Saturday, December 09, 2006

Nepal's Road to Another New Constitution

Read Nischal Nath Pandey's article on NepalNews yesterday. He talked about the "Constitution Making Process in Nepal." It was generally a good piece of writing and I had to agree with Mr. Pandey on most of his tenets.

However, as far as the success or failure of the constitution goes, it's all about changing the mindset. We have heard the same SPA leaders say over and over again that the 1990 constitution was the best in the world. Now that same constitution is a failure. So the question is, did the constitution fail or did the politicians fail the constitution? And, if it is the latter, what guarantee do we have that the same politicians will not fail the new constitution?

Keshav Poudel had a nice piece, also on NepalNews (reprinted from Spotlight), about Nepal's Constitutional journeys.

It seems to me as if everyone is worried about Nepal, except Nepalis. The Indians are worried, the Americans are worried as are the Brits and the people at the UN. And all we do is ask those external players what we need to do. In such a scenario, what is there to convince us that the SPAM leadership will not use the new constitution as a means for them to deflect their prior mistakes and massive errors of judgment?

Constitution is just a piece of paper. What makes it work is an inherent belief in its spirit and fundamental values of good governance. The big questions is does SPAM know that. Their past actions make me believe that they don't care. However, for the sake of Nepal and the Nepali people, I hope that they have learned from the past.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Old constitution was giving too much power to the king. The new constitution should give power to the people. Why should the king be paramadhipati of the army? This dictator king even has no army training.

We need to empower people in Nepal to make thier own decisions. Too much power to the king is not the solution. Who knows, the king may not even exist after the sambidhan sabha election. This is the 21st century and we need to move with the time.

Long live nepal.