Perhaps the biggest lesson to emerge from the 20-district survey of Nagarik Research Bureau of Nepal Republic Media, conducted to get people's feedback on the draft constitution, is that people are starting to get fed up of the protracted constitutional process and would like to see a new constitution without any further ado. This is why of over 700 people surveyed between July 21st and July 26st, nearly 60 percent said they either agreed with the provisions of the draft constitution or accepted the draft with reservation. In the same survey, 64 percent of the responders said federalism was necessary for Nepal, but 51 percent of them were against the (erstwhile) vague agreement on eight provinces. This may be the reason the four major parties later floated a six-province federal model with clear demarcations. We welcomed the deal on six provinces because, first, it offered clear state boundaries, and as such something concrete to work with, and second, the six-province model, a product of intense negotiations, seemed as good a federal model as we could realistically hope for in the near future.This line of reasoning is not flawless, we understand. There have been strong reservations with the six-province model, expressed in sometimes violent protests that are now taking place right across the country. Most of these protests were against either inclusion or exclusion of certain areas in one of the six proposed federal states. Many believe that it is better to have no constitution at all than have one with serious flaws. The latent discontent from such a faulty constitution, it is feared, could one day erupt, and the country will find itself in another deep political mess. This is a possibility, of course. But what then is the alternative? Can the political parties afford to take their own sweet time in their bid to come up with a supposedly flawless constitution when people have clearly indicated that they want no more delays? We fear that any more delay could irreversibly discredit the political parties and the democratic process. There were indications of this in the Nagarik survey as the majority of responders said that they had less faith in major parties than they did at the time of the 2013 Constituent Assembly polls. This slide in the popularity of democratic parties is worrying.
We would thus like to see every effort made to incorporate the legitimate demands of the protestors in the draft constitution in the next few days. The final draft could thus be prepared before the end of this week. We understand that as we write this, political parties are discussing a range of options, including changing the number of federal states to either five or seven. In our view, and in the view of the majority of responders in the Nagarik survey, there is no more time to lose. If we cannot have a constitution when political parties that together command 90 percent of CA seats are in one place, then it isn't farfetched to imagine that we might never have a constitution through the CA mechanism, a prospect some doubters of CA have long cherished.
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