Ke Bhayo? Ke Garne?  (what happened? oh, well!)

It's now been a month( November 19) since the National Elections were held.  Experts predicted that most would stay home rather than vote because of a pre-election transportation strike which prevented many from returning to their villages to vote, the threat of violence at the polling places, and simply because everyone is discouraged that after 5 years there is still no constitution. Yet, the voter turnout was an unprecedented 70% which really makes things suspect!

Nevertheless, The Carter Center (including Jimmy Carter himself) along with a half a dozen other International Agencies monitored the elections and declared them "fair and free."  Their parliament, called the Constituent Assembly (CA), is composed of 601 members, which is approximately equal to the number of senators & representatives in the US....but Nepal has less than one tenth of our population and only a hundredth of our land mass!

Voting is rather complicated. Each person casts two votes: one directly for the candidate and another for the party who will select the representative.  40% of the members are selected by direct vote of the people, and the winning parties can each select the appropriate proportion of the remaining 60% of the seats. Five years ago the Maoist won in a landslide taking 40% of the vote more than twice that of the next two parties (UML and the NC). So much for background, who won?

This time it went the other way with the Nepali Congress Party (NC) and United Marxist-Leninist Party (UML) carrying nearly 70% of the votes and the Maoists with only 10-15%! The NC and the UML, if they behave, have enough votes to write the new Constitution even without the Maoists. The Maoists in turn, are withdrawing from participating in the writing of this document as a protest against what they believed to be gross mishandling of the ballot boxes. In many ways this seems to be a throw back to the previous era of the oligarchs. For example, women won only 10 of the 240 seats directly elected. However, the women are still guaranteed 1/3 of the seats 200 of 601) and so the majority of apportioned seats will have to be delegated to women by the parties. What this means of course is that hordes of illiterate, party "yes-women" will be selected (last time clearly half of the 200 women having seats were indeed illiterate-that is no longer representative, nor leadership!).

The camel trading is happening right now, so it will take a few months before all this shakes out. The good thing to remember is that an election was held and it looks like the constitution will be written.  If all this sounds like a mess, it is indeed sausage grinding, but remember Nepal has spent nearly 7 years trying to write its new Constitution without a coups or revolt, while it took the USA 13 years to write ours (1776-1789).  Even in recent years, I have read, it takes an average of ten years to write a new Constitution. Somehow, amazingly, things seem to be coursing out as they should, and it looks good for our sponsors and friends to visit Nepal in April! Join us, we'll be able to see firsthand what is happening, by then. (Earle can be contacted by email: jecan314@gmail).