The fast-paced campaign trails in these two completely different settings—Thapa from urban Kathmandu with a large number of well-informed but uncommitted voters and Pandey from rural Chitwan with a relatively low income and less education—revealed similar experiences with campaign financing, which had become far more demanding and expensive. The two said that they discovered how party workers, constantly losing trust in leaders as agents of long-term political change, expected immediate returns for contributions made. As a result, both lawmakers promised to sponsor in Parliament a political party legislation 

that would ensure intra-party democracy and accountable party financing. 

The parties Thapa and Pandey represent, with all their limitations, have been instruments for fundamental political change in Nepal. Besides generating people’s participation for public offices, they have elaborated the space for engagement with civil society organisations, state institutions and effective governance. On the one hand, this has created an environment for the state to function but on the other, this is also precisely a reason as to why some sections of their parties fell for corruption. Therefore, the two parties must now begin by working within a defined legal territory. 

 

The Nepali polity offers one of the most laissez-faire grounds for political parties to operate. The 1990 Constitution carried some guidelines for political party registration and organisation. Beyond the constitution, no comprehensive law on political parties has ever been legislated. 

The Election Commission, a few months before the elections in November 2013, intended to bring about a more transparent accounting of party financing. A proposed regulation required parties to issue receipts for all campaign donations, including a suggestion that contributions above Rs 50,000 be made through cheques or bank transfers. This regulation, even if below average by modern standards, could have proven to be a welcome step towards crucial legal reforms for political parties. Unfortunately, all political parties unanimously shot it down for they found it ‘unimplementable’. 

For an interim arrangement, political party funding and campaign financing in Nepal is governed by the Election Commission Act 2006, which instructs that the parties and candidates should present the details of campaign spending within 35 days of the announcement of the final election results. For the 2013 election, the spending cap for each candidate was raised to Rs 1 million. Further regulation was guided by a temporary election Code of Conduct as in the past. No political party was averse to it in principle but in practice, the code was overlooked and shattered all over the country. Low spending requirements were dishonoured on an especially large scale. And after the election, audits to the Election Commission were submitted with final adjustments made through reduced invoices.  

This illustrates a real crisis for an ailing democracy, where the political parties, the most important institutions of competitive democracy, engage in open fraud by deliberately weakening state institutions that would check them. This is primarily a reason why political parties in Nepal, despite their monolithic dominance in the political process, are perceived with cynicism, which is further fuelled by their reluctance to function within a mandatory democratic intra-party structure and financial transparency.  

 

Nepal’s start-stop party system of 35 years, with intervals of as many years in between, always seems to be in a state of flux. For evidence, here are some latest symptoms. The 2006 political change brought new parties into the political fray. The previously unseen Maoists emerged as a major player while the Madhesi Janadhikar Forum-Nepal, along with other Madhesi parties, created political space in the Madhes. 

Surya Bahadur Thapa’s personal staying power has not helped his Rastriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) from gradually declining from the height of its reinvention as a political party in the 1994 mid-term election. Thapa must be wondering why the more conservative RPP-Nepal, which was mowed down in the first CA election five years ago, has now evolved into a fourth force from the November 19 elections. 

Notwithstanding the balance of power distributed among the actors of the 2006 political change and the 2008 election, the numbers they carry in the second CA brings up a picture of the growing electoral vulnerability of existing parties, big or small. Eleven, out of thirty elected parties, are new.  

Parties tend to corrupt themselves faster when this kind of uncertainty looms over their electoral future—because of the temptation to achieve everything by the next elections—or when one party or leader exercises control over resources for longer periods. The risk of volatility, coupled with the reasoning that political parties operate as movements for empowering the people and the state, provides the most persuasive argument for a comprehensive law on Nepali political parties. 

 

Against this backdrop, as soon as Gagan Thapa and Surendra Pandey begin acting on their pledge, they will find that weakened states like Nepal encounter a dilemma while formulating strong party laws. Since parties are themselves the source of policy choices and public agendas, state oversight discourages them from developing. Besides, political parties devise their own laws and statutes for internal systems, leaving them not completely unregulated, even in the absence of an umbrella law. Deciding how much regulation is enough is certainly a tough call for legislators. 

Therefore, it would be advisable for the two to look into Nepal’s own empirical experience, which leads to the conclusion that in the absence of sufficient state legislation in place, power has either been exploited by narrow coteries that pursue their own interests, as with the NC, is monopolised by a single leader that suppresses dissent, like the Maoist parties. It is time for Thapa and Pandey to work from ground zero, building a cross-party culture on matters vital to democratic self-defence.  

 

Dhakal is a Kathmandu-based political analyst