No simple solution

TKP 15/6/2009


Simply replacing Nepal's parliamentary system with a presidential one is not going to cure the nation's ills

The traditional parliamentary parties, presenting themselves as staunch defenders of democracy, have for some time now argued that only a parliamentary system would be able to protect democracy. That a presidential system would lead to authoritarianism, and that the Maoist advocacy for such a system only reflects their covert desire to install themselves at the helm of the state forever.

But there has been widespread disillusionment as a result of the Maoist withdrawal from government and the painful and prolonged drama of the quarrel over the division of ministerial portfolios. For some this is an indication of the failure of parliamentary democracy. A presidential system, it is argued, will have an executive that will be very difficult to remove until it completes its full five-year tenure. In addition, major powers will be concentrated in the office of the president, which will also have full freedom in the appointment of ministers. This will lead to highly stable political system which can finally work for the long-term interests of the country.

While this may be an attractive argument given the current political situation, it is misleading. A presidential system by itself will not be the panacea for all ills; it will not be able to cure the fundamental problems underlying the Nepali state — its weakness, inability to deliver and its great susceptibility to interference by various political actors and social groups. In fact, given the nature of the Nepali state, the “democrats” fear that a presidential system will lead to a kind of authoritarianism may not be unfounded, though perhaps not in the way that they think.

What, then, are the major problems of our state? First, its ability to deliver services — be it infrastructure, health or education — is extremely limited. There is a major dearth of monitoring and implementation mechanisms. A very high proportion of funds allocated to any project are siphoned off. The implementation of projects by the government is like pouring water into sand. This was most recently seen in the reports regarding the efficacy of the literacy and employment projects that former Minister of Finance Baburam Bhattarai instituted. It was revealed that these projects have barely had any impact at all and some of them are now to be scrapped altogether.

When the traditional parliamentary parties vehemently criticized Bhattarai's policies and claimed that all of the money he spent would go straight into the pockets of Maoist cadres, they were speaking from experience of the Nepali state. They had, after all, worked within Singha Durbar for almost two decades and come to realize the inefficiencies of the governing apparatus. The most conscientious of politicians, who entered the halls of power in the 1990s, thinking that they would gain stature and legitimacy through the rapid implementation of major projects that would benefit the people at large, were quickly disabused of all such notions they brought with them. It was far easier, they realized, to expand one's support base — if not stature and legitimacy — through the dispensation of patronage to particular individuals or groups. Of course, this would not lead to any tangible output, but they would be able to cultivate a pool of cadres and voters.

The bureaucracy and other state institutions such as the police, meanwhile, showed that they were eminently susceptible to the lures that their political bosses offered them. Patronage could make government officials loyal to a particular politician or party. For politicians, then, one of the purposes of entering government became the cooption of the bureaucracy, which they could then use towards partisan ends in events such as elections. While out of government, they were wracked with paranoia that their political rivals would expand their influence at the expense of their own.

But the structure of Nepal's political system and its culture helped mitigate these fears. Except for brief periods in the late 1950s and early 1990s, no single party got a majority in national elections. Parties that wished to form government therefore first had to cobble together a coalition of parties, often of vastly diverging views. This enabled the smaller parties to check the larger parties' unrestrained expansion over government organs and patronage networks. Besides, before this process went too far, before the party leading the government became too powerful, the government would collapse anyway. Unable to countenance the head of government's grandiose plans for the expansion of his power, his coalition partners, or, on occasion, even rivals within his own party, would engineer his downfall.

This is the political model that most leaders of the traditional parliamentary parties are most familiar with and would like to see perpetuated. The most important political value in this democratic system is not the time-honoured right to justice and equality, or the separation of powers. It is the maintenance of a relative equilibrium of power among parties through checks imposed on their tenure and actions in government.

The replacement of the parliamentary system by a presidential one would make it much more difficult for a group of parties to check or oust the party in power, which could well complete its full tenure — an accomplishment hitherto achieved by no party in Nepal's history. This would allow a single party to penetrate so deeply into all government organs and use them to expand their control over society to such a degree that the other political parties become permanently emasculated. This is what leaders of the mainstream political parties mean when they say that a presidential system will lead to authoritarianism. And because the Maoists are electorally the most powerful party, and appear set to remain so, a presidential system, it is said, will lead to “Maoist authoritarianism.”

Nepal's post-1990 political system, with its weak and unstable governments, has been discredited. Major reforms in all political institutions are required. But such reform has to be much broader and has to go much deeper than the simple replacement of a parliamentary system by a presidential one. A presidential system by itself will not cleanse the ills of Nepal's state. It will not improve its effectiveness, it will not make it more autonomous from political interference, and it will not curb the channeling of state resources towards patronage networks. Instead, if these other issues are not tackled head on, a presidential system could well install in power an executive bent solely on the aggrandizement of self and party, with such great control over the state that it would be immensely difficult to eject it from power.