The major political parties of Nepal—ruling and opposition alike—now face criticism for damaging the sanctity and fabric of the National Assembly (NA) while picking candidates for its elections. They have attempted to exploit the loopholes of the constitution and flouted universal norms of parliamentary representation. The final list of 51 candidates published by the Election Commission last Saturday for elections to this upper chamber of the federal parliament, slated for January 25, to fill 19 NA seats that will become vacant on March 4, is clear testimony to sham representation. The candidates include septuagenarians who faced defeat in the last general elections, those who occupied attractive positions almost unfailingly in the past but thoroughly failed to prove their mettle, henchmen and sycophants of top political leaders, and individuals without any professional abilities to reckon with.

The NA came into being as the “second chamber” of Parliament after the promulgation of the democratic constitution in 1990 and the subsequent general elections in 1992. Since then, political parties have given little consideration to maintaining it as a mechanism to ensure the representation of minorities, people with significant standing in various walks of national life, and experts with outstanding professional track records in diverse fields who would have failed to make it to the national legislature through the regular electoral process but whose inputs are valuable for national development.

The 2015 constitution also continued with bicameralism in the federal parliament but failed to define its rationale and lay out the clusters of representation that are distinct in both the process and outcome of the elections to the lower house. Retrospectively, these lacunae have been deliberately conserved by influential political leaders to use them to augment their self-interests at their will and discretion.

Perilous outcome

In fact, the current episode of trampling of parliamentary norms and popular aspirations vying for dignified representation of public figures in the NA suitable to the nation’s elite chamber is only a partial manifestation of Nepal’s comprehensively failed political reform in general and reforms in the electoral system in particular. Lack of progress in several key dimensions of political reform—including the methods and clusters of representations, the strict adherence to the legal and constitutional provisions in their true spirits, the exercise of internal democracy in the major political organisations, and the practices of election financing—has impeded the much-desired institutionalisation of democracy. What’s more, it has stalled all wider agenda of reforms: legal, institutional, economic and administrative, among others.

Some important election-related legal reforms are effectively thwarted by the apparent disinterest of the political bigwigs. The Council principally approved a bill designed to amend and consolidate the laws related to the elections of ministers to register in Parliament on December 28, 2021. But this bill is yet to become law. Had the proposed reforms in the bill become law, the candidates defeated in the last general elections would not be able to file candidacy for the current NA elections.

Other proposed amendments include barring members twice elected to Parliament and provincial assemblies through proportional representation to contest for the third time and contesting from another constituency after losing in one during the same tenure of the elected body. The bill also includes provisions for no-vote, voting rights for Nepalis abroad and early voting arrangements for voters who cannot vote on the election day.

Once implemented, the electoral outcome is expected to be more representative and fundamentally different from the current one. This is exactly what the current set of leaders with an essentially dictatorial mindset does not intend to see materialise at the cost of their privileged exercise of power. Consequently, for example, no party leader is thinking beyond his circle of cronies to nominate in the NA, which ideally would have provided opportunities for literary figures, economists, educationists, planners, thought leaders, social reformers, and so on.

Most arduous of reforms

The reform aimed at democratising Nepal’s political parties has, in effect, been a Sisyphean endeavour. It has both ideological and functional dimensions. A joint “revolution” by the democratic and communist forces made the restoration of democracy in 1990 possible. It certainly capitulated the communists—the Marxists and Leninists in 1992 and the Maoists after the 2006 peace accord—to accept the adult franchise-based multiparty parliamentary democracy. But their ideological baggage and demeanours are often costly barriers to the country’s complete democratic transition. These communist outfits have failed to update their political nomenclature and ideological literature to comply with the shift they embraced to rise to power. Their indoctrination on “power from the barrel of the gun” often seems to make a nostalgic dawn intermittently.

At the functional level, all political players of the day—old and new alike, ranging from the oldest democratic party, the Nepali Congress, to a plethora of communist outfits adjusting to political pluralism, and regional parties to recent “not-for-ideological” formations like the Rastriya Swatantra Party—have systematically undermined the importance of internal democracy in the life and operations of their respective organisations. This has given rise to sycophancy and nepotism instead of informed and free discourse. The parties have thus failed to attract a newer generation of cadres in the rank and file and, alarmingly, have defamed the hard-earned political system for no fault of its own.

Even if the proposed bill on electoral reform becomes law, transparent election financing will remain the most troublesome issue in the foreseeable future. As often whispered in high political circles, the tangible cost of winning a parliamentary seat in the last election was Rs60 million on average. Neither the parties nor the candidates ever disclosed the source of such funding. People with vested interests and dubious income sources have started to invest in politics. This has criminalised politics to the hilt, exacerbated corruption when the elected ones try to recover their expenses by all means possible and made electoral reforms more herculean. All this has only added fuel to the anti-democratic, pro-reactionary narrative now in the offing. But the mainstream political actors that call the shots fail to realise this.