In the Shadow of the Singha Durbar : Democratization of Powerlessness in Republican Nepal

This study explores the relationship between historical structures and contemporary political culture within the larger process of democratization. It seeks to interpret and understand the elusive and uncertain nature of Nepalese democracy. While the Constituent Assembly elections of 2013 gave Nepal’s politicians a new mandate to finish the constitution-drafting process, the negotiations surrounding the troubled issue continue. Despite the established formal democratic institutions and procedures, authoritarian legacies and pre-democratic political practices, values and attitudes co-exist with the new democratic establishment with negative consequences for governmental stability. In the 1990s, the dynamics of democratic institutions and electoral competition transformed traditional patron-client relations in multiple ways: as the primary political unit and the new base for obtaining social affiliations, Nepalese political parties took advantage of the existing traditional patron-client clusters and incorporated them into their structure. This impact on the patron-client relations has tended to heighten factionalism and conflict. In the traditional setting any rivalry between patrons was largely limited to the local area, but the contemporary electoral system maintains rivalries at both the regional and national level with destabilizing effects on society and politics. The findings are based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted during winter 2013–2014 in Nepal, where I participated in workshops and demonstrations of several civil society groups and political organizations that were involved in community building, policy making, and in interest group activities. The work builds on the literature on the political history of Nepal, on theories and anthropology of democracy, on local debates and discussion, and on ethnographic data gathered during the fieldwork. In addition to information acquired through participant observation, the research material consists of twelve semi-structured interviews and several supporting in-depths discussions. The interviewees are urban professionals and members of the small yet growing Nepalese middle-class of the Kathmandu valley. The fieldwork data is analyzed in the context of Nepalese democracy and the analysis is supported by a recent citizen survey on the state of Nepals democracy. In a disciplinary sense, the thesis provides an anthropological perspective to bear on a widely-debated issue of political science, thus contributing to anthropology of democracy and fostering the interdisciplinary dialogue between anthropology and political science. The overall argument of the thesis suggests that Nepal’s democracy is in a troubling state of dysfunction due to a failure on the part of its politicians to consolidate democratic advances in the form of sustainable democratic reforms and restructuring of the state. There is a variety of issues that have worked against democratic consolidation in Nepal. They include, among many others, patrimonial and split political culture, destabilizing populism, patron-client clusters, the rise of ethnic-nationalism, disoriented new generations and a crisis of governance. The failure to implement deep reforms of the state has allowed the Nepali polity to slip into a state where the new democratic regime has entered into a precarious co-existence with the autocratic institutions of a former era. This study contributes to the findings in anthropology, political science and sociology that demonstrate how democratization cannot be conceived of as a linear process. Although the democratic movements of 1990 and 2006 were compelling examples of the power of social movements to generate peaceful change, the ‘new Nepal’ is characterized by a constitutional crisis and a state of democratization of powerlessness in which the official prognoses and rhetoric paint a picture of popular participation while the polarization of society continues