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| isolated freak |
Posted
on 17-Dec-03 09:31 AM
King Mahendra, undoubtedly remains the most visionary leader of Nepal, even after his death 32 years ago. If it weren’t for him, Nepal would have been either reduced to the status of an Indian client state, if not an Indian state. King Mahendra contributed a lot to the overall development of Nepal as a modern nation. He not only devised a foreign policy that suited Nepal and that preserved our independence, he also came up with the Panchayat System, which was the best system Nepal could have imagined at that particular era. There are people who will be quick to dismiss this because of their heavily westernized democratic view that somehow does not relate even remotely to Nepal.
The system of Panchayat wasn’t bad at all. What happened in the Post-1990 Nepal can be understood in the 2017 saal, Poush 1 gate’s speech. In that famous speech, King Mahendra clearly highlighted the need for a system that would guarantee Nepal’s and Nepalis’ interests first than “other” countries’ and their citizens’ interests. The system was indeed a Nepali hawa-pani suhaudo system, and there’s no doubt regarding that. For those, who say that it wasn’t a true democracy: even people like Ram Raja Prasad Singh, Nani Maiya Dahal and Padma Ratna Tuladhar were ELECTED in Panchayati elections!
On the foreign policy front, King Mahendra broke away from the traditional India-only foreign policy of Nepal. Nepal now established ties with China, Israel, Egypt, Burma and many nations in every continent. Also, Nepal started to benefit from the Chinese partnership in development. When the Indians warned the King against the construction of the Kodari Rajmarga saying that it will only help the Chinese export communism to Nepal, his reply, which became one of the most famous quotes later on, was “ Communism taxi chadera aaudaina”. The Indians didn’t know how to react, and the King went ahead with his linking China-Nepal highway project. King Mahendra also represented Nepal in the Bandung Conference in 1955 and became one of the nine leaders who started the Non-Alligned movement. By the time of his death, Nepal had established diplomatic relations with more than 50 countries, compared to less than or around 10 when he ascended to the throne.
Apart from politics, King Mahendra had a deep interest in Arts. Royal Nepal Academy, Rastriya Nachghar, Nepal ChalaChitra Bikash Nigam etc. are all his gifts to the nation. The King was also a good poet, if not great. His two anthlogies, Usaiko lagi and feri usaiko lagi, have some of his best poems. His songs/poems have romantic and nationalist messages to them. Its probably based on his songs and his polices that made some analysts remark that King Mahendra was a socialist at heart. Of Course, some of our Sajha friends have a hard time understanding the simple fact that political systems are not monoliths and that societies, cultures etc somehow moulds the ideologies to fit in the societal context. For them, its THIS which was said by THAT in THIS book. For them, communism means Russia, Democracy means America and Capitalism means free market and to be a political analyst or to show one’s knowledge (?) of politics one has to be un-necessary critical of the state, whether it makes sense or not, or even whether they themselves know why they are criticizing the state. Probably being rebels, iconoclasts and vocal about “god knows what” make them democracts, and again, 90% wouldn’t even know what democracy means. So, deducting these people, for whom everything has to be according to the book and a set definiton/formula/logic, there are other rational people, who agree that there can be multiple ways to see/ analyze things and logics and reasonings somehow do not work all the time when you try it in the real world context, would agree that King Mahendra was not a dictator, nor he had ambitions to be any. He was a democrat, a socialist democrat who wanted to see his country develop. All the old people that I met tell me that, Panchayat was a temporary measure, and the King wanted to give back the power to the people. His socialist tilt is reflected in some of his poems such as Hey Bir Hida Aghi Sari and Garchin Pukar Aama.
His willingness to fight against all odds is reflected in his famous “ma” poem: “Euta purja bigradaima, “ma” ta mardainathyo”. This was, according to some people who knew him, targeted against all the Congressi propoganda against him. True, “euta purja bigradaima, mahendra ta mardaina thyo” as he was a great statesman. He carried on until his death in 1972 . He followed the rules and made everyone around him follow the rules. From taking loans from an ason-ko-sun-chandi-sahu to cycling at night on the streets of Kathmandu, this King understood Nepal and Nepali life like no other leader did.
criticisms both informed and ill-informed are welcome.
