 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
| |
| |
| |
|
Teeka
Bhattarai and Bijaya Subba/Disabled democracy:
Leaders lacking political consciousness
By
democracy, we simply mean the democratic practice
of the last 12 years for the purpose of this presentation..
Our thesis is that the lack of awareness in the
political leadership is the reason why democracy
is being disabled. We have spent 10-11 years of
the 12 years of multiparty democracy in the villages
from where we have tried to look at the last 12
years. But we were able to deal with only one
aspect in this paper.
In
2000 we undertook a socio-economic-ecological
survey of 5 VDCs of Achham. Some 40 per cent of
the respondents did not know that the system had
changed from Panchayat to multiparty democracy.
We believe the leaders were too interested to
get the votes of the people and there was nobody
explain what the new system meant.
Leadership
and bureaucracy were conditioned to partyless
system of governance. People could not find substantive
changes in the behaviour of the leaders before
and after 1990. They came, they asked for votes
and they gave speeches and they went away—pretty
much the same as in the past.
We
have looked at three forms of exclusion and these
form the basis of our argument. The three forms
are gender, ethnicity and geographic region. The
third one is perhaps a new aspect that is not
being looked into that way. We have chosen the
elections of 1958, 1962, 1981, 1991 and 1999 for
analysis. The workshop has gone much further where
the trend of exclusion is being claimed for over
the centuries. We try not to repeat what has already
been said and give a glimpse of the difference
between the Panchayat and democratic era with
a few graphs.
In
terms of gender, parties have not moved ahead
other than fielding 5 per cent of women candidates
for general elections. Women’s representation
in the central committees of UML and NC is similar.
This is nothing new or unexpected . If we see
the people’s council of the Maoists the
only apex body membership of which has been made
public, the gender representation does not look
any good. We don’t know how that has been
compensated in other organs.
Looking
at the ethnic representation in legislative membership
the trend is clear throghout the whole period:
over-representation of high hill castes followed
by hill indigenous groups, Tarai high caste groups,
Newars and so on. It is possible that this classification
can be contested. Exclusion has been looked at
from the development paradigm rather than the
sociological and political one which we consider
have significant overlaps.
Next,
we looked ethnic representation at party central
committees. There were no substantive difference
between the two major political parties: UML and
NC: high hill castes dominate the composition.
Tarai dalits and hill dalits are zero. Even in
the people’s council of the Maoists there
is no substantive difference. But there is higher
representation of other hill indigenous groups
but we do not know what kind of structure there
is within the Maoist structure of governance.
We then looked at geographic representation and
on the basis of the state’s resource distribution.
We have looked at the expenditure in the past
five years. We have put the three west subdivisions
together as ‘West’ for the purposes
of this paper. The west has 42 per cent of the
population, but only 14 per cent of the central
committee members of the NC are from the west
and 9 per cent of UML central committee members
are from the west (although the two committees
have comparable numbers they are not exactly comparable).
The central region has 35 per cent of the population
but takes 70 per cent of the state’s resources.
Of this, 58 per cent is taken by Kathmandu district
alone. There is a concentration of political power
in the east but fund allocation is not in the
same proportion if we base our analysis on the
representation in the apex bodies of the two parties.
We have included budget allocation between 2054
and 2060 because we could not get data for the
past 12 years. Eighty per cent of the development
budget is spent through central level and 20 per
cent through the local.
We
also looked at exclusion from the point of view
of service delivery. To illustrate this, we have
two cases. The first case is about free education.
The UML government announced free education up
to Grade X when it came to power. Among the Chepangs,
where we worked, there were only five students
who had finished Grade V. It shows where were
the resources going.
The second is the case of uterus prolapse cases
amongst women. Already in the 1960s, 1500 uterus
prolapse cases were treated in Pokhara. It is
astonishing why nobody—the government, the
donors bothered with it. It is estimated that
at least 10 per cent of the women in Nepal are
affected by this. This means more than two and
a half million people are affected. Nobody bothered,
we think, because women did not have a voice.
There are 58-60,000 people reportedly affected
by HIV AIDS but it gets so much attention but
prolapse gets almost none.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
|
