More than 3,500 Nepalis were interviewed nationwide in 38 districts for this year’s Himalmedia Public Opinion Poll in mid-February, and for many of them the disappointment with national politics has trickled down to the district and village level.
DDCs, VDCs, and municipalities have been without election councils now for 11 years and the resulting lack of accountability is affecting the lives of Nepalis everywhere. Six in every ten respondents said local elections should be held ‘immediately’, without waiting for national elections for a Constituent Assembly.
Local units of government are responsible for citizenship, birth and marriage registration and other paperwork, and this is now being handled by civil servants who are often outsiders. When asked where they went to get work done, one-third of the respondents said they went to the VDC or municipality secretary, but a sizeable 26% said they still approached council members elected in the last local elections in 1998. The fact that people still go to their elected officials even though they don’t hold any formal positions anymore is an indication of the residual respect accorded to local officials.
However, successive poll results from the past three years show a gradual erosion of the people’s trust in local political leaders. When asked to compare between national-level leaders of political parties and local ones, nearly 55% said they were ‘the same’. More people (nearly 20%) thought they were worse, and only 17% thought local leaders were ‘better’ than national ones.
More than half the respondents (52%) now say that their trust in political parties has diminished in the past few years and less than 9% felt that their trust had improved.
The Poll had a battery of questions on the public trust of other institutions like the army, police, bureaucracy, media etc. ‘Distrust of the police’ is at 24%, and it is higher in the Tarai. The people are similarly distrustful of the civil service, with a full one-third of Tarai respondents saying so.
