To consolidate his rule, King Mahendra imprisoned the leaders of the political parties, and created a propaganda machinery to support his actions. After his initial grip on power was ensured, he promulgated the constitution of what was called Panchayat System on December 16, 1962.
What was the constitutional architecture of the Panchayat System under King Mahendra?
The 1962 Panchayat constitution declared Nepal to be “an independent, indivisible and sovereign monarchical Hindu State” with Nepali written in the Devanagari script as its national language. It guaranteed the right of equality to all citizens, and protected them against discrimination. It also guaranteed the right to practice any religion, but activity to convert someone else was prohibited. Right to property, freedom of speech and expression, and freedom to assemble peacefully and without arms were also guaranteed.
However, the 1962 constitution did not guarantee the right to form unions and associations – this was later included during the first amendment in 1967. Several restrictions were also placed on the exercise of fundamental rights for the “sake of public good.” This constitution was silent on the banning of political parties, a move that had already been realized via the King’s proclamation on January 5, 1961.
The Panchayat Constitution conceived of a multi-tier political setup led by the King in whom the sovereignty of Nepal was invested. All executive, legislative and judicial powers were ultimately derived from the King. It put village/town panchayats at the bottom of this system, showcasing this feature as the proof of the decentralization of power. District Panchayats and Anchal (Zonal) Panchayats were the next tiers up, with the National (Rashtriya) Panchayat (RP/NP) being the apex of the system.
Members in the RP were elected from the immediate lower tiers of the Panchayat hierarchy (90 members), or by the so-called “class” and “professional” organizations, of which there were five, initially 15. Its members were also elected from among university graduates (4) and nominated by the King (16). The NP was mostly a legislative body, but ministers serving in the Council of Ministers also had to be, for the most part, its members. Its chair was appointed by the King. A body to advise the King – the Raj Sabha –was also included. A Supreme Court was also there with its judges being appointed by the King.
The 1962 Panchayat Constitution committed itself, as its preamble put it, “to promote the welfare of the people by securing and protecting a just social order which brings about harmony in the national life by integrating and consolidating the interests of different classes and professions from a comprehensive national outlook.” After the first amendment done in 1967, the adjective ‘partyless democratic’ was added to the Panchayat System’s name in the preamble to the Constitution. Also while adding the freedom to form unions and associations, the first amendment explicitly stated that “no political party or any other organisation, union, or association motivated by party politics shall be formed or caused to be formed or run.” In other words, political parties were explicitly banned because they were thought to be inherently a divisive force in Nepali society.
A notion of community-led mobilization and the idea of participation of a maximum number of individuals in various tiers of the Panchayat System were central to its political logic and claims to being a democratic system. As one of its apologists, M. Mohsin put it, Panchayat shared the democratic goals of other “highly sophisticated political institutions like that of Anglo-Saxon,” but its institutional form was “a positive answer to Nepal’s long quest for a suitable form of self-expression.” It was claimed that the Panchayat form of democracy was suitable to a country like Nepal, “spread over a difficult and broken terrain, lacking modern transport and communication media and with a low level of literacy.”
Such conditions, it was added, demanded a political system like Panchayat which was “simple to understand, viable to maintain and elastically integrated.”
Panchayat’s democratic credentials were further justified by a reference to its four-tier pyramid-like institutional structure which was “elastic enough to allow every village to play a specific and meaningful role in the process of national development and strong enough to curb any local or regional tendency to assert itself at the cost of the nation or country as a whole.”
Another apologist, Pashupati Shumsher Rana, claimed that Panchayat’s native-ness was based on the “fairly complex, but surprisingly democratic organisation of village life and government” that existed in Nepal.
Although the multi-tier setup gave the impression that a large number of individuals were involved in Panchayat politics, and each member of the NP had reached that apex body via representative means of upward political mobility, that was not really the case.
As was argued by the late Rishikesh Shaha in his book “Nepali Politics: Retrospect and Prospect” (1978, 2nd ed.), one could become a NP member by securing the support of a tiny group of individuals working in the lower tiers of the system. In other words, the NP member could not necessarily be described as a representative of the district he was supposedly elected from. More than people’s participation, it was important for Panchayat leaders to be in control of the avenues through which the few could participate in the higher echelons of the system.
The class organizations and the graduate constituency were designed to fill up some of the vacuum left behind by the banning of the activities of the political parties. The former was a mechanism to, at least in theory, coordinate class and professional interests in accordance with Panchayat values and vision, and the latter was a mechanism to secure the participation of college graduates in Panchayat politics at the NP level without their having to deal with its lower tiers.
The class organizations are thought to have been largely ineffective for the purposes of the Panchayat system. To the contrary, as was argued by political scientist Lok Raj Baral in his book “Oppositional Politics in Nepal” (1977), they seem to have played a somewhat minor oppositional role within that system. As Baral has argued, the graduate constituency elections were eventually used by some candidates who did not believe in the tenets of the Panchayat system to expose its democratic pretensions and advocate for full restoration of multi-party politics.
The 1967 amendments to the Panchayat constitution introduced further mechanisms through which the King (and his Palace secretariat – another body that was not accountable to the multi-tier setup) controlled the whole system. During the same year, King Mahendra began another extra-constitutional experiment in the form of what was called ‘Back to the Village National Campaign’. This was another effort to emphasize that the theoretical focus of the Panchayat System was village Nepal, and those who hoped to be good Panchayat political workers had to cut their political teeth, as it were, in service to village people. Tactically, it was also a move, in the words of Baral “to disengage panchayat workers from party-infested urban centres” in an effort to check growing opposition to the system. But this campaign, too, was not that effective.
With the forced demise of the multi-party political structure, competitive politics based on the various values and visions of the political parties had come to an end in Nepal in December 1960. Having provided both the value and vision for politics, what mattered for King Mahendra and his supporters was simply the bureaucratic delivery of development which could be showcased as the result of the Panchayat System. Decentralization and people’s participation in various tiers of the Panchayat were values that were good for Panchayat propaganda, and these were often repeated in all kinds of literature produced by the system. However, in actuality, by closely controlling the mechanisms of popular participation in the system and possibilities for political upward mobility, a system that was highly centralized around the monarch was put into place.
Onta is a historian of 20th century Nepal and is based at Martin Chautari.
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