Spirit of Public Inquiry
Anti-Political Politics in Nepal

Dev Raj Dahal

A paradox lies at the heart of politics in Nepal. If on the one hand, opening of the country to the outside world has allowed Nepalese citizens to develop a critical sense of inquiry about public issues prompting them to demand that politicians address their concerns, on the other hand, the capacity of Nepalese politicians to inspire citizens, resolve conflicts and deliver public goods have been drastically undermined by their own actions. How did this happen? One obvious answer is: Nepalese politics has been moving towards an anti-political direction.
Neglected Public

For the conception of politics to be adequate, it should involve the creation of a righteous space for the citizens to articulate and resolve issues of their concern. In this space, citizens can exercise their democratic rights and freedoms as well as include a variety of perspectives to deliberate on questions and seek answers. Politics is nothing but the processes involved in the execution of these public duties. Therefore, the dharma (institutional duties) of politics is to serve the public. It is in this public sphere that citizens are motivated to question their leaders' accountability, remind them of their duty to society and the zeitgeist of time. Thus, the public sphere provides politics the legitimacy needed to make it the bedrock of raj dharma- the rights and responsibilities of public figures to conduct statecraft. So, politics is nothing but the process of executing the raj (state) niti (policy) to protect and promote public interests. Politics is essentially public in the sense that the political sphere is shared equally by every member of a polis, regardless of gender, wealth, class, or caste position or political power. It is not essentially a manipulative vocation. And, to the extent that it appears to be so, it is only those selfish politicians who make it a dirty game. When their numbers rise, politics gets mired in crisis. In Nepal, such a crisis has already led to the declaration of a state of emergency in the country and the suspension of fundamental rights and freedom of Nepalese citizens. It is a crisis whose roots lie in the malfunction of politics.

If politics exclusively serves the private interest and exhibits apathy towards those who are not in politics, but who do make up the public sphere, it cannot become a matter of public or collective concern or, by implication, political. In no way does such politics treasure a common ground for citizens and leaders of all hues. To use the public trust for private goals is just as serious a crime against the public as any seizure of public property for private gain. Anti-public politics, therefore, becomes anti-political. Democratic politics intends to widen the public sphere as it is deliberative, participatory, public, inclusive and transparent. Anti-politics, by contrast, is individualist, exclusive, private, non-public and opaque. Anti-political trends become contagious if institutional mechanisms are not geared to correct them in time, as has happened in Nepal. As a result, it is not unusual to see Nepalese politicians vying to remain "above" the Constitution and public institutions. When this is the purushartha (matter of pride) they all rush towards, it is natural for their dharma to serve the public elude them. In a more general context, the hegemony of selfish politicians in the structure of power in Nepal has devalued the very purpose of politics--enlargement of freedoms to citizens. At the heart of Nepalese politics leading politicians towards anti- constitutional behaviour lies their excessive passion for private gain. Public inquiry is thus moving towards the center of political discourse in Nepal calling for an effective democratic oversight on the deteriorating trends in the behaviour of public figures. This article seeks to examine why this spirit of public inquiry is important for scrutinizing not the motive of politics but its very purpose and meaning.

Articulate Nepalese have increasingly voiced their concerns about being reduced to mere spectators of the grab for political power. They have started complaining about the deficit in public order, rule of law and social justice brought about by the rising affinity of politicians towards their affno manchhe-- family members and clients-- and weak ties with the voters, citizens and workers. The reaction is natural. When political relations are reduced to social affinity, the citizens contest political points of views and policies even when they are justified, marking a general deficiency of political trust especially in authority and public institutions. In many instances, such a gravitation of politicians to primordial ties and distribution of public goods to particular clients, not common citizens, does skew the benefits of the relevant public policy. Exclusion motivates citizens to invoke their basic constitutional right to know and frame the terrain of discourse around the precarious political existence they daily face. To be informed about what political leaders are doing becomes their daily aspiration. Here lies the crux of their inquiry.

