Vibrant Public Sphere Vital For Solidarity

Nepal's each political change has widened people's rights and a sharp drop in matching duties. For instance, the new constitution has granted 31 rights and 4 duties to people. These rights are embedded in the system of laws and allow them to live with dignity in opposition to conformism of party politics. Public debates on rights-based reasoning go beyond natural rights to life, liberty and property. One of such debate circles around subsidiary identity. It has created many mini public spheres and unleashed contesting interpretations of issues whose synthesis is vital for a cohesive nation building. John Rawls says, “The desire to express our nature as a free and rational being can be fulfilled by acting on the principle of rights and justice as having first priority.”

 A rational public sphere deconstructs the pyramidal rank of people in order to create social equality, like in ancient Shastratha, where they with diverse tempers speak with courage and conviction and clarify tormenting doubts. Pooling varied ideas of people is vital to evolve a broader view and craft policy. The autonomy of the public sphere from power and wealth enables it to keep due diligence over the acts of authorities and tie power with the people’s needs.  Contest of arbitrary power, removal of structural violence and use of public education help people to realise their potential even if they differ on talent and aptitude.

Vicious paradox

The gradual expansion of rights but shrinkage of the national economy and institutional capacity of the state to fulfil them has produced a vicious paradox.  Constitutional rights can be guaranteed by fulfilling the spirit of the welfare state, acquiring leadership’s political will and its solidarity with other actors. It needs to change the socialisation patterns through mutual obligations about their duties to each other, the state and the species beings. The rationality of the public sphere calls for the democratisation of personal life, spurring human rights and its extension into pre-existing social boundaries of the nation. This helps the social modernisation of public life, detribalises Nepalis and builds the state capacity in the areas of resources, policies, laws, institutions and leadership. 

Crass individualism saps the virtues essential for engagement in public life while absolute collectivism stifles individual incentives for innovation and creativity and inclines one to total conformity. In this sense, a critical public sphere helps Nepalis to live with dignity and engage in a spirit of inquiry about the issues, rules, actors and processes without losing a strong measure of public-spiritedness. This makes life beaming, not barren and passive and creates an equitable coexistence of people.

 Democracy, as a receptive rule, spawns building the economic and social clout of the state, not just for disciplining and regulating power but also muscle to expand the sphere of distributive justice and deliberative public for the eloquent articulation of people’s peaceful voice and visibility beyond haggling in parties, parliament and street. Well-informed by daily information flow, Nepalis have become self-analysing beings on many matters of public concern, pursuing their ends and passing judgments on public authorities. Their constitutional right to sovereignty, equal basis of liberty, self-direction and participation has elevated them while perspective taking from others has entitled them to claim common ground and visualise optimal means to resolve conflict of ideology, interest and identities. 

This means wellbeing guarantee is necessary to create a level playing field for all Nepalis. This enables them to exercise their freedom of choice. The public sphere helps to generate democratic impulses of emancipation of people and their increasing politicisation about their rights, obligations and action.  Nepalis are now endowed with the right to express, organise and participate in decisions affecting them, power to assert and claim, communicate and even engage in peaceful action. It is in the public sphere necessary knowledge, skill and creativity of the public are fertilised and multiple voices are heard and heeded to and provided an outlet to effective civic engagement in the public sphere of politics. 

In this context, civic education of Nepalis is vital to spur their commitments, get informed and orderly engage in the public sphere regarding public policies, legislative action and decisions. The growing signs of non-institutional participation, social movements and anomie against the corruption of power and even radicalism, however, can easily affect the institutional basis of Nepali democracy and its ability to create legitimate public order.  Intellectual heritage and national affiliation are the values and virtues that define Nepal’s identity. It is on the basis of these values people trust in mutual cooperation and pull them together to mitigate pressing issues.

There are, however, little signs that the expansion of civic rights in Nepal has enlarged the healthy public sphere where public opinion can influence public policy and legal issues for the improvement of the nation’s statecraft so that common life is governed by social justice supported by production and distribution of public goods. The availability of public goods to all Nepali enables them to self-liberate from constraining conditions created by laws, institutions and material deficits. Impoverished civic life empties the moral substance of democratic politics and makes life worthless with no grabbing instincts for money. 

Without an interacting public sphere and its capacity to rectify the shortcomings of leadership by enforcing their conscience and accountability, politics becomes only an arena of calculation of profits, not the execution of democratic doctrines for the general wellbeing of people. The whisk of social struggles of people outside the political parties, parliament, polity and state-centric politics is the outcome. Nepalis now find that politics represents not public and national interests but the vault of partisan interests of leaders where the legitimate interests of the public are negotiated in the bargaining of power-sharing dispensation.