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Dec-03 12:04 PM
What follows is an article that gives a different picture.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
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Remembering Panchayat
(First published in The Kathmandu Post April 6, 2001)
http://www.nepalnews.com.np/contents/englishdaily/ktmpost/2001/apr/apr06/editorial.htm#4
By Pratyoush Onta
Today is 24 Chait, perhaps the most important anniversary day in the recent history of Nepal. On 24 Chait 2046 B.S., the Jana Andolan reached a stage from where it became impossible for the Partyless Panchayat System to continue its farce. That system, in the words of some contemporary observers, fell like a pack of cards. However, in retrospect, that description seems hurried as many of the stalwarts of that system have continued to dominate politics and social life in post-Jana Andolan Nepal in new guises.
Due to the inability of the present crop of our post-1990 political leaders, the Panchayati stars are even beginning to lecture to us about corruption, about governance, about poverty alleviation and associated subjects. It is as if they speak to us thinking that they were not involved in the sustenance of an anti-democratic system for almost 30 years in this country.
They speak to us as if those 30 years are unrelated to many of our present inabilities: our inability to institute mechanisms to monitor political corruption, our inability to build robust institutions in civil society, our inability to build large pro-democratic networks or for that matter our inability to make contributions to Lord Pashupatinath transparent!
That an authoritarian regime that justified its rule on the basis of hukums from mathi did not give us the space to learn many of these skills over a course of time has indeed been conveniently overlooked. In fact the Panchayati stars speak to us as if we have forgotten the whole Panchayat era in total.
On the face of it, this seems true. It does seem like we forgot the Panchayat years too quickly. It seems as though we forgot how that system left us debilitated to the core. It seems as though we forgot how those who are giving us lectures from high pedestals of Nepali society sold their mind (often trained in some of the finest universities) and soul to serve a single master and a system that was at the same time ruthless and feudalistic.
But we have not forgotten. To celebrate the spirit of 24 Chait, I want to recall, in brief, the writings of people who can be described as the early philosophers of the Panchayat system. In the mid-1960s, King Mahendra was trying to consolidate the Panchayat system.
Among those whom he recruited to elaborate the ‘philosophy of Panchayat’ were Mohammad Mohsin and Pashupati SJB Rana. Mohsin had just completed a doctoral degree in the social sciences from India and Rana had returned to Nepal after being a student in the UK.
They promptly started writing in favour of the Panchayat system in English and became the two most important interpreters of the system to the world outside Nepal by 1970.
Some of the articles they wrote first appeared in the magazine Nepalese Perspective. A few of them were subsequently published in a small book with the title Some Aspects of Panchayat System in Nepal in 1966 by the Department of Publicity of the then Ministry of Information and Broadcasting. The book contains three articles by Dr Mohsin, five by Rana and one unattributed piece, perhaps written by both of them.
One of the first tasks of these Panchayat philosophers was to justify King Mahendra’s decision to dissolve B P Koirala’s government and with it the entire multi-party system. Mohsin and Rana had to tackle two aspects in their justification: first was to argue why the Royal coup was necessary and second was to argue how the Panchayat system was both democratic and suitable to Nepal. Mohsin went around the first task by talking about "the decade of disillusionment" in an essay that steeps with vitriol for the leaders of the various political parties of the 1950s and obvious praise for his political master.
He first characterized the 1950s as being the decade in which "the transformation from an autocratic feudal regime to a regime of so-called democratic liberty was so sudden and surprising that the people were psychologically unprepared for this."
Commenting on the political leaders of the parties that had become active in the 1950s, he argued, "most of the leaders who were in the forefront of the 1951 uprising and who later formed the government had spent most of their time outside Nepal. They failed to have an objective grasp of the national situation. Besides, they were too ambitious and impatient."
Continuing his criticism of these leaders (while neglecting in total the various ways in which both King Tribhuvan and his son had failed to facilitate the fostering of a good environment for pro-multi party political action), Mohsin further wrote, "In their obsession with the textbook concept of liberal democracy they failed to give due consideration to the low level of literacy in the country, the absence of communication media, difficulties of transport, the evils of localism and traditionalism and the near absence of a sense of national identity." Mohsin added, "At the hands of many of these hare-brained politicians and demagogues, that this decade abounds with democracy was reduced to a mere catchword." Continuing in the same vein, he wrote, "These parties, in fact, converted the opportunity that the Monarchy had created for them of a democracy into unadulterated chaos."
Responding to the criticism that parliamentary democracy was not given a ‘fair trail’, he asked "Is it always necessary to taste poison to the very lees of a vessel to convince ourselves of its destructive potentiality?"
Arguing that the Royal coup could not have waited longer, Mohsin asked rhetorically, "Would it not have been too dangerous as well as too long a period to wait for its anticipated outcome, particularly at a time when international situation was at a most unsatisfactory state?" Mohsin then went on to argue in another essay how the Panchayat was "a royal gift, a native plant" that "symbolises a grand, eloquent and moving partnership between King Mahendra and his countrymen for all-round national upliftment."
