While you and I, as elites in this society, have perfected the art of negotiating with the powers that be to protect and augment our own interests, the same is not true about the vast majority of our people who happen to be must less fortunate.

Bihari Krishna Shrestha <biharishrestha@gmail.com> writes in response to

 Siddhi Ranjitkar <siddhiranjit@gmail.com> 

Dear Shiddhi jee,

I am fully in agreement with you that dictatorship is the last thing
we want in our country and that our president must not emerge as a
dictator. Having said that, I have a lot of problem about your
characterization of our present type of democracy as being merely
"messy". While you and I, as elites in this society, have perfected
the art of negotiating with the powers that be to protect and augment
our own interests,  the same is not true about the vast majority of
our people who happen to be must less fortunate. As the media reports
remain awash with such stories, in order to make their ends meet, the
poor are even forced to sell their own children to traffickers and
their young daughters to Indian and African brothels. As things stand,
our villages have been drained of youthful workforce, both men and
women, who have migrated to India and to third countries in search of
employment and income. So, it would amount to a grievous disservice to
our society to characterize the current system of governance--the
government of the corrupt, by the corrupt and for the corrupt--as
being simply a little "messy". From my perspective, the recent
earthquake has been the tipping point. The people who paid heavily for
this "messy" democracy have been those who could not afford more than
a earthen or mud-mortared structures that they call their home.

As I wrote in my earlier write up, I am not looking at the
presidential takeover as the alternative to the present set of rulers.
I am looking at presidential takeover as a transitional arrangement
for achieving two major objectives. Firstly, the president should
apolitically preside over a focused and committed relief and
rebuilding programme for the quake victims, so that it is kept
undisturbed and undistorted by these corrupt politicians, who,
irrespective of their outward ideological trappings, have been unable
all these years to see beyond themselves personally and their party in
appropriating scarce national resources. Therefore, in order to run a
judicious and effective relief and rebuilding programme, the president
happens to be the only constitutionally sanctioned official who is
mandated to remain apolitical and neutral to perform this task during
this national emergency. In order to help him discharge this task, he
should be assisted by similarly apolitical organ of the state, our
security forces, the army in particular, which have done a commendable
job so far in the present crisis. However, the main institution to
carry out this relief and reconstruction on the ground must be the
user groups of the victims themselves at the grassroots, who alone
would make sure that the resources available for the purpose, both
internal and external, are used effectively, equitably and
sustainably.

Secondly, what we have in the name of democracy is nothing but the
interminable perpetuation of the feudalistic system under a new garb.
The bottom line of an authentic democratic system should be that it
actually functions as "the government of the people, for the people
and by the people" in every sense of the term.  Had that been the
case, after 26 years of democratic restoration in 1990, our country
would not have remained "desperately poor", the term used the world
over to denote our country for the recent earthquake reporting.
However, despite the stubborn persistence of feudalistic order in the
country, we happen to be endowed with two brilliant success stories,
the forest user groups and the mothers' groups that I mentioned about
in my TV interview as well as in the subsequent write up. These
innovations have shown that the vicious grip of the feudal elites in
the communities can be blunted by empowering the users themselves to
protect their own stakes at the grassroots. So, we have discovered
that genuine democracy happens and benefits all the people in the
communities, often quite equitably, when the users themselves are
empowered at the grassroots. Therefore, my contention is that if the
masses of the people are to benefit from our governance system, our
feudalistic socio-economic structure demands that it be fundamentally
restructured so that the people themselves become the primary decision
makers in the management of the affairs that affect them. In order to
make this happen, it is again the president that has to play the role
of the nation's guardian and take measures towards reformulating our
polity to that end. I hope this makes sense to you.

Warm regards
Bihari Krishna Shrestha