Borrowed Policies Recipe For Economic Disaster

It is weird to copy the model of other nation’s progress where historical, cultural, social, psychological and material preconditions are entirely different. There is a powerful lure of Nepali leaders and scholars to borrow ideas, ideologies and projects of national progress from advanced nations. This marks a lack of their self-confidence, ability to reflect on the national context and indulge in false caricature without knowing the nation’s own characteristics - resource endowment, social genes, norms and culture. They usually yield to ingratitude to the gift of native sediment of knowledge, heritage and culture. A sense of cultural cringe has marked the habit of denial of the scholarly heritage while embracing intellectual tribalism and ideological politics of negation of rivals.

For example, Ranas’ contributions were negated by democratic forces, considering them apostle of the dark phase of nation’s history, Panchayat negated the contribution of democratic forces which expanded the elite base of polity but also spawned political flux and being conditioned by Western intellectual and ideological order. Multi-party dispensation negated Panchayat’s contribution to the growth of the middle class and deemed it authoritarian for banning political parties. The Maoists negated the democratic forces for executing neo-liberal offensive against the people’s wish for social justice. The ensuing political change suffered from the incoherence of the economy, population and the state despite the enormity of civic rights, laws and institutions entrenched in the constitution. 

Factional fights

The resultant factional fights of leaders, populism, radicalism and conformist nostalgia insinuate that each political change kept the regularity of transplanting public policies fabricated in advanced nations and global institutions without adaptive innovation. It sustained the vibes of an informal political culture of feudal privileges that adopts a welfare state without ample resource base to support it thus lodging demand overload on the polity.  Modern Nepali leaders continue to rationalise the unity of opposites and oppose the critical voices as foes of political stability. Democracy and development, by their very nature, begin with compromise of contending interests and require apt policies, institutions and laws suitable to unleash the latent potentials of Nepali society for progress and change and improve peoples’ living standards. 

A culture of eternal polarisation exhausts the dynamic elements of progress. Organic intellectuals and leaders have yet to mobilise the cognitive, social and material resources of the people, converse with them and build a frame suitable for general interests shared by them including the constitution without being prejudiced to the universal spirit of the age defined by liberal values, science and ecological imperatives. The political circuit of Nepali polity—parties, parliament, executive and judiciary suffers from integrity and capacity deficits. The penetration of parties in all these realms has weakened their impersonality and eroded the autonomous capacity of the state which is dear to the political culture of advanced nations. 

Cronyism is a local invention allied with the practice of an alien mantra of democratic centralism, personal loyalty and subordination of civil society under leadership’s appetites for power, not human dignity and progress which are prised by advanced nations. Nepali leaders and their advisors’ ideological construction of self, animus with opponents and hazy internalisation of external policies, values, institutions and educational and admin practices only fabricated the disembodied life of Nepalis. The lack of internalisation of historically derived knowledge, experience-remote politics, theory-driven economy and ungrounded pattern of progress has produced inadvertent outcomes for national life long cherished by the spirit of national independence. 

Leadership’s acceptance of policy prescription conditional to foreign aid controlled Nepalis democratic choice, crippled its parliament’s policy, making prerogative and barred the state-people ties. The effects are: growth of captive politics, un-socialised cadres, de-politicised parties weak to grow a sense of volunteerism to raise the demand side of politics and frail polity to respond to people’s diverse needs. The structural and functional parts of the polity are acutely penetrated by external stimuli of aid and advice fermenting trouble for the authorities to rally loyalty of people and latter’s inability to make leaders accountable.

The vital bits of state and interpretation of constitution are visibly partisan while representational links and legitimacy functions are confined largely to elections than meritocratic performance. They are cramped by social struggles and anomie. It is distracting the political process to create public order and ease ritualised production, exchange and distribution of public goods. If internal rationality derived from the native knowledge and culture is negated, the task to bring the positive forces of society into optimisation turns uphill. This is one of the reasons Gautam Buddha invented the golden mean to avoid extreme interests and ideas and favoured a need-based economy rooted in compassion to all living species, a vital leitmotif of sustainable development. 

