Shops close early and traffic is usually light, but movement of private vehicles continues to be normal till early in the night. Where are all these people going to or coming from under the cover of darkness? The city keeps its secrets remarkably well, as the cover-up of an accident involving the scion of a media baron sometime ago clearly showed.
The apparent normalcy of life, however, is depressingly deceptive. Schools in Kathmandu are open, but all educational institutions in much of central Tarai-Madhesh have remained closed for almost five months. Traffic jams in the capital city hide the fact that petrol sells in the informal market at almost three times the regulated price.
At least four ex-chiefs of police force are under investigation for suspected corruption. As if to prove that their individual net worth was not insubstantial, each succeeded in posting personal bonds of several million rupees within hours of demand to avoid custody.
Load-shedding—that's merely a fancy euphemism for enforced disruption in electric supply—lasts for up to 16 hours a day. Water trickles from the tap once a week for less than an hour in most part of the city. Cooking gas disappeared from the market soon after protests in Tarai-Madhesh began and even fast-food joints have begun to rely on firewood.
Prices of essential goods, including foodstuff, have rocketed. Reports of snowfall around epicenter of Gorkha Earthquake are accompanied with details of government's abject failure in providing even minimal relief to affected families that continue to brave rain, hailstorm and snows under bulging tarpaulin sheets.
States fail when they can no longer perform basic functions of providing physical and human security and people are forced to take sides in fractious violence of warlords in order to merely exist. Despite years of instability, Nepal can't still be called a failed state by any stretch of imagination.
American Jurist Robert Jackson describes a disintegrating state as lacking "the characteristics of a common public realm: State offices possess uncertain authority, government organizations are ineffective and plagued by corruption, and the political community is segmented ethnically into several 'publics' rather than one." Sounds familiar? Yet, Nepal isn't exactly a flailing state either.
Organized hypocrisy
Even though figuring low on stability ranking, Nepal has managed to remain slightly ahead of Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in the Fragile State Index—2015, which means that the country is a lot less susceptible to state failure than most of its South Asian neighbors.
No matter how charitable an observer, Nepal isn't a functioning state. The state can't guarantee the security of a person's life, liberty, dignity or property. Powerful people are free to flout laws with impunity. In a race to the bottom, one after another government has broken records of failure in providing even minimum level of services such as potable water, rudimentary sanitation, primary healthcare or basic education.
Officially, nearly three and half million youths have voted with their feet and gone to perform what are called the 4D (Dirty, difficult, dangerous and desperate) jobs in Sheikhdoms of West Asia and South-East Asia. Many more millions migrate seasonally to India. Trust in government's ability to improve the situation is so low that everyone who can wants to escape this country at all costs and as soon as possible.
If Nepal isn't a functioning state but has neither failed nor flailing, then what has kept its existence intact? That's a political riddle worthy of wild conjectures! Could it be that dysfunction of the state has ensured its survival as an independent country despite attendant anomalies? Dysfunction, after all, merely implies that something isn't working optimally, which is different from complete malfunction. Nepal is perhaps designed to be what it is: A country meant to exist for the benefit of the power elite rather than for the betterment of the lot of laity.
A mere look at the composition of the government is enough to reveal its vacuities. Premier Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli hasn't spoken a single coherent sentence ever since becoming the head of government. His deputies vie with each other in spouting absurdities. One DPM, sworn into office to protect and promote the secular republic, openly advocates Hindutva and monarchy. Another of his colleagues has taken it upon himself to denounce federalism that he is constitutionally-bound to implement.
Yet another DPM revels in bigoted denouncement of Madheshi politicos. Singing hosannas of long-dead monarchs is the chief occupation of a minor DPM. The last one of the laughable lot takes the cake for ridiculousness: His party is agitating against, and negotiating for political settlement, with the same government in which he is a senior DPM.
To call this a cabinet of clowns will do injustice to the noble profession of jokers. Jesters at least use their apparent idiocy to tell truth in a humorous manner. Few, if any, member of the Oli cabinet seem to posses such a saving grace. They actually appear what they are, which is perhaps the only good thing that can be said about them. The duplicity lies in the Gorkhali system of governance rather than with any individual.
When the warrior-chieftain of Gorkha principality conquered Nepal valley and declared himself the new monarch, King Prithvi Narayan Shah (1723- 1775) made sure that all power shall remain for foreseeable future within the circle of family loyalists. In order to consolidate his control over the newfound country, he put in place a ladder of communal hierarchy, militarist structure of governance, and patrimonial pattern of sharing the loot in acquired territories. By and large, the same system remains intact even after nearly two-and-half centuries.
There is a reason the so-called 'Khas-Arya' is the only group to find a definition in the new constitution: They are inheritors of the Gorkhali victory. Duplicity lies in the denial of the reality that Nepali nationality means, inter alia, supremacy of Gorkhalis in its very definition. Political correctness in a democracy makes such an assertion problematic, but the message for those who don't agree with the proposition is unmistakable: Go, agitate to your heart's content but not even a coma will change in the supreme law of the land to dilute Gorkhali hegemony. Einstein called nationalism "an infantile disease" and "measles of mankind", but then the heroes of the PEON are Hitler and Stalin.
Separate State Administration Bill to be introduced
Negative sovereignty
An obsession with autonomy is another legacy of the Gorkhali chieftain who depicted his possession as a yam between two rocks. The description implies that rocks shall remain immobile forever, letting the yam perpetually expand into their crevices. Jang Bahadur Kunwar (1816-1877), an adventurous soldier of the Gorkhali Court, was the first one to realize the true significance of location in the geopolitics of the region. Nepal has been a vassal state since the Treaty of Sugauli (1814-1816); Jung turned it into a tributary enterprise by putting the entire country and all its resources at the disposal of the British Empire. There is a reason the Ranarchy (1846 – 1951) lasted for over a century by turning the entire country into a giant prison.
Once again, Jackson offers a convincing explanation: The constitutive norm of sovereignty in the international system allowed states with virtually no capacity to effectively govern to exist and function with the patronage of hegemonic powers. Mere existence is the essence of negative sovereignty.
Every country deserves the government that it gets. The fault lies with the fate and the sooner people of Birgunj and Barpak realize it, the better. Nepal's sovereignty is so sacrosanct that even emerging principles of R2P (Right to Protect) are unlikely to be applicable in this buffer state. This land is truly at the mercy of Lord Pashupatinath.
