How Nepal politicians can use earthquake to bring stability

The earthquake in Nepal has left close to 9,000 people dead. More than 6,00,000 houses have been destroyed or partially damaged. As a whole, eight million people have been affected in some shape or form. Nature, it seems, is likely to continue disrupting the recovery process in Nepal and there won't be much respite as a large part of the affected population still don't have a roof over their head to shelter them from the incoming monsoon season.

Is it possible then to think about the devastation caused by the earthquake as an opportunity for improving and stabilising the political landscape in Nepal (which would surely aid the rebuilding process)? Disasters have been known in the past to enable political accommodation; the most recent manifestation of this was the case of the tsunami-enabled peace in Aceh, Indonesia, where the widespread and acute disaster (reportedly, over 1,50,000 people lost their livesand half a million or more displaced in Aceh) caused by the 2004 tsunami led to the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), who had been fighting the state for almost three decades, signing a peace agreement in August 2005.

After a decade (1996-2006) of Maoist-led insurgency in the Himalayan nation, which reportedly resulted in the loss of 17,000-18,000 lives, the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Accord (CPA) on January 6, 2007, was meant to have put Nepal on the final lap of its own peace and state building process. Unfortunately, the last eight years have failed to produce any remarkable progress on that front and Nepal continues to suffer from a dysfunctional political order. The biggest impediment has been the repeated failure of the elected Constituent Assembly (CA) to accomplish the constitution-making process, with continuous missing of set deadlines and their endless extensions.

Various scholars and observers have suggested that such a chronic failure can be appropriated to the fact that many of the important and potentially contentious issues, such as defining the state governing system/ form of governance (presidential or Westminster), implementing the federal structures (boundaries, names of states, et al), providing inclusive mechanisms and proportional representation systems (that is, whether or not there should be freedom to form political parties), right to self-determination (question of preferential rights on natural resources, economic sector and prior rights on politics being given to the oppressed communities, janajatis, indigenous groups, and Madhesis), as well as maintaining judicial autonomy, are not agreed upon in the CA.

Although the seven-point agreement of November 1, 2011 provided a glimmer of hope in completing the task of writing the constitution and implementing the provisions of the CPA, however, the perennial, serious differences that existed and have continued to exist between the signatories of the agreement (that is, the major political forces of the country) have continued to pose serious doubts about the implementation.

Apart from completing the task of constitution-writing, there is a great deal of unfinished business from ten years of civil war, which may now be further put off in the aftermath of such a natural disaster. Among such issues, the one that has been regrettably and repeatedly ignored, is that of local elections. The democratisation process, which was ushered in primarily as a result of the 1990 Jan Andolan-I, has been failing ever sinceas it has been focused on power, position, and money at the centre, and has only carried forward the almost eternal legacy of centralisation in Nepal and have not provided any substantial change in that regard (which is also why this was one of the more popular drivers responsible for the onset of the insurgency). Sadly, this process of centralisation of power in the power corridors of Kathmandu has festered even in the post-conflict era and consequently, in most of the country, there are today no political leaders with sufficient legitimacy to lead and coordinate relief efforts at the village and district levels - and it was in the mountain villages north of Kathmandu where the most affected victims of the earthquake, in many cases, had to wait a long time for help and aid to finally reach them.

There have been no elections at the local level since a state of emergency was declared in 1998, leaving a majority of such districts, towns and villages in the hands of ill-equipped appointed committees.

Understandably, the popular opinion has been mounting against the government and all the parties of the Nepalese political establishment. In this context, the political actors can continue to indulge in petty politics and in fact look to use the disaster caused by the earthquake as a way of continuing the political impasse due to their inabilty and lack of desire for achieving political consensus on the various issues that have been plaguing the post-conflict state building process in Nepal. Or, perhaps they can rather view the discussed political issues not as a diversion to the process of reconstruction and redevelopment but as being central to it. Instead, the political class - whose credibility has been low - should use the seemingly reduced social polarisation and the sense of national solidarity to manoeuvre through the sticky issues. Priority should be given to completing the constitution -writing process and a deadline can be set for the end of the year. This can be followed by the holding of general and local elections in the coming year or so.

In a positive sign, leaders of the Communist Party of Nepal-Unified Marxist Leninist (CPN-UML), which is part of the ruling coalition, and the Unified Communist Party of Nepal - Marxist (UCPN-M) have recently held talks where they discussed about the need for greater political unity. The National Congress, leader of the ruling coalition, must also look to stay away from any form of political upmanship and should try and utilise this opportunity to move beyond the deep political divisions that have been pegging Nepal back.