The everlasting elections for prime minister and the prolonged political impasse have now made the much-abused slogan of a 'New Nepal' a joke. All but vanished is the promise that the country will get a much-needed make-over. We are just trying to make do.

People are now saying the 'Old Nepal' wasn't that bad after all. All we did with a ruinous war was import a culture of violence and impunity, and 16,000 Nepalis died so a few goons can now extort, intimidate and bag contracts. The revolution has degenerated into a nationwide network of looters. Those who believed in taking the country back to Year Zero have succeeded in a way they perhaps did not intend.

'Status quo' has become a bad word. Anyone who talks about non-violence, democracy or pluralism is a 'status quoist'. We abandoned everything from the past, even the good stuff, and threw the baby out with the bathwater.
As we have often argued in this space, everything that has worked in Nepal since the First Democracy Movement in 1990 has the word 'local' or 'community' attached to it. Nepal's community-managed commons are a model for the rest of the world. The community forestry movement worked because nationalised forests were handed back to villagers to protect and manage. The community radio network, with nearly 300 FM radio stations across the country today, provides the substrate for grassroots democracy by facilitating community participation in decision-making. Local mother's groups have been at the forefront of cooperatives that have improved family income.


We were able to reduce our national maternal mortality average from 538 per 100,000 live births in 1996 to 280 today, as well as halve the child mortality rate in the same period, largely because of the work of local Women's Health Volunteers, of whom there are more than 50,000 across the country. Then there was exemplary community social mobilisation by groups like SAPPROS, whose Srikrishna Upadhyay is a co-winner of this year's Right Livelihood Award.

All this happened despite a raging war, the post-conflict political disarray, the corruption and mismanagement at the national level, and the three-party dictatorship in the DDCs. Imagine how much more progress we'd have made if local elections had been held every five years. The interim constitution has a provision for local elections, so there is no reason why we should have to wait till the constitution is written or a new coalition government is formed to hold local elections. If we wait, we may wait forever.

Polls would allow us to correct some of the problems that local self-governance was slow to address, like user groups not being inclusive enough, the poorest of the poor not benefitting as much, or job creation lagging behind, as well as the poor quality of education and healthcare.

But we were on the right track back in the mid-1990s. A needless and wasteful war changed all that. It is not a coincidence that the first targets of the Maoists were local elected councils. Many VDC buildings like this one in Turang in Gulmi are still in ruins while the current coalition tries to unravel the community forestry success with wholesale plunder.

Let's bring back the elements of the old Nepal that worked, and were showing results. If believing in grassroots democracy, participatory development, non-violence and pluralism is to be a status quoist, then we are proud to be for the status quo.

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