The utility of public inquiry is not an end in itself. It can become an effective tool to bring into being certain influences on politicians termed as leaders. With this tool, politicians can be tested solely by their public function, as under constitutional law; not by their distinction, history, status or particular stances on issues of little practical concern to the general masses. Under democratic power structures, leaders are not supposed to exclusively satisfy their own self-will above the conception of a higher law--sanatan dharma-where political power evokes a call for public service. Public inquiry, thus, is the first step towards bringing everything under the constitutional umbrella. In Nepal, that step is being taken with the citizenry asking their representative politicians about what went wrong with their ideologies and political utopias.

The right to seek answers from politicians makes people capable of knowing the realities of political power, the rationality of power disposition and the varying degrees of complexity in the relationships between citizens and their leaders. If citizens play no role in politics, except as a factor or pawn in the power struggles, if they do not continuously engage in the inquiry about what their leaders are doing and why, in no way does their consciousness about public affairs enrich the quality of their political life. By contrast, a culture of inquiry helps citizens connect their views, skills and resources to a broad process of learning and civic engagements as the practice of everyday life. It helps generate politically relevant resources to overcome their powerlessness. At the policy level, ordinary citizens need to be attracted to a deliberative process of politics to invoke political leaders for an explanation of what they have done to improve the administration of public goods and public decisions. Politics has to be geared towards enlarging the policy domain to include popular aspirations. Otherwise, it is reduced to the economics of short term self-interest of politicians or private social interactions of their families and clients. This makes the political space anti-political in character and undermines the capacity of citizens to influence government policy.

An inquiring public is a constitutive ideal of democratic citizenship-- the membership of a political community called the state. Citizens living in a politically bounded space engage in public action for solving the substantial societal problems they come across in their everyday life. They are activated in political relations by their rational self-interest generated by the existing social order they are embedded in. They thus subject their opinions to public inquiry and validation. In the Nepalese context, their culture of inquiry does not spring from isolation. The rationality of their public inquiry is firmly rooted in a functional political context of the state where citizens can claim and realize their basic rights. So, the foundation for using the tool of public enquiry to solve popular problems is there. The cognitive construction of politics, after all, is a good sign in the establishment of a democratic civil society as well as to transform the subject status of the Nepalese people into thinking and acting citizens. An imaginative intelligence, initiative and esprit de corps of citizens can make politicians highly democratic in communication, cooperation and interaction with a multitude of societal actors acting and influencing the locus of power and decision-making. Since the Nepalese civil societies have a multiplicity of referents, but little or no links among themselves to connect civility to nationality, the political character of national identity of Nepal is especially important. Only this common thread can glue a coherent social life characterized by the heterogeneity of life-forms.
Social Renewal

For the majority of powerless Nepalese, politics holds immense importance to regulate the process of public affairs and free themselves for associational thought, feeling and reflection The motivational spirit of Nepalese public inquiry, therefore, springs from the hope, concern, passion and emotion of citizens to orient themselves towards the exercise of autonomous choice and free will. For the alluring virtue of political life to manifest itself in Nepal, a constant civic renewal is required to recapture the sovereignty of the Nepalese people and to reclaim their right to live with dignity. It is political power that wears the cloak of legitimacy. And it is only the political sphere where private interests of powerful persons can, at least in principle, be transcended for the common good of society.

