Culture Serves As Soft Side Of Politics

Democratic politics promotes the cultured life of people offering them collective memory and opportunity for choice based on norms, beliefs, tradition and institutions vital to spur social mobility and progress. It bridges the attainment gaps, not splitting the sources of livelihood and knowledge into the public and the private and confining it to mere biological survival. It is vital to reduce the emotional distance of Nepalis living in various stages of human progress and diverse geographical spots. Culture as a soft side of politics provides a template for thinking, feeling and acting. Managing this soft side is, thus, vital for the evolution of civilisation that blends a variety of cultures.  The normative milieu of cultures stores memory and sets a hope to create a modern nation where all Nepalis make full use of their potential and talent for self-transformation and attain public goods. 

Utilitarian penchant 

This means civic maturity of Nepalis, their acculturation and character building are vital to lift them to full stature and build community for stable social life. So far politics of Nepal can be labeled into various types, not each of them is culturally sensitive to reconcile reason and faith, rights and duties and state and people. The utilitarian version of power politics drafts policies and makes decisions that guarantee the highest scale of people’s satisfaction so that in the future they  stick to those leaders and parties and vote for their hit in elections. Its side of democracy is rooted in shaping the interest of government compatible with the general will, considering that they are the best judges of their own welfare. 

In Nepal, however, utilitarian politics is deemed as calculating, bargaining, maneuvering and opportunistic devoid of ideological and ethical drapes where leaders adopt any policy or strategy which suits their mostly personal, not party, public or national interests. The usual obedience of the people to the rule of law is a virtuous act but uncritical sticking to party bosses may lead to a political culture of clannish conformism, authoritarianism, cultic traits and poverty of inner vigilance. The culture of ditching each other is popping up in the nation. Political elites of most hues versed in certain universalistic values of democracy often parade its basic ideals both to infantilise democracy and subordinate native culture, religion, languages and practices considering them parochial.

They seek to replace them with modernity in the image of advanced nations and uphold the burden of defending it. This process amounts to substituting feudalism by external dependence and harboring a feeling of cultural cringe, not appropriating and appreciating the sanity of syncretic culture of Nepal emerged from cross-cultural fertilization. Cultural amnesia, except in the promotion of tourism, evokes the ire of faith-based leaders,  parties and intellectuals with strategic rationality in the same way as those de-culturalized leaders’ geopolitical flirtation bent on dividing population for electoral constituencies, not nation building.

 Many nations are now self-defining, pursuing modernisation, decolonisation and discovering common cause with each social stratum to enrich inner life and forge national unity. Nepal has once articulated a policy of Nepalisation through the normative texture and hues of languages, cultures, religions, arts, music, poems, stories and philosophy without becoming insular and inferior. They helped the leaders to build their national identity without deflating social and cultural mosaic. It had only aimed to transform all mini identities of Nepalis into the meta identity of citizens with equal rights.  The current establishment has, however, promulgated Nepali constitution, along materialist and postmodernist prejudice, sought to differentiate Nepalis on the basis of mini identities and stratified population for instrumental purpose without any reflection for balance, reciprocity and affinity to national self-determination. 

It may expedite the colonial sort of elite politics of utilizing the art of divide and rule and command and control thus flagging the concept of the sovereignty of collective Nepali demos bound by bonding and bridging capital of tradition, institution, constitution and deliberation. Liberation of the ordinary folk from the particular elite class dominating and monopolising power and wealth is crucial for democratic nation-building based on community spirit, entrepreneurial zeal and wise citizenship filled with the soft power of its culture. Organic intellectuals now need the mobilisation of centripetal forces of society to tide over the crises occurring in various fields and shore up its enlightened tradition and deeply embedded culture of tolerance of social and cultural pluralism. This can free up the empirical bias of leaders stoking sectarian unrest with its emancipatory ideals, create a just society and formulate the wisdom of eco-sensitive progress. 

Popular sovereignty espoused by Nepali constitution admits the centrality of people in the statecraft where power flows from the people, not top-down or outside. Frail leadership harnesses little public purpose based on public opinion and civic culture built on the connection of law to morality. Nepali society remains segmented into various sub-cultures and herds, each has its own cultural rationality and richness which has contributed to the formation of the state and national identity. The proponents of a primordial source of knowledge believe that liberation of leaders from history, culture and tradition marks conscious alienation from the national spiritual, ecological and moral context, intellectual heritage and condition of people and their eternal notion of dharma. Certain intellectuals rooted in a group-think mentality are unmindful of the modern version of individual and human rights espoused by the nation. 

