irreversible. Despite promulgating a “federal, democratic and republican” constitution in 2015 and two rounds of parliamentary elections, Nepal's fledgling democracy faces a real risk of never being institutionalised. The current set of leaders undoubtedly has the responsibility of putting in honest efforts to correct the course for the better. But both historical and global contexts, too, have their share of impact on the current state of political mess and inescapable hopelessness.

Nepal's democracy, since its inception in 1951, has never taken firm roots. Democratic discourses and practices have been invariably squeezed into a narrow corridor, constantly infringed by the rightist forces led by the monarchists on the one hand and the strong rise in influence of communist forces of different hues on the other. For the first four decades since the dawn of democracy, three generations of ambitious absolute monarchs—Tribhuvan, Mahendra and Birendra—swayed the sword of power, thwarting all possibilities of the sprouting democracy.

Since the restoration of democracy in 1990, left politics and its anti-parliamentarian narrative, while “using” parliament as a springboard to communism, have defamed the parliamentary system to displace it through armed insurgency, etc., rather than claiming the liberal democratic political space inevitable for the flourishing and institutionalisation of democracy.

Globally too, several studies and reports convincingly indicate democratic norms and values like political freedom, separation of power and accountability of the rulers are in sharp decline. A 2022 report stated that dictators rule two-thirds of the world’s population. Democracy is considered a self-correcting system because when elected rulers deviate from their promises on social contracts, voters vote them out of public positions. Lately, however, overall disenchantment with politics among the youths with an excessive predilection to social media, both as voters and participants, to make a timely intervention in the system is only helping gerontocrats to return to power repeatedly. Demagogues are harping on populist nationalism without much public resistance. Worse, periodic elections are becoming more like rituals to gain legitimacy for undeserved, essentially anti-democratic and outdated ideologies. In 2024 alone, more than 2 billion people will exercise their rights to suffrage, but populists and dictators-in-the-making are poised to emerge stronger.

No correction on sight

Since such undemocratic pulls are on the rise even in so-called large and institutionalised democracies like India and the United States, it is no surprise that small and third-generation democracies like Nepal face a more uncongenial atmosphere for democracy to flourish. The first-generation democracies instituted following American independence and the second-generation democracies established in the post-colonial era or after World War II have created strong institutions like the independent judiciary, ombudsman organisations, vibrant media and citizens' awareness. Some best practices, like limiting the number of tenures of presidents and prime ministers to be in office, have become traditions.

Therefore, democracies in developed countries hope to correct derailments and aberrations through these institutions, norms, and values long in practice. However, Nepal's political system, to qualify as a democracy, depends only on periodic polls and the application of crude parliamentary arithmetic. Without a democratic ecosystem, it is often in danger of being a plaything in the hands of power-hungry politicians with little concern for the future of Nepal's democracy.

The most disheartening is the shrinking scope to correct this “political diarrhoea” of changing government three times a year. Now the mixed representative system provisioned in the constitution is being solely blamed as capable of producing nothing but a hung parliament, the root cause of unhealthy power bargains and disproportionate tradeoffs against the norms of democracy and the spirit of the constitution.

The third largest party harbours an ambition to rule the country perhaps for the entire five-year term of the current parliament by embedding with different coalition partners at its will. A deliberate tendency to exploit the technical loopholes in the constitution with complete disregard for political integrity among leaders with a sizeable number of parliamentarians behind them has muddied the entire pool. The absence of informed resistance from the people in general, the media and the intelligentsia has come as heaven-sent blessings for incessant machinations by the political class. At present, Nepal's politics is heavily dominated by essentially anti-democratic forces, both of rightist and leftist orientations, which makes the survival of meaningful democracy a real challenge.