Hindrances to the civic renewal, that can bring public concerns to politics, come from a political elite thriving on the ignorance of citizens. But, if citizens are exposed to unfettered communication and socialization, the power of non-representative and unproductive political elite-- the modern thalu barga, can be dissipated. Members of this class are the aristocratic bearers of effective social power who do not assume the moral responsibility for rational progress, modernity and social stability of the majority of citizens, as did the old thalu class. The political power of this class is disproportional to its representativeness. If power is disproportionate, injustice occurs. The thalu are an elite class raised to oppose elites based on merit and egalitarian ethos. This class prefers authority and order and opposes innovation and creativity, just like the old thalu class. But unlike the old, it is devoid of any responsibility, moral or otherwise. Its politics is awfully alienated from the everyday lives, hopes and needs of ordinary citizens because the modern thalu class is less enmeshed in the historical, cultural and institutional values of the nation. One can see its effects on the growth of poverty, inequality, dependency, alienation and rebellion in Nepal. There is marginalization of public intellectuals and social critics, which is also accompanied by changes in the relationship of professional intellectuals with society. This relationship is increasingly defined by the degree of their own reconciliation with political power to rationalize their own comfortable positions within the social hierarchy. Informed citizens as the lifeblood of politics must examine the causes of these developments and reconstitute their leadership capable of fleshing out public needs and committed to fulfill them. This is the way to reconstruct political power along democratic lines and make Nepalese politicians accountable for their actions. The political culture of politicians and the culture of political life of ordinary people determine the shape and direction of politics. In this context, political space is not a given; it is regularly reconstituted as per the political needs of the citizens and the zeitgeist of the Age. This is how the state, the market and civil society institutions are rendered accessible to the majority of citizens.

The spirit of inquiry is a positive attribute that helps strengthen and deepen the politicization of civic participation. A politicized public not only lowers the costs of cooperation but also sets the citizens free from excessive preoccupation with a one-way flow of information, particularly journalism based on the interests of powerful corporations that own them. The spirit of inquiry also liberates citizens from the tyranny of sound-bites of free-floating intellectuals whose sights are firmly and constantly set only on governmental power. An inquiring public is not necessarily locked in a particular party's ideological trap or within some other political disciplinary bounds. They also look beyond cheap entertainment that miseducates citizens and produces a seductive consciousness.

The fundamentals of civic competence that remain untested in Nepal, however, are: Whether Nepalese citizens are questioning the utility of the public statement of their leaders? Have they been able to make them accountable for their promises and actions? A critical public is not lulled by a false sense of promises of their leaders. Conscious citizens clearly understand that merely issuing a sterile statement or making unsorted speeches by leaders cannot solve social problems. Problem solving becomes an object of explicit concern to political leaders if they are threatened by collective action. The politics of promises, at least, presupposes an understanding of politicians about the dynamics of problems and their involvement in mediating the gap between the empirical reality of Nepal and its normative ideals embedded in democratic principles and the constitutional vision.
An inquiring public is often motivated and engaged in discovering tangible links between leaders' statements and policy substance thus relating them to the quality of political discourse. The culture of inquiry seeks to establish an instrumental connection of social knowledge with politics and politics with the transformation of political life. The cardinal question is: Are Nepalese politicians helping to achieve this transformation? The hope is that the emerging civic environment will allow public inquiry to do its job. But, here too, Nepalese civil societies have been pathetically weak in reinvigorating the civic life because they are caught in a trilemma-- among serving self-interest, maintaining self-restraint or promoting the interest of public life.

The Nepalese radicals are irredeemably hostile to tradition and are trying to destroy it at all costs while conservatives are bent on sticking to the antiquity at all costs. Both are unadjusted to the new political consensus. Both assert that an enforced consensus does not hold the promise of a golden mean of politics. Both are thus caught by the presumption of disenchantment and disaffection. On the other hand, participatory change-- a change essential to deepen politics in the daily life of citizens-- has often been downplayed or overlooked by reformists for too long a time. Worse still, policy makers have not only dehumanized political life by their culture of greed, graft and impunity but also pushed the state and the majority of Nepalese to such a situation that both are forced to deal with an existential dilemma rather than talking about progress. Such a situation is supposed to have been prevented with the right choice of policies. Instead of coming together to solve this grave problem, Nepalese political parties have been plagued by factionalism, with a host of rival interest groups. A common purpose to make politics representational of societal interests, rational and public eludes them. The implication of this for the parliament is this: it does not constitute a social microcosm of the whole nation. A weak representation system has weakened its power to create a strong executive to implement pro-public policies.