Native scholars believe that the positivist and ethno-centric version of social science, its policy making style and political culture is inapt to capture the spirit of Nepali society which is too pluralistic laden with its own positive tradition of caring and sharing as opposed to borrowed version of negation, indoctrination and contradictions.  The contextual account of culture is vital to indigenize democracy and progress in Nepal. In primordial orientation, people generally perceive that culturally relativist politics gives them preference to protect their worldview, values, culture, experience and indigenous knowledge. The resurgence of Nepali culture is giving vent to populism in many parties as they find the establishment less attuned to popular expectation generated by democratic politics and cultural definition of politics harbored by Nepal’s neighbours for their post-Western future.

 Self-interest is the motive force of rationalism. It is bound by reason and science, not emotion, feeling, sentiment, culture or religion, the soft side of politics, before making policies and decisions. Yet the emotional appeal and campaign of Nepali political parties and leaders influence voters’ behaviour and impel partisan attachment. It is a model of politics in which people favour the parties or leaders of their choice, vote for them and keep affinity with them in terms of reason and action. The founding spirit of Nepal’s mainstream parties such as Nepali Congress, CPN-UML and CPN- Maoist Centre were scientific ideologies but now they have evolved overlapping interest for power and diverse partnership to race to the top. Aroused by the fear of one another’s ambition, the rationalist model of politics couched in Westernisation is now facing setbacks for their long years in power with blank promises, overtaking democratic impulse and pushing the nation and people’s race to the bottom. 

Now Nepalis demand the globalisation of the local rather than the other way round and stress on self-rule, not centralised and personalised ones unable to adapt to popular sovereignty and the zeitgeist. People are inquiring about the tune-up of the establishment in creating a huge size of agencies at multi-scale rule by burdening the future generation with mountains of debts for its privileges in politics and administration. The more the Nepali political parties convert into interest-oriented rational choice, the less remains their ability to articulate the needs of unorganised groups of society.  The rational concept of politics harbored by it for long has not been able to purge palpably conscious passion of undue partisan prejudices of leaders to aid meritocratic order amenable to public good and cultural pride.

 It can also be considered a club model aiming to create the elite status quo unreflective and economic-deterministic in appetite. The recurrently used term in Nepal is also a syndicate regime where leaders make a bloc of several parties regardless of their differing ideologies or identities to win elections and form a coalition government lending continuity to the cycle of patronage politics.  Power-constitutive interest is an incentive and motivation which has ossified the values of democracy in public life, public policy and political culture. Monopolisation of power is the leitmotif and, therefore, it has the temptation to cultivate partiocracy, not democracy based on a model of choice Nepali voters’ desire. Because of this practice voters previously socialized in the historical identity of parties are indulged in self-interested de-alignment from party politics as utility maximizers, not governed by party’s norms and discipline.  

Others are swayed by populist lure. They inflame the craze of unthinking crowds, breeding political instability and elevation of the norms and values of good citizenship. The power-bloc politics discounts the future, a culture of intergenerational justice and allows the status quo to persist, closes options for democratic dissent and tolerates impunity and violence and thus faces tension spilling into popular plea for inter and intra-party democracy. It expects the optimal negotiation of rival interests in the golden mean.

Dilemma 

Top Nepali leaders are now in a dilemma: easing generational transfer of leadership might freeze them devoid of warmth of power while sticking to power life-long in a post-ideological order without sound performance and inability to resolve piling of national issues might cost the party’s future.  The spasm of populist and conservative parties have adopted this model for a short time but soon departed as they found that the ends are incompatible with the means. Rastriya Swotantra Party’s anti-corruption tirade is an example. Even the Rastriya Prajatantra Party and Janamat Party found trouble in adjusting with the establishment and left their previous electoral alliances and power-sharing.  The former believes in a politics of cultural and spiritual de-colonisation to maintain the memory of tradition and institutions while the latter favours justice for the oppressed. 

Those outside the establishment articulate collective concern for increasing depopulation of the nation by easing massive migration of youths abroad for its inability to provide a favourable condition where they can live a collective life.  They do not have control over their fate and livelihood means. This provides a space for new forces to compete with the establishment for scarce political resources. Migration of youth abroad deprives the integrative and idealistic dimension of Nepali society and critical mass of production and change. Creative cultural production is essential to refresh the public sentiment and overcome the power bloc model representing a loss of its meaning by correcting its course through a fusion of national and world cultures as a soft side of politics. 

(Former Reader at the Department of Political Science, TU, Dahal writes on political and social issues.)