The discursive exercises through which Mohsin and Rana established Panchayat as a "true democracy" will be the subject of a subsequent essay. Suffice it to note at this point that to understand why Dr Mohammad Mohsin, chairman of the Upper House, wants King Birendra to assume a "more active role" in Nepali politics, one needs to read his writings when he was the Panchayat philosopher par excellence. Mohsin, in turn, needs to remember that while it seems like the Nepali people have forgotten the Panchayat, they really haven’t. THE END
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Dec-03 12:08 PM
Here's a part II pf the above essay by Pratyoush.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
***********************
Remembering Panchayat, again
April 20, 2001
http://www.nepalnews.com.np/contents/englishdaily/ktmpost/2001/apr/apr20/editorial.htm#4
By Pratyoush Onta
After the Royal coup of 1960, a small group of well-educated and faithful workers were hired by King Mahendra to construct the ideological apparatus of the Panchayat System.
As I argued in my last column, one of the first tasks of these Panchayat philosophers was to construct the ideological justification for the dissolution of B P Koirala’s government and the entire multi-party system. In that connection, I discussed how Dr Mohammad Mohsin, currently the chairman of the Upper House, executed that task by describing the 1950s as "the decade of disillusionment."
Describing the leaders of the political parties of that decade as "too ambitious and impatient ....hare-brained politicians and demagogues" who "failed to have an objective grasp of the national situation", Mohsin passionately argued that the Royal coup could not have waited longer!
The second task of the early philosophers (early because I want to distinguish the likes of Mohsin and Pashupati SJB Rana who were recruited in this enterprise in the 1960s itself from others such as Dirgha Raj Prasai, Tek Bahadur Khatri, Ananta Poudyal, Kanchan Pudasaini and Dr Tara Nath Sharma who were recruited later) was to show how the Panchayat system was both democratic and ‘native’ to Nepal.
In the execution of this task, various terms were used interchangeably at different times to describe Panchayati democracy. Sometimes it was described as ‘true’ democracy; other times, an ‘organic’ democracy. Mohsin and Rana also talked about their favourite system as a ‘planned’ democracy. But how did they go about building the ideological features of the Panchayat system as both democratic and native?
In an essay entitled "A Royal Gift, A Native Plant" included in the collection Some Aspects of Panchayat System in Nepal (1966), Mohsin made a case against the universal suitability of a particular mould of parliamentary democracy. He argued that while democracy "as an ideal does not raise any controversy," analysts must separate between the form and the spirit of democracy.
The latter is a "complex of ideals", a "value system" which can be "readily adhered to as an end." In contrast, Mohsin added, "the same latitude cannot be accorded to the Anglo-Saxon stereotype of institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions." Creating the analytic space where Panchayat’s institutional form could be justified in terms of the ‘objective’ conditions of Nepali society, Mohsin added, "The form is just a tool devised to facilitate the process of attaining the set of objectives and so liable to function in different socio-cultural situations differently." The Panchayati form of democracy was suitable to a country like ours, "spread over a difficult and broken terrain, lacking modern transport and communication media and with a low level of literacy." Such conditions, Mohsin added, demanded a political system like Panchayat which was "simple to understand, viable to maintain and elastically integrated."
Mohsin’s argument was especially targeted against non-Nepali commentators who had criticized King Mahendra’s dismissal of parliamentary democracy in 1960. Befitting his role as the early philosopher par excellence of the Panchayat system, Mohsin argued that while Panchayat shared the democratic goals of other "highly sophisticated political institution like that of Anglo-Saxon," its institutional form was "a positive answer to Nepal’s long quest for a suitable form of self-expression."
Panchayat’s democratic credentials were further justified by a reference to its four-tier pyramid-like institutional structure which was "elastic enough to allow every village to play a specific and meaningful role in the process of national development and strong enough to curb any local or regional tendency to assert itself at the cost of nation or country as a whole."
Now that Panchayat’s democratic credentials were established, how was it ideologically constructed as a ‘native’ system? This task was left to Pashupati SJB Rana. In an essay entitled "Roots", Rana quoted anthropological studies by foreign scholars such as C Von Furer Haimendorf (on the Sherpas) and John T Hitchcock to show that village communities had been taking care of themselves and their needs with minimum interference from authorities of central government.