The economic society seems emotionally neutral to the politics of public interests. So, most of the citizens' grievances are directed to the members of political society-- state authorities, political parties, government and the legislative and local leaders. This political society is the one that promises everything, even something unjust, to gravitate citizens towards the game of electoral politics. And, the citizens have not let them down. They have come out into the streets several times ready to sacrifice their lives for social change. Many members of the political society were catapulted to power articulating the language of social justice, but they quickly shelved their promises under the ruins of collective unconsciousness once they came to power. This way they could form a pact of domination with the existing elite to dominate the state, the market and civil society. This is how the majority of citizens have always been excluded from a space to participate in the public life of the nation.

In spite of their weaknesses, a multitude of civil society organizations are pondering over this matter earnestly and requesting the members of the political society to execute the social contract they entered into with citizens on a number of provisions: protecting the weak against the strong, maintaining a modicum of public order, security and peace, providing welfare services and resolving the deadly political conflicts in society. Their discourse espouses livelihood security for powerless people. Such language vindicates the rationality of policy utility--the classical dharma of politics. It is a dharma which seeks to exercise political power on the basis of the consent of the governed. As the successive Nepalese governments failed in all these tasks, citizens are inquiring about what is wrong with the politics of Nepal-- the political structure, the constitution or political culture of the nation?
Bringing Politics Back To The Public Domain

The spirit of public inquiry establishes a condition in which communication between citizens and politicians becomes rational inducing both to engage in a more fundamental reflection about themselves for exchanging reciprocity. One, however, must define the purpose of political discourse and contestation in an unequal condition and an environment of injustice. How can political discourse and contestation expand the sphere of public rights of citizens and help reform and mediate the public policies made for them? Does such a discourse have positive effect on political life in Nepal bristling with the wretchedness of fear, tremor and trouble? In most public discourses in Nepal, one often finds the participant defending one's own personal, partisan, professional or disciplinary interests even if they go against the wider public interest. An excessively partisan politics ironically tears down the individuality of citizens and the sovereignty of the civil society, easily erodes the freedom of thought supposed to flourish in the domain of differences and diversity. Citizens fall prey to the discipline of organized power through indoctrination and social control. Such culture seeks conformity and rejects diversity of opinion. It does not challenge the irrationality of unaccountable power. One must understand the fact that the political party is only a part of the society and, therefore, it does not represent the society as a whole. Mediation of power, knowledge and interest by other societal forces is important to make politics "political" and to prevent the devaluation of politicians.

The public character of politics distinguishes itself from the profit-driven world of business and commerce. Nepalese politics is increasingly dominated by the motivation provided by the apolitical cost-benefit discourse or sheer populism of a wild mob. These irrationally motivated non-debatable courses of action have threatened to undermine the very stability of the democratic state. Although public pressure has started building up to bring them in line, Nepalese political leaders have yet to define their boundaries of action. They have yet to discover the utility of activism for public communication and public action.

Coping with the problems of anti-political politics depends on generating new ideas about effective learning, linking knowledge to power and establishing a culture of inquiry about the harmony between political philosophy and political practice, between norms and facts and between law and politics. Several huge tasks await the Nepalese if they want to bring politics back to the public sphere. Political scientists, seasoned politicians and the people manning the relevant institutions have all been united in demanding several institutional reforms: an election code of conduct, enforcement of transparency and accountability, an effective implementation of political parties' act and an end to the culture of impunity for the powerful political class. These attributes are expected to discipline the anti-political politicians.

Accountability to serve public and national interests has often been undermined by public institutions and one can notice this trend in the cabinet, in the parliament, in political parties and even civil societies that have in many instances only acted as an appendage of the politician's interest. The Supreme Court has had to reverse many arbitrary decisions of these bodies. The civil society has played a crucial political role in all these issues-- some times bringing watchdog agencies to life, while at others activating the court. To make justice accessible to the powerless sections of people the court has to be above political power. Its autonomy, objectivity and integrity must be enhanced if the costs of justice is to be brought down. The spirit of inquiry that has been stirred up is working its way through in Nepal. Taking politics away from the public realm has already cost the nation dear in the form of a radical extra-constitutional insurgency in Nepal. Some form of reform is thus expected, if only to prevent it from being used by violent movements for their own legitimacy.

South Asia Politics, New Delhi (June, 2002)