 NEPALI TIMES ARCHIVE |
We now have a fait accompli that Nepal will be carved up into 11 provinces. In any other country this would be called gerrymandering, but here it was just politicians who found appeasement too tempting to resist.
Even though the political leadership knows that ethnicity-based federalism would be a disaster, they were too weak-kneed to oppose it. The only benefit proponents have been able to cite is that it would 'bring government closer to the people'. But existing evidence shows this argument to be flawed.
Nepal has had elected local councils for nearly half a century now, first called District and Village Panchayats and now known as VDCs and DDCs. After the mid-1990s, these councils had elected officials till 2002, and since then have been run by state-appointed secretaries. But local politicians still play a decisive role in the distribution of pork-barrel funds and state allocations.
These local bodies, in whatever form, have all along been bastions of corruption in which all party officials carve up the pie and collectively partake of it, irrespective of whichever party is at the helm in Kathmandu. The problem is that the feudalistic order continues to reign supreme, and most political leaders belong to local elites who have always derived their power ascriptively without having to be accountable to the community members in its exercise.
This is why most politicians are corrupt in Nepal, and they get away with it with impunity under the cover of mutual protection. With such a feudal order remaining intact, Nepal's imminent federalisation would only mean dividing up the country into new feudal fiefdoms, and we will effectively be jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
Wait, it gets worse. Take the example of the West Seti project, which the Maoist government has just awarded to China's Three Gorges after 15 years of deadlock, but which may never be built if we continue with federalism. As directed by the Natural Resources Committee of parliament, West Seti will be developed as a multipurpose project, which would mean that the 290 m high dam would submerge 2,166 hectares of land (619 hectares of that prime farmland) and displace 16,221 people in Doti, Dandeldhura, Baitadi and Bajhang. It would release 90 cubic metres of regulated water per second, sufficient to irrigate 270,000 hectares for non-paddy cultivation and 90,000 hectares for paddy cultivation in the downstream districts of Kanchanpur, Kailali and Bardia.