Nepal’s slow grammar of democracy

The slow, arduous labour of democracy rarely announces itself with the fanfare of constitutional moments.  It proceeds instead through committee rooms, ward meetings, half-attended assemblies, the awkward choreography of speech and silence, and the everyday compromises between aspiration and constraint. 

The book Nepal’s Federalism and the Pursuit of Deliberative Democracy attends precisely to this unglamorous terrain. In it, Vishnu Kumari Tandon does not ask whether democracy is desirable — an already settled question — but whether it can be made to think, to listen, and to endure under conditions of inequality, historical fracture, and institutional novelty. 

Her wager is modest yet demanding: that federalism, when tethered to participatory planning and deliberative fors, might recalibrate the relationship between state and citizen without promising redemption.

Tandon’s Nepal is neither a site of democratic salvation nor a study in failure. It is a space of trial, where ideas migrate from constitutional text to municipal practice, altered by context, power, and expectation. Democracy here appears not as an ideal form but as a situated practice -- procedural, contested, and unfinished. 

The book’s quiet achievement lies in redirecting debates on deliberative democracy away from abstract normativity and toward the ethical friction of lived institutions.

Federalism arrives in Nepal not as a technocratic reform but as a historical concession, wrested from conflict, exclusion, and prolonged political unrest. Tandon, who is a governance consultant at the World Bank, situates the 2015 Constitution within this unsettled genealogy, treating federalism less as an administrative innovation than as a moral response to longstanding claims of marginalisation. 

The constitutional recognition of local autonomy is thus freighted with ethical expectation. Yet the book refuses to equate decentralisation with empowerment. Federalism, Tandon insists, redistributes power without dissolving hierarchy.

Domination may simply reappear closer to home. The central question, therefore, is not whether local governments exist, but how they govern: whether institutionalised participation genuinely alters the terms on which citizens speak, decide, and contest public priorities.

Federalism emerges not as a stable structure but as a field of tension—between autonomy and dependence, inclusion and capture, aspiration and capacity. It is within this unstable terrain that the democratic experiment unfolds.

UNEQUAL SKIES 

Participation, one of democracy’s most invoked terms, often risks conceptual exhaustion. Tandon restores its weight by treating participation as labour rather than ritual. Drawing on fieldwork in Buddhabhumi and Dhanushadham municipalities, she reconstructs the choreography of local planning: assemblies, committees, and councils through which proposals circulate, stall, or vanish.

Participation here is unevenly distributed. It is shaped by gendered expectations, caste hierarchies, economic precarity, and anticipations of return. Attendance becomes a calculation rather than a civic reflex. This analytical attention to motivation marks one of the book’s strengths. 

Citizens participate not out of abstract virtue but through pragmatic reasoning, moral obligation, and strategic interest. Participation thus appears neither ennobling nor cynical, but politically intelligible.

If participation concerns presence, deliberation concerns voice — and, crucially, whose voice matters. Tandon’s engagement with deliberative democratic theory is respectful yet revisionist. Habermasian ideals of reasoned consensus are treated as aspirational rather than portable, strained by structural inequality.

In municipal assemblies, deliberation is patterned by authority: who speaks first, who commands attention, whose claims are legitimised. Marginalised citizens may be present without influence, audible without consequence. Deliberation risks becoming procedural affirmation rather than substantive redistribution of voice.

Yet Tandon does not abandon deliberation as a democratic practice. Instead, she broadens its normative horizon. Drawing on second-generation deliberative theory, she legitimises emotion, self-interest, and strategic speech as components of democratic reasoning. Deliberation becomes a contested exchange rather than a purified rationality. The common good, if it appears, emerges provisionally: negotiated rather than presumed.

One of the book’s most original contributions lies in its treatment of fiscal decentralisation. Money is not merely a resource but a language through which priorities are articulated and participation structured. The devolution of budgetary authority transforms deliberation into distributive politics.

Citizens attend assemblies not simply to speak but to secure roads, water systems, clinics, schools. Voice is tethered to material expectation. This proximity intensifies engagement while sharpening conflict. Fiscal autonomy thus amplifies the stakes of deliberation without guaranteeing its equity.

Local representatives emerge as paradoxical figures: empowered yet constrained, accountable yet insulated. Tandon resists binary judgments, showing instead how fiscal decentralisation deepens democratic possibility while exposing institutional fragility.

Threaded through the book is a sustained interrogation of the ‘common good’. Revered in theory and suspect in practice, the concept is neither discarded nor sanctified. In unequal societies, appeals to the common good can obscure asymmetries of sacrifice.

Empirically, deliberation proceeds through articulated self-interests: neighbourhood demands, caste claims, gendered priorities. Far from undermining democracy, these claims animate it. Self-interest becomes deliberation’s motor rather than its negation.

The book thus advances a quiet ethical argument: democracy does not require the transcendence of interest, but its articulation under conditions of mutual visibility. The common good, if it exists, is emergent, fragile, and revisable.

Institutions, for Tandon, are moral technologies. Laws mandate participation, but they cannot generate trust, courage, or equality. Procedural compliance may coexist with substantive exclusion. Yet repetition matters. Even imperfect fora can cultivate habits of speaking and being heard.

Deliberative democracy, the book suggests, is not an event but a discipline, learned slowly, unevenly, and reversibly. Federalism is less a solution than a condition: one that opens space for democratic learning without securing its outcome.

Firmly grounded in Nepal’s political history, the book resists parochialism. Nepal functions as a mirror, reflecting broader dilemmas of democratic deepening across unequal societies. Comparative resonances with Brazil, India, and donor-driven governance reforms are handled without formula or prescription. Nepal is neither an exemplar nor an exception. It is a site where democracy reveals its ordinary difficulties.

The prose mirrors the argument: careful, analytic, resistant to grand claims. What lingers is not a verdict but a sensibility: an attentiveness to democracy’s tempo. Deliberative democracy appears less as consensus achieved than as disagreement sustained without rupture.

In an age of democratic impatience, Tandon offers a quieter ethic. Democracy must be allowed to think slowly, to falter, and to learn. This book stands as a thoughtful companion to that discipline, reminding us that democratic transformation often occurs far from the centre, in places where speaking itself remains an achievement.

Aftab Husain is a Pakistan-born poet and literary and cultural critic. He teaches South Asian literature and culture at the University of Vienna.