Why Does Nepal Need a Directly Elected PM under the Parliamentary System?

Politically, general voters, political parties, and politicians have couple of decade´s experience of how a Westminster Parliamentary system would work in Nepal. So far, the system has worked not for the nation and people, but for the politicians to grab the power and the wealth from nation´s capital under the unitary system of government.

This does not mean to blame Democracy because the Westminster Parliamentary system has failed in Nepal to institutionalize a system for regulating, for example, the revenue of a township or a village development community as resource for the local development. As a result, no grass-root development took place with the absence of democratic regulations.

On the contrary, since 1990 Democracy has given people freedom and opportunity to develop their community on their own without specific regulation to process their enterprise. Conglomeration of Kathmandu city is the dreadful example of the consequence. Visiting Kathmandu I feel as if I lose the sense of direction while walking along the street. It is obvious that Kathmandu has become one of the world´s urban hodgepodges where Google map will definitely fail to find the locations.

This all happened because the Westminster Parliamentary form of government has created instability with the cabinet formations that kept changing rapidly with one prime minister after another. Consequently, such a form of government could not lead the nation with a certain direction within a certain period of time. Instability of the government cabinet dragged the nation into multi-facet conflicts. The Maoist insurgency is the historical example.

One of the reasons of failure of the Westminster Parliamentary form of government in Nepal is that it blindly complied with the unitary system and its century old regulations and policies. As a result, it got stuck in the capital of the nation by deliberately ignoring grass-root developments.

I had once suggested former Prime Minister Mr. Deupa in 1996 that he should as a legislator introduce a bill to eliminate the centrally appointed chief district officers (CDO) and let the directly elected district chair and his district assembly run the district administration. The transition could have taken several years but the Westminster Parliamentary practice could have laid greater impact on grass-root level politics.

That´s why Nepali people are desperate to find a stable form of government whether be in Parliamentary or in Presidential form by directly electing head of the government as Prime Minister or the President for the full term. It will, of course, create a sense of stability in the politics and it might as well allow the government to regulate grass-root level developments through federal setup.

At this point, the nation has stuck with the orthodoxy of a political party that advocates the old school of thought of the Westminster Parliamentary form of government without any amendment that has already taken place in last century. Such an advocacy is regressive in itself because the nation is unwilling to accept the old form that by virtue is unstable. Nation needs a stable form of government for the full term. Yet, the senior leaders of the party (Nepali Congress) that advocate instable form of government are unwilling to moderni