Modern Nepal bumps into a disjuncture between the democratic idiom of civic culture and rancorous political voices. Its cultural life rooted in syncretism faces social engineering aimed to create an artificial nation no longer unified by historical spirit. It is crippling the culture, local organisations and means of survival. Michel Foucault says, “social sciences have served as instruments of disciplinary society, the connection between knowledge and power rather than between knowledge and human solidarity.” The alienation of the educated Nepalis from rural society affirms the sterility of progress.   

The blanket transplantation of borrowed policies of modernisation, growth, dual economy, self-help, community development, basic needs, structural adjustment, cooperatives, neo-liberalism, MDGs and SDGs, etc. without indigenising them with local interests, capabilities and ownership only veered them off the track and firmed up the tormenting illusion of progress. Modern banking, financial institutions and social cooperatives set up to liberate Nepalis from the feudal lending system have corrupted both devoid of internal or external articulation of people’s priorities. The swindling of cooperative funds, loan shark, financial manipulation, pervasive corruption, etc. signifies distortion of the nation's economy and spiralling down of development indicators. 

Execution of aid-conditional policies of subsidy cuts in agriculture and de-industrialisation acted contrary to constitutional vision of social justice thus trapping people in poverty, job loss, mounting imports, debt and dependence. Long-term structural factors behind Nepal’s political instability, rise of strong interest groups, economic inertia, social fractures and ecocide are the effects of the use of borrowed policies. Development vision now focuses on cultural aspects of innovation, individual maturity, social discipline, green economy and institutional incentives. A culturally diverse society like Nepal is flexible, tolerant and resilient to change if geopolitics does not pierce into the structure of its knowledge, statecraft and indigenous economic life. Stable progress rests on retaining the existing infrastructures rather than dumping them and resorting to the luxury of often inventing new projects for political rationality.  

Mutual responsibility of leaders, policy makers and scholars on correctly conceptualising various ideas into a nationally-rooted vision, engaging in a dialogue with the people and solving problems can leap the nation’s path forward. The idealisation of democracy, human rights, social justice and peace requires general progress so that politics is not played in the state of nature with great passion of leaders without any sign of public and national interests. National politics needs to animate progress from inside national vision, not chasing outside dreams, cutting people's choice and absolving leaders, policy makers and scholars from their responsibility to craft national perspective. 

Nepalis have struggled to realise their personal and national potential without resorting to rationalistic obscurantism or positivism and bridge the gap between their expectation and reality. It helps to harness nationality and humanity by nourishing native values of social human nature, duty-bound state and international relations based on the nature’s web of life. George Gadamar says, “Reaching understanding in the life-world requires a cultural tradition that ranges across the whole spectrum, not just the fruits of science and technology.” It is affirmed by science philosopher Paul Feyerabend. He too finds the wisdom of science for culture and society, with no parody.

Local reality 

Are Nepali social scientists, bureaucrats and technocrats acting as advisors of leaders capable of conceptualising rational progress by truly representing local reality or relishing the transplantation of alien models which had failed to grasp national realities? The experience of people and power elites about the notion of progress, prisms, perception and outcome are different. The former are locally embedded, hold years of experience and culture and nature- sensitive. The latter use instrumental methods, classifies people along empirical lines and designs policies to intervene to achieve progress. Ignorance of local structural, institutional and social context only marks the failure of policies. Captive minds cannot ingeniously apply wisdom to address multi-causes of failure, learn from them and assume accountability for their actions. 

Problems in Nepal are interlinked while the solution is discipline-driven. The cultural perception of people matters. Nepali people judge progress in terms of better standards of living and reducing human toil, ecocide, poverty, inequality, unemployment, discrimination, alienation and conflicts. Progress requires defining self, searching for culture to realise self, incubating entrepreneurs and using social institutions and science and technology. Otherwise, the nation will continue to remain a penetrated regime which the founder of modern Nepal- Prithvi Narayan Shah loathed. His wisdom to allow Nepalis define vision, priorities and means can increase their self-confidence, cut dependency, reinvent bodypolitik and renew self-rule whereby they can satisfy material, moral and spiritual needs spurring authentic existence.

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