Dev Raj Dahal

The historical shift from the state of nature to a culture of civil society has liberated humans from fear and necessity and stirred their will to freedom. Civil society groups in Nepal have emerged as a self-defining cognitive sphere where citizens, leaders and scholars discussed about nirvana, the realisation of the intrinsic potential for full consciousness and emancipation. Before schools, colleges and universities were established, public dialogues on knowledge and issues helped sages, citizens and leaders learn about the realisation of needs, perform duties, know the laws of nature and maintain vigilance essential to self-determine one’s own destiny defying the other’s domination.
The privileged roles of Nepali civil society are to shape public opinion and policies and pass judgments on leaders’ virtues and actions. In multi-actor governance the coordination roles of the state and statesperson is mediated by diverse groups of civil society within the bounds of normative order of culture. Both society and the state need each other—one for liberty and the other for order. Both need vigilant civil society, a myriad of conciliatory institutions of citizens operating under the cultural memory of public reason, to educate, guide and check each other’s irrational desire, rationalise both and allow citizens to articulate, communicate and serve each other’s valid interests and manage cooperative action.
Civil society cannot function if the state is reduced to the bare bones overpowered by the shadow of other states and non-state agencies. The ethical domain of civil society tends to control the growth of modern rationality based on economic self-interest of globalisation, traditionalism ingrained in ignorance, group egoism set in identity politics and uneven growth of the state devoid of the monopoly on power to use authority to keep societal peace. Nepali civil society are supposed to cultivate the life of faith in the values of global common-freedom, justice, ecological ethics, cooperation and peace and make the national order civil in consistent with the conscious belief, associational life and the nation’s sense of universal  spirit.
The beginning of scholarly decadence and the sovereignty of knowledge over power have conflated Nepalis’ imaginative ability for good life marking the dominance of borrowed vision, ideas, tools and practices, bureaucratisation of state and leaders’ paternalistic thinking thus weakening their social learning and articulation of citizens. Only altruistic persons, historians, poets and apologists of national culture stand as organic intellectuals reflecting on the shaft of light of native wisdom and enlightenment upon whom Nepali society finds its manifest cultural resonance in syncretism. The universalisation of money nexus and neo-liberal assault on the welfare state built a complicity of civil society with the market forces rendering the ability of Nepalis to howl against misplaced policies -- cut in agriculture subsidy, deindustrialisation and privatisation of public goods -- muffled. The swelling size of jobless youths has only one option left to respond to the siren call of global labour market. The servants of free choice thus alienated new elites and labour from their ties with the native place of their birth. Now, the discourse of Nepali civil society lingers on rights-based reasoning parallel to the Constitutional expression of disproportional rights to citizens relative to few duties, not balancing both.
The grievance-fed Nepali state is weak to fulfil them owing to a lack of political will, resources and institutional muscle.  Nepal’s classical wisdom dreamed of bliss in changing self, not coercing others for change and justified rebellion against injustice laying the basis of rational education, need-based economy, local self-reliance on food and associational life. As an incubator of intellectual culture, organic civil society have to liberate the poor from necessity and fear arising out of dependency and indoctrination and enable them to gain participatory role for enduring civic competence.
Without humanising individuals’ relations with associations the selfish genes will continue to spoil Nepal’s fractionalised political parties disabling them to serve as political channel so as to manage the tension between tradition and modernity in the confines of human rights, democracy, social justice and peace. Popular demand for the respect of dignity has emerged as a new form of social movements of civil society. As a result of this, Nepal’s political parties are facing tension with the classical wisdom, values and memory -conserving cultural institutions and the modern rejection of patron-client ties rooted in hierarchy, patriarchy, domination and subordination. When political parties exercise disproportional power relative to their representation, accountability and performance, no amount of democratic rhetoric or voluminous rationalisations can muster the article of faith. Their collusion with the special interests of society is only leaving citizens to resort to self-help, civil society and autonomous media as armours of defence, articulation and solidarity. The theories of social sciences and the institutions and constitution shaped by their insights too face a problem with the emotionally charged citizens communicating through social media to national and global audience and multilateral lobbying.
Newly emerged Nepali civil society are passing comments on every matters piling up--transitional justice, peace, poverty, corruption, domestic violence, migration, human rights abuse, authoritarianism, ecocide and geopolitics turning the regime oriented civil society of the past lurk on the lost track and linger on irrelevance. Their uncaring roles in great earthquakes testified this. Newly emerged civil society rely on knowledge produced not by think tanks, research institutes and universities but by themselves in dialogues and struggles seeking to achieve the fullness of life without escaping from moral limits of public and national interests.
 It seeks to uplift the general society to higher order so that citizens rise above tribalism, do not demonise each other, habitually internalise norms, resolve petty conflict of interests and make reciprocity a realistic option. Unstable social struggles in Nepal for democracy, human rights, justice and peace, eradication of social vices hurting each other and creation of virtuous citizens through education, mobilisation, acculturation and public action want to hone the ability and skill of citizens for self-governance.
In Nepal, a number of worthy initiatives are vital to achieve: first formation of political party-civil society interface to foster inclusiveness and democratisation of organisational life of leadership, second, application of moral and constitutional checks on the unrestrained will of authorities to power without accountability, third, habituation of elites and leaders to live with the norms of society and the nation, fourth, maintenance of a balance between the state’ capacity for creating security, order and basic service and society’s ability to expand the frontiers of liberty, and finally smooth flow of public services so that citizens remain loyal to the state, abide by the constitutional culture and adapt to cosmopolitan virtues.
Nepali civil society groups’ mobilisation of vigilance against the imposition of any arbitrary restrictions without the consent of citizens can blossom civic action and awaken them from deep snooze. As a defender of citizens’ rights, Nepali civil society have the duty to monitor, interact and educate the public about the operation of power, authority, wealth, rules and processes, build their rational capacity to fulfil needs and rights, enable them to discover common position on public and national issues and engage in the ethical life of society. The publicity of civil society and their survival in Nepal as an autonomous space marks the emergence of critical public sphere for rational discourse uninfluenced by powerful actors -- national or international with conflicting motives, whirlwind of geopolitics for eternal regime change, de-culturation for rural dysfunction and corporatist integration into urban life line with structural shifts of political economy driven by technology.
Nepal’s development partners found civil society useful agencies to de-bureaucratise the process of development. The state too created positive condition and spurred their busy engagement in many sectors. Newly emerged civil society groups are now re-politicising the welfare issues earlier depoliticised by regime-oriented ones and resonate with the nation’s syncretic culture. Nepali political parties and civil society have to espouse pedagogical notion of civic education and interpret ideas about improving human condition by technical utilisation of nature, legislative capacity for reasons and reasonable formulation of laws and policies.
The internal composition of Nepali civil society and external orientation to rational goals underlined by the directive principles and policies of state demand their own capacity building so that they build a curriculum for addressing need deficits, problem resolution and continuous reforms and rationalisation of Nepali society and market along democratic lines. The multiverse of Nepali civil society along regional, caste, ethnic, gender, age group, class and professional lines has reduced them into instrumental politics, built divisive tendency, cut their gift to democratise public life and engage in the renewal of its intellectual culture as a non-sectarian alternative to vault high and teach a solution of their imperfections. 
Nepali civil society have to build a collective identity for esprit de corps, pay attention to the contextual and cultural reconstruction of knowledge and policy and make a self-analysis in relation to the state, polity, government, political parties, market institutions and the donors. Now time for them has come to imagine the expansion of democracy in every sphere of life to level the uneven aspect of life-opportunity and choice for ordinary Nepalis. 

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