Lawful Power Of State Key To Public Order

The use of the state's lawful authority is central to the evolution of a reasonable public order in society. It coordinates the functions of many institutions and authorities created to serve people and protect them from harming each other. Its lawful monopoly on power is vital to create security, execute the constitution, avert anomies, provide public goods and keep social cohesion and peace. But when its institutions lose core power, it cannot stop the state of nature or private violence, raise taxes to finance its own capabilities to use national self-determination in politics, leadership and public policies, regulate public and private sectors, serve public interests to rally the loyalties of people and gain international recognition of its sovereignty. 

Polity can release the potential for national cohesion only if the state can consolidate its institutions; stabilise politics through the people’s fair representation in civic bodies, build trust in rule and distribute power, resources, rights and identities in a tuneful way. The Nepali state and people are tied by mutual expectations and duties to each other. The shifting paradigm of the state from patronage to entitlements entails post-feudal and post-bureaucratic statecraft. The onset of democracy in Nepal has followed effective pluralisation of state power. Political leaders had weathered the coordinating capacity of countervailing societal power of political parties, civil society, business, interest groups, the deep state and global regimes and brought them under a rule-based public order.

Shared policy space 

These horizontal non-state entities have shared policy space with the Nepali state under the banner of countless planning meetings but failed to assume mutual accountability for policy failure. Ideologically, these forces are more integrated into the international system to counterbalance the Nepali state and people than into the national culture, needs and context of the people. Globalisation has further eroded the Nepali state’s sovereignty from above and skewed its constitutional outreach, thus forcing it to accept several conditions. It has distorted the social, economic and cultural priorities of the Nepali welfare state. Realisation of all 31 constitutional rights of the people and their four duties remains tough. 

The state is overburdened by international human rights, environmental and legal obligations and lacks matching resources to meet them and spur economic diplomacy by reducing external dependence. Nepal, as a rentier state, is financially dependent on the global capital market for its survival and its planners seem unable to invent apt development policies. It is destined to accept many external prescriptions, including the ideology of the Washington Consensus that converted its economy from a production to a consumption model. The capital expenditure for development is around 20 per cent. Tax breaks for the corporate elites, while there is no such bonus for the production sector. This has converted it into a subsidiary state where the poor subsidise the comfort of elites. To be sure, business is neither above the constitution nor the people. Its exclusive profit motive collides with corporate ethics and constitutional vision. 

The nation’s bleak economic basics, except in the areas of hydropower, IT and remittance, cannot fetch macro-economic stability vital for structural reforms in agriculture, industry, commerce, service, finance, technology and governance. Nepali civil society, NGOs and professional groups do not claim the state for welfare functions but become congruent with global regimes' incentives and policies. Workers’ remittance contributes 28 per cent to national income, which is bigger than the income from tourism, foreign aid, FDI and the share of capital.  Similarly, the flow of development cooperation has not set free the forces of production. As the Nepali government joined the global race to reinvent the state in a minimalist image against the liberal spirit of the constitution, it was supposed that people themselves are responsible for their well-being. 

The state eschewed an interventionist role in the real economy and veered to the symbolic economy. As a result, people's sovereignty as spelt out in the constitution has become hard to realise. Its multi-level governance is facing not only a resource crunch to expedite progress but also corruption, irregularity and unsettled accounts. Stabilisation of society and linking it with the state’s imperative to keep security, discipline and public order linger. Resolution of these problems is vital to enable people to constructively engage in their personal and collective pursuits. Subsidy cuts in agriculture and reckless privatisation of all import-substituting state industries weakened the social role of the state.

 Attentively, the regime leveraged youths in the global job markets to bring more remittances and fund the swollen size of political classes. Neoliberal reading of farewell to Nepali state trimmed its autonomy, capacity, strength and embeddedness and unleashed conflict boom, thus weakening its capabilities to promote the core state functions (security, rule of law, adjudication, health, education and infrastructure development) and wellbeing of people as a part of social contract. The soft power of culture, spirituality and social spirit of people is holding the unity of the Nepali state and society against the centrifugal bent of ideological zealots and pre-modern and postmodern forces.

