Down the road to serfdom?

KRISHNA POKHAREL

People and the politicians need to understand that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions'

Nepal's earlier trysts with democracy have been short-lived and fraught with setbacks. The first one, back in the 1950s, barely lasted for a decade and the second one, in the 1990s, lasted for a little more than a decade. It's rightly attributed that on both the occasions the institution of monarchy played the spoilsport- though the popular zeitgeist would inform us that the political parties blithely prepared the grounds for it. With the success of the 'people's movement' in the April last year, democracy is back in the reckoning. Many desperate hopes for lasting peace and prosperity are at stake and Nepal's current experiment with democracy can't just simply afford to fail.

But the time, past and present, is littered with many sweet intentions gone utterly sour and many great dreams shattered. Democracy won't deliver with mere good intentions nor is it a magic wand as the politicians would have us believe.

In his 2002 bestseller "The Future of Freedom," journalist and writer Fareed Zakaria makes a valid point that the greatest threat to democracy is from within the democracy. Opinion makers from both the political left and right may seem to have been convinced of the virtues of unalloyed democracy and its universal acceptance as the most benign form of political system makes it a sacrosanct entity. But the catch remains, and continues to elude the intellect of most of our politicians, that democracy is a false promise unless it is backed up by the constitutional liberalism espousing the free enterprise, personal liberty and the rule of law. In the lack of it, democracy becomes the tool for demagogic politicians to gain power and ride roughshod over the people's aspirations for freedom, peace and prosperity.

Constitutional liberalism- freedom of speech and expression, personal liberty, limitations of power and the rule of law - need to be firmly ingrained in the political culture of the nation for the democracy to be stable and deliver.

In his article "Putting the People First" in International Herald Tribune economist Prof. Christopher Lingle strikes a cautious note that sans individual freedom flowing from the rule of law democracy becomes "a hollow vessel that allows populist politicians to usurp the freedom and wealth of citizens."

This healthy cynicism on the tendency of democracy to become a tool of oppression and controlling the "destiny of people" by the elected political elites is required to guard democracy of its ills. This is not to undervalue the greatness of democracy as the best possible political arrangement to check the modern Leviathan but to ensure its long future by mitigating the threats to it from within itself so that its enemies- totalitarianism and tyranny in all their political variants-can be permanently put at bay and the welfare and the freedom of people be suitably enabled and reinforced.

One year down the road since the success of the uprising last year, Nepal is still a dangerously confused nation – politically and economically. The social fault lines based on castes and region that were hitherto been existing but not acknowledged to have been politically significant are now showing up. Various marginalized groups and communities are clamouring for their rightful share in the nation's social and political pie. Maoists might have entered into the mainstream politics but they are still to sort out men from the boys among them when it comes to their participation in the parliamentary democracy. They are Jekyll and Hydes of Nepalese politics. And the political capital of the eight political parties is fast depleting with the growing skepticism in the public of their ability to hold a peaceful, free and fair election for the constituent assembly.

The greatest casualty of all this messy politics, which is going to have the serious consequences on the nation's future, continues to be the country's economy. The economic growth rate is at two per cent – exacerbated by continuing strikes, road closures and Bandhs. It's been eating away at the confidence of the hardworking and enterprising Nepalese individuals who are becoming less and less sanguine of a peaceful and prosperous future. And that's a sure way to fail a nation by robbing the citizenry of the confidence in themselves and making them resign to the status quo- make them feel that they are not in the control of their own destiny.

As Austrian economist and political philosopher F.A. Hayek would put it, the journey down the road to serfdom is the political state in which everything would be planned and decided by the all-powerful politicians, including the 'destiny' of the people.

(An article published on the current issue of Newsfront weekly in Nepal)