As a result, democratic deficits are stirring up in every sphere of public life. The group-enclosed seminars, workshops and party conferences in Nepal cannot substitute the public sphere as they are insulated from the popular participation and feedback and that of the critical public opinion of attentive public desiring inclusive social transformation. The hegemonic discourses of elites are based on objective, dispassionate and detached from local feeling, learning, experience and context of people, succumbing to stultifying conformity. They are caught up in esoteric abstraction beyond the ken of people. It marks an itchy divorce from the classical ideals of democracy where inclusive participation of all those affected by public policy is ensured. 

Expert seminars and workshops, with elusive concepts and party conventions loaded with ideological jargons, undercuts the conditions of open-ended, free debate for the ordinary people to know and evocatively participate in the public sphere reflecting the conditions of their living which the former neither know nor adequately feel. Indoctrination of Nepali intellectuals, policy wonks and leaders has thus stripped them of from their own intellectual heritage and, as a result, lost sight of who they really are. They consequently face an inferiority complex in the indigenisation of borrowed knowledge and its use in public policy and social change. 

The conceited private pursuit, privilege and impunity for elites flag the egalitarian effects of Nepali democracy. The reality of poverty, inequality, discrimination and selective justice obscure its values and virtues. In no way it has created each Nepali equal stakeholder and participant of the public sphere. Cultivation of public virtues is essential to foster a pluralistic civic culture of tolerance, moderation and teamwork. The undemocratic bargaining between different interest groups hardly takes into account the needs of informal society, polity and economy and liberates people from the growing feudalisation of the public sphere and eroding autonomy of public institutions.  It is fundamental to renew the national political community — the Nepali state, now shackled by top party elites. It is now febrile to muster people’s general loyalty to it as a matter of duty.

It is vital to strengthen the civic identity of equal citizens and a political response to the partisanisation of the public sphere. Nepali state’s inability to enforce social contract, order and discipline and provide public goods shows its flaws, which is prone to stomach abuses of authority, impunity and violation of human rights.  A lively and inclusive public sphere can connect them to the rationality of political ends and means. But now the growing commercialisation and consumerism of this sphere are unrewarding for the people as the rationality of the public sphere is less derived from their experience. Unfulfilled promises of leaders and unrealised rights of Nepalis have served as a motor of social struggles that aim for inclusive transformation of the elite dominated sphere into a public oriented one.  

Now the growing primacy of materialism and rationalism is shifting political power from the Nepali parliament to a myriad of powerful special interest groups cut off from the values, rights and needs and aspirations of Nepalis for democratic transformation. It has plagued the professional functions of bureaucracy and other institutions of governance as well.  The Nepali political leadership is now lurched between indifference to the ordinary folk and entanglement with the special interest groups indulged in illicit activities, weakening the rule of law and retrenching the state’s writ. The fading role of the state to perform impersonally has caused institutional and authority erosion of constitutional bodies and their ability to save the public sphere from its breakup.

The ecological envisioning, gender concern, social and intergenerational justice entail leadership to balance the structural justice and opening new possibilities so as to create an enabling condition for a livable future. The antinomy between the equalising tendency of democracy and unequalising and unregulated forces of the market and between freedom and determinism must be optimally resolved. In a heterogeneous society like Nepal, the role of the public sphere lies in mediating the division, balancing rights with responsibilities and promoting social and national integration. 

Dreary struggle

The ongoing debate in Nepal between sacred and secular is fruitless as the constitution has already settled it in its promise of protecting national tradition and faith though social science discourse dominates the frontiers of knowledge and guides public policy debates which has so far failed to lighten up the toil of people in the margin of modern progress and remain sensitive to Nepalis faith and future. The critical escalator of opportunity for Nepalis is to migrate to the global labour market and escape from the dreary struggle for daily survival. 

Politics of Nepal needs morality to choose the right course of action. It is crucial to shape the value patterns of society so that leaders do not use wrong idioms to cast the rivals in a negative light and feel gratification in rhetoric, not performance. The circle of participants in the public sphere now aspires for a common desire, corresponding socialisation, needs satisfaction and elimination of violence from politics.  This helps to build solidarity. Human beings cannot be individualised, or exonerated from their social nature and dynamic membership with societal forces. Their identification with national institutions and democratic public sphere helps to overcome parochialism, selfishness, dissembled and deformed context of life-world.

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