The central question about which strategy is suitable and most appropriate to rebuild the state and complete the peacebuilding with full execution of transitional justice remained vague. The temptation of political leaders for a shortcut way to political power left the tasks of institutional integrity of the state in a lurch. It has fostered insidious factionalism, fragmentation of power and social resistance of youth against the stabilisation of client networks for the realisation of their demands for power, resource and representation. Client groups waltz around individual leaders and discourage the institutionalisation of political parties as modern engines of democracy. 

Strong interest groups exist both within Nepali political parties and outside whose interest is to seek rent by any means. Lack of inner-party democracy has reduced the size of mainstream parties. Similarly, their pre-modern political solidarities and various national inclusive commissions lost their utility. New parties seek to define the Nepali state based on national culture, land, labour and citizenship. As the economic strength of the state withered due to inapt policies, the regime had formulated many non-implantable laws and increased entitlements to Nepalis, which are unaffordable, while its performance remained sclerotic. Frequent change of governments and shifting coalition partners had made the government unsteady, weak and drifting. 

In a nation where the structures and constitutional bodies are largely partisan, recruiting party-affiliated transactional leaders and authorities who hardly act impersonally in the public and national interests and muster the public trust in rule. It has lingered the traits of the ancien regime, thus carrying the peril of perpetuating patronage and provoking the fury of the youth for a political jolt, a gear change for hewing a new path. Only a functional democracy is capable of supporting the state to keep a balance between partisan and public goods for the maintenance of lawful public order. It defends the reasons of the state and its ability to execute the constitution and resolve conflict through negotiation and compromise, not the negation of rivals that Nepali parties and various regimes have followed against their rivals.

Now, youths have learned how the politics of negation pays off. Democracy respects legitimate dissent to keep its dynamic, while negation fosters a political culture of division between them and us, not as co-citizens of the common state. The state can retain the lawful monopoly on power if its leaders and people reclaim the state for the welfare of the masses. Impersonal state institutions are therefore important to implement a legitimate monopoly of power and set an edifice of a unitary legal order for social modernisation. When politics is influenced from behind the scenes, and many grand scams and destruction remain veiled, it is a worrying secret for the Nepali state to keep its integrity and capacity. 

Political order polarises and unravels if political parties do not find common ground on national issues but only blame each other to flog democratic duties and responsibilities. Political dysfunction has occurred where each political party, in a struggle for a monopoly on power, stifled the creative opinion and ideas flowing from the other side and constantly outmaneuvered to preserve its own advantage by any means. It does not contribute to building a modern state and balance the power of the state and society in a fair equilibrium. 

This means new Nepali political leaders have to tackle the future of generational divide and also the past’s human rights abuses to shape a new era of equity, order and peace. This can liberate the state from the capture of the powerful and cultivate the peaceable conduct of all in private and public affairs. The size and scope of the state do not matter so long as it performs constitutional duties, contributes to the civilised life of Nepalis and creates self-corrective mechanisms of society, economy and polity to save the polity from the ferocity of the sub-system's instrumental gamble. Nepali state institutions have organised the society and endlessly lubricated the stability of the life of its nature, culture and elements of sovereignty.

The elite's revolt against the state’s ability to stabilise the security situation and create law and order has tormented its democracy. Nepali welfare state stagnates under its own weight of inflated promises if leadership does not build institutional capacity for a productive economy, restore all illicitly privatised industries, stop subsidising the sprawling elites, support people and internalise innovation, problem-solving and adaptability to the competitive spirit of geopolitics. Bringing the Nepali state back to society from neo-liberal globalization of capital, labour, youths and professionals is vital to ensure the accountability of politics to govern. 

Trilemma 

When so many spoils have trickled up, the Nepali state continues to face a trilemma among the need to assert national self-determination entailed by democracy and popular sovereignty, elites' interests in the monopoly of power, position and resources that also control democratic institutions and the spree of reckless globalisation that entails the consistency of the state to new technology, economy, regimes and laws. The resolution of this trilemma is vital so that it does not fade the ecological, social, economic and political bases of the state’s sovereignty.  

Leaders have to rethink how their ineptitude to know the anatomy of the state and subordinating it to polity, government and political parties has damaged its cohesive elements to penetrate society, keep public order and provide essential public goods essential to draw their loyalties in a robust and resilient way. It is important in Nepal to educate the policy and decision makers to know institutional distinctions and their vital roles in nation-building so that institutional and policy capture does not occur and their functions and services to people spur impartiality.  

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