The oldest party, which was also the largest before the Maoists pushed it to # 2 position some two-and-a-half years back, is in its all-time low since the restoration of democracy some two decades back. The descent started soon after the party led a historical mass uprising that restored parliamentary democracy besides voting it to power. Despite being in power for most of the time during the last 20 years, the party grew weaker and weaker owing to infighting and inability that disappointed supporters and common people alike. During the Maoist insurgency, the party was almost wiped out from the countryside by the rebels, both physically and politically. Thereafter, it lost its conventional strongholds like the Tarai. It had already lost minorities and marginalized communities, once the party’s traditional support base, to ethno-lingual parties/groups and communists. The list goes on.
Without properly analyzing the underlying reasons for the party’s poor capabilities, poor performance and poorer governance while in power, a section of NC believes that its deviation from socialism is responsible for the sorry state-of-affairs. The party is disorganized and badly managed, its revenues are scanty and poorly arranged, leaders are selfish and cadres are incompetent. Inept and lethargic leaders are neither interested nor capable of training or mobilizing party workers.
Self-centered party workers lack sense and spirit of unity and collectivism, the very foundations of any cohesive organization. All important decisions are made by the supreme leader(s) who are not subject to discussions, much less questions, from party workers. During the last five years, when the all-powerful party president late Girija Prasad Koirala signed on his own pacts after pacts of suicidal consequences with the radical Maoists – the centrist party’s principal opponent – the party failed to show institutional ability to stop the autocratic leader. The historical blunder has cost the party and the country dearly.
Neo-liberalism doesn’t breed poverty. On the contrary, it has reduced poverty elsewhere in the world through increased production and wealth. It is a different thing that the wealth created may have been distributed unevenly thus widening the gap between rich and poor.
Thus, leadership and organizational failures, not ideological impropriety, are responsible for the party’s continued decline. Changing with times, majority of social democratic parties all over the world have switched to market economy from socialism; the shift has benefited both their country and party. India, our closest neighbor and a country with similar socioeconomic settings, is a glittering example of this. Neo-liberalist policies of the erstwhile socialist Indian National Congress have been reaping an annual growth of 8 percent on an average for the past many years as against the stagnation during its ‘socialist’ past. So, if it is not for its own weaknesses, there is no reason why NC alone should be a loser while political parties across the world have benefited by adopting neo-liberal policies.
Although bashed by the socialist lobby both inside NC and out as anti-poor, NC’s neo-liberal measures, first introduced during the early 1990s, never did any harm to the poor and the downtrodden. Left-leaning thinkers who emphasize that those policies have harmed or alienated the poor have never produced any studies, specifics or statistics to support their claim. Except for rhetorical abstractions, there is not a single piece of research work that would show in empirical terms that this particular (neo-liberalist) policy has resulted in the loss of so much income of so and so group of people over such and such period of time. Or are there any?
Neo-liberalism doesn’t breed poverty. On the contrary, it has reduced poverty elsewhere in the world through increased production and wealth. It is a different thing that the wealth created may have been distributed unevenly thus widening the gap between rich and poor. If so, it is the duty of the governments, parliaments, planners and development pundits to uplift the poor through empowerment and capacity-building apart from redistributive measures—policy in itself cannot be blamed for the disparity. In our country too, neo-liberalization has helped reduce poverty even if not the wealth gap. I will cite one such example.
NC often quotes B P Koirala’s ‘dream’ of providing a cow for every household within 15 years to meet their material and nutritional requirements as bottom-line of their ‘socialism-made in Nepal’ blueprint. Fine: But B P also opined that if too little milk is to be distributed evenly among too many people, it will be available only in drops, which means first we must raise production – this is exactly where socialism has flopped. Today, if milk products of one’s choice are available anywhere, anytime at competitive prices, it is because the ban/suspension on granting licenses for dairy operatives (applied to protect the state-owned monopoly Dairy Development Corporation and to stop the sensitive public health produce falling into the hands of “greedy private sector”) was lifted by the NC government in 1991 as one of its several neo-liberalist moves. Before that, people used to spend long hours in the morning in queues or pay extra money to the salesman just to purchase a small sachet of milk. Today, not only the consumer but the whole nation has gained, as the white revolution has made milk products an exportable surplus. And, above all, the license granted to ‘capitalists’ has through its backward linkages benefited the dairy farmers – the poorest of the poor – more than anybody else.
Well, that was only an example. Market-oriented and business-friendly measures introduced in other areas as well such as education, healthcare, telecom, media, IT, aviation, public transport, overseas employment, tourism, financial services, etc have tremendously benefited different stakeholders including the employees/workers, consumers and people in general besides contributing to the national economy. Of course, there should be effective regulatory control of the state to see that fair business practices and welfare of consumers or common people are not breached. Neo-liberalism is not without sovereign oversights or checks and balances; it is not statelessness or lawlessness either as socialists often believe or argue.
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