Local officials, whose responsibilities rotate among the families of the village, carry out their duties responsibly. This kind of de facto autonomy from the Centre came with its own rules of moral economy whereby the "spirit of mutual self-help" assured that in any given village, no family was allowed to fall below a point of ‘minimal economic sufficiency and self-respect’."
Based on the evidence provided by these "unbiased researchers", Rana thus argued that a "fairly complex, but surprisingly democratic organisation of village life and government" has existed in Nepal. He added, "This pattern of village democracy is at a maximum the further away the village from the valley or the seats of the Bada Hakim, (the district governor), but prevalent in all rural Nepal in a minimum degree."
Once it had been shown that village organization and self-government already existed in Nepal, it was left to Rana to propose that what Panchayat democracy was trying to do was "to capitalise on this already available system and make it the basis of its evolution of modern democracy."
Rana’s argument that Panchayat democracy had ‘roots’ in Nepali society was further developed in a monograph he wrote with Mohsin entitled The Panchayat: A Planned Democracy which was first published in 2023 BS by the Research Division of the Ministry of Home Panchayat. Later, in the hands of other Panchayat workers, it attained the status of the "suitable to the soil" theory of Panchayat democracy.
These textual ammunitions of the Panchayati ideological apparatus were backed up by institutions which were put into place to develop more sophisticated versions of Panchayati democracy and societal practices. Together they tried to ensure that all legitimate Nepalis were Panchas. The legacy of these ideological productions, corresponding institutions and individuals need to be thoroughly analyzed if we want to begin to understand why post-1990 Nepali political developments have not produced the kinds of results expected of them. THE END
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| ashu |
Posted
on 17-Dec-03 12:14 PM
Here's a Letter to Editor.
I post these old articles to stimulate further thoughts and ideas.
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
LETTER TO EDITOR
(THE KTM POST: April 14, 2001)
Remembering Panchayat
This is with reference to the article "Remembering Panchayat" by Pratyoush Onta (TKP
April 6, 2001). I find it interesting that more than 10 years after the demise of the much-maligned system, it still remains a major reference point for our political debate. I am too young to remember whether the Nepalese chattering class used to use Rana rule to gauge the performance of the pre-Panchayat multiparty governments. Nevertheless, I sometimes try to imagine what the tea shop conversations were like in, say, around, 1957.
Although I found Mr Onta’s quotes from the book "Some aspects of the Panchayat system" highly selective, they do provide a glimpse into relentless effort the system made to justify itself throughout its 30-year existence.
As someone who has read Mr Onta’s writings for some time - I recall the days when he used to be a regular contributor to the Letters to the Editor column of The Rising Nepal - I am encouraged by the way he has established himself as a prominent commentator in the "free press" of the restored multiparty order.
At the same time, I am aware that the nature of Mr Onta’s activities - thinking, writing, moderating and making recommendations on the political, social, cultural malaise of today - almost by definition presupposes virulent antipathy to a system that severely restricted commentaries on such basic matters as the potholes that pockmarked Kathmandu’s streets and the legendary delays in the postal system.
Today’s vast pool of US-educated thinkers and experts tend to measure freedom of expression in Nepal on the basis of the core values of the First Amendment and the Freedom of Information Act. I appreciate the nobleness of their hopes of transplanting genuine openness in Nepal as a means of bringing all-round (to use a popular Panchayat-era term) transformation. What I see happening instead is a proliferation of issues and ideas in the midst of a political elite that has virtually enshrined its "right to ignore" as the fifth unchangeable feature of the current constitution.
As a person who lived under those so-called ‘dark days’, I have to put on record my personal view that the Panchayati restrictions did manage to breed a sense of order that I as a member of society miss today. I feel sorry for those of my college friends who were imprisoned for their political activities.
Today when I see many of them in parliament and in local elected bodies, I cannot relate to them. Had I accompanied them to the Nakkhus and Bhadragols of the Panchayat years, I often wonder, would I have been entitled to the same hefty return on the investment those years of imprisonment turned out to be for them?
As someone who, in the words of Onta, has not forgotten the Panchayat system - but certainly not in the sense he means, which must be obvious from the preceding paragraphs - I look forward to reading the essay on the "discursive exercises through which Mohsin and Rana established Panchayat as a ‘true democracy’" Onta has promised us. At some point, I hope Onta can deal with something that has bothered me for a while: how have people like Dr Mohammed Mohsin and Pashupati Sumshere J B Rana managed to maintain their relevance to and play a direct role in today’s open and competitive politics without ever having felt the need to revise - much less renounce - their original beliefs?
Durgesh Nandan Jha
Dilli Bazar, Kathmandu
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