Think about that.
Instead of worrying about whether or not the Constituent Assemblywill deliver us our new constitution by May 2010, we would now be participating in national events and exhibitions to mark half a century of multi-party democracy. We would be engaged in multiple intellectual interactions, analyzing our collective experience of democracy since the first national elections of 1959. We would be reading several academic and other publications to mark this moment.
But that is all wishful thinking for a counter-factual history.
The villain, of course, is King Mahendra, and the anomalies he had written into the Constitution of Nepal, 1959. So instead of golden jubilee celebrations, we can only revisit the politics of 1959, and continually ask ourselves, “What if ….”
The 1959 Constitution
Mahendra became the king of Nepal in March 1955 at the age of 35 following the death of his father, King Tribhuwan (r. 1911-1955). He consolidated the Shah monarch’s hold on Nepali politics and had very little patience for the structures of representative democracy. During the late 1950s, King Mahendra continually postponed the elections to a constituent assembly (CA) – as promised by his father in 1951 – that would have written a new constitution of Nepal.
Under pressure from various political parties in operation at that time, in February 1958, King Mahendra announced that election would be held the following year. However, he stressed that it would not be an election to create the constituent assembly, but to elect representatives for a bi-cameral (two-house) legislature. He also added that the elections would be held as per a constitution that had not yet been drafted at the time of his announcement.
In March 1958, he appointed a committee to draft the constitution and two months later, he announced the formation of a government to prepare for the general election. This government consisted of representatives from several political parties and two independents. There was no prime minister but Nepali Congress’s Subarna Shamsher Rana was the Chairman of this council of ministers. This government immediately passed laws related to the election and the political parties began to prepare their campaigns accordingly.
On 12 February 1959, the new constitution was promulgated by King Mahendra superseding the Interim Government of Nepal Act, originally introduced in early 1951 to manage what was expected to be a short transition into post-Rana Nepal. Instead of the constitution emerging from a body of representatives elected by the people as originally envisaged in the idea of the CA, the people of Nepal were ‘given’ a constitution by the King evoking his traditional rights to do so.
The 1959 Constitution guaranteed personal and political fundamental rights of the people of Nepal. Every citizen was entitled to freedom of speech and expression, freedom of assembly without arms, freedom to form associations or unions, and freedom to move to or reside in any part of Nepal. A bi-cameral legislative body with a lower house (called the House of Representatives) consisting of 109 elected representatives and an upper house (Senate) consisting of 36 elected and nominated members was envisaged as the Parliament. The party with a majority of representatives in the lower house would get the chance to form the government. The Cabinet was to be headed by a Prime Minister.
However, this constitution failed to make the people of Nepal ultimately sovereign over their political destiny as it vested emergency powers with the King. These would allow him to suspend the whole constitution and assume all powers otherwise vested in the Parliament or any other governmental body. The King’s ability to interfere and make decisive calls to control the work of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary were written into the Constitution. He was also the supreme commander of the army. In short, it could be argued that the kind of polity this constitution guaranteed was a powerful monarchy with a multiparty democratic setup, an anomaly with the potential for disaster.
Popular leader of the Nepali Congress (NC) BP Koirala and many of the then active political leaders did not like the fact that the constitution was not prepared by the CA but was granted by the King. However, Koirala thought it was better to work with it than risk another showdown with the King. He acknowledged as much when he addressed his party colleagues in May 1960 – in his double capacity as the first elected Prime Minister of Nepal and the president of NC – when he said, “The Constitution of the Kingdom of Nepal is an instrument which can prove to be of gradual assistance in the development of democracy, but which can also be used successfully against democracy. In other words, we cannot call the constitution completely democratic. But in the present context, we cannot visualize a constitution which would be better balanced. In spite of many obstacles, this constitution offers manifold opportunities to broaden the path of democratic development.”
The 1959 Elections
The elections to the bi-cameral parliament were held in several phases between mid February and early April 1959. NC and other parties campaigned over the country with their election manifestoes and other election-related promotional literature. This was the first occasion when Nepalis living in far corners of the country vis-à-vis Kathmandu got their first taste of nationally competitive party-based politics. This is a phenomenon that has been written about by famous writers such as Abhi Subedi and Khagendra Sangraula in their memoir essays published in Radiosanga Hurkanda (2005) but remains under-researched by historians thus far.
In the NC’s election manifesto, the first agenda was related to land reforms which it said had two aspects: the first was to preserve the rights of the peasants and the tillers over the land by ending feudal exploitation, and the second was to increase the productivity of the land using scientific means. In this connection, NC vowed to nationalize all forests, abolish birta tenure by nationalizing lands previously given to individuals as gifts under this system, fix a ceiling for landholdings, and redistribute land held in excess of those ceilings. It also promised to promote cooperative farming. It also vouched to make the village the fulcrum of its policies on decentralization, given that the development of Nepal’s villages, it claimed, was the equivalent of the development of the country.
The NC’s second agenda was the promotion of industries. It promised to promote the use of the Nepali currency throughout Nepal (at that time the Indian currency was in use almost at the same magnitude as the Nepali currency). The NC also promised to promote small industries on the principle of cooperatives, middle-size industries by supporting private investment, and large-size industries through state investment backed by loans from international organizations or state-invited foreign investment. It also promised to apply good labor laws for the welfare of factory workers.
The party’s third agenda was focused on reforms in the bureaucracy and eradication of corruption. It also promised to decentralize state administration through the creation of people’s representatives at the district level. Among other matters, the NC also said that all will have the freedom to practice their religion.
Against all expectations of King Mahendra, NC won an absolute majority by winning 74 of the 109 seats in the House of Representatives. The rightist party Gorkha Parishad won 19 seats, the United Democratic Party won five seats, and the Communist Party of Nepal won just four seats. Many of the major leaders of the other political parties failed to be elected. Almost twenty years after the elections, BP Koirala explained to Bhola Chatterji why his party succeeded in the 1959 elections: “Because I had a party which had a network of active workers all over the country, whereas most of the parties had paper organisations mostly” (quoted from Chatterji’s Palace, People and Politics: Nepal in Perspective, 1980).
BP Koirala became the first elected prime minister of Nepal in late May 1959. For the first time since the end of Rana rule in 1951, the monarch – King Mahendra – was forced to share the political centre stage with a set of popularly elected politicians under the leadership of Koirala. The latter became the emblem of the hope that the search for a new democratic post-Rana Nepal had finally found its track. Once it had taken office, the NC government set out to execute policy and programs that matched its election promises, with some success.
As has often been remarked, it was Nepal’s tragedy that the workings of an ambitious elected leader, BP Koirala, were read by an equally ambitious tradition-invoking monarch, King Mahendra, as a direct threat to him.
On December 15, 1960, the King used the emergency-power articles of the 1959 Constitution to dismiss the Koirala government and dissolve the parliament. King Mahendra assumed all executive state powers, imprisoned most of the important leaders, and banned political parties. Subsequently, he established the so-called Partyless Panchayat Democracy under his undisputed authority. This political system, first constitutionally articulated in 1962, survived with some alterations until the first Jana Andolan of 1990.
That is why there are no golden jubilee celebrations of the 1959 first national elections this year.
But the question still remains, “What if….”
Onta is a historian of 20th century Nepal and is based at Martin Chautari.
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