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Transitional justice is a tricky balancing act between, on the one hand, upholding universal human-rights norms and ensuring justice to conflict victims and, on the other, respecting the legitimacy of a political settlement to a conflict. Sixteen years after the guns in Nepal fell silent following the signing of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement in 2006, the Nepali state is still struggling to maintain the delicate balance. The government has just tabled a bill to amend the transitional justice law; make it more ‘victim-centric’ and in keeping with ‘international norms’. The amendment underlines the need for recognition of injustice meted out to conflict victims. Unlike the earlier law, it also bars amnesty in cases of grave human rights violations. The government argues that the amendments are adequate and just. 

But rights activists and conflict victims are not buying it, for various reasons. For instance, although the amendment penalizes killing, rape and torture, it does not specify that such cases can be retrospectively pursued. (The relevant penal code came into effect only in 2018.) New provisions also allow the government to recommend light punishment if the perpetrators confess to their crimes. Moreover, there will be no provision of challenging the court verdict. In other words, the new amendment is no more than a fig leaf for Nepal to cover its transitional justice blunders. 

It was clear from the start that no transitional justice law would be universally acceptable to the two sides to the conflict as well as to the conflict victims. The goal was always to find a middle-ground where neither grave rights violations from conflict-time were excused nor did the victims feel left in the lurch. The proposed amendment bill could have been that middle-ground had there been adequate buy-in of conflict victims. It wasn’t meant to be. 

The National Human Rights Commission has already made public its dissatisfaction with the amendment bill. Victims want more tweaks in it. Yet there is no political will to fairly pursue all war-time cases. The cumbersome transitional justice process will drag on.

The anniversary of Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deuba’s year in office came hot on the heels of the storming of Presidential and Prime Ministerial residences in Colombo. Following the July 8 incident in Sri Lanka, Nepalis are debating if something similar could happen here. It certainly can. Had King Gyanendra not stepped down in the nick of time during the 2006 anti-monarchy protests, the royal palace too could have been overrun. While a repeat in Nepal of the Sri Lankan crisis is unlikely in the near future, it cannot be ruled out in the longer term. This is because in the past one year PM Deuba has done little to improve people’s perennially low opinion of their government. 

Deuba’s biggest achievement was giving Nepal’s grassroots democracy a new lease of life by successfully holding the May 13 local elections. Besides that it is hard to think of Debua’s any other achievement. Economic indicators have steadily gotten worse. The pandemic’s aftereffects and the ongoing war in Ukraine have weighed heavy on Nepal. Yet the government has also failed to bring comfort to the people in these troubled times. Instead, his (now ousted) finance minister did everything in his power to wreck the already troubled economy by pandering to vested interests.

Deuba liked to bemoan Oli’s authoritarian tendencies but he too has preferred to rule by diktat and concentrate power in Singhadurbar. Or he would have detached vital state organs like the the Department of Revenue Investigation and National Vigilance Center from the PMO. The transitional justice has continued to stagnate under his watch. Nepal’s foreign partners are more suspicious of Kathmandu than ever before. Meanwhile, the prime minister sounds out of sorts as he finds himself hemmed in both in and outside his party.

There was some hope that in these fading days of his political career, the five-time prime minister would try to cement his legacy as a statesman. But he has further tarnished his political legacy. Unlike in Sri Lanka, his offices may not be stormed. Yet the signs of public disillusionment against his government are there for everyone to see. 

Perhaps having once led a guerrilla army to overthrow the state, Finance Minister Janardan Sharma found it much easier to bat away charges of working for vested interests while drafting the national budget. He was accused of bringing in a pair of unauthorized personnel into the Ministry of Finance the night before budget-presentation. The pair, as first reported in Annapurna Post, proceeded to dictate certain tax and excise rates to top ministry officials. The rates they set later appeared in the national budget. Sharma denies the charges. The best way to establish his innocence would have been to make public the ministry’s CCTV footage of the night. But when requested to produce the footage, the ministry put out an astonishing statement that the 13-day-old record had been deleted: legally, government bodies are required to keep such records for at least three months. The malafide intent of Sharma and his cronies in the ministry was thus established.     

Such a grave breach of law called for Sharma’s immediate sacking and the start of a judicial inquiry. The public image of the Sher Bahadur Deuba government was deteriorating the longer the tainted finance minister stayed in office. More than that, if there was to be no consequences for such open misuse of power, people’s belief in rule of law would have been shattered. 

A lot was at stake. If the taxes people paid with their hard-earned money were being so brazenly misused, tomorrow they would have all the right in the world to stop paying. Again, Sharma’s wrongdoing had strained the delicate trust between the government and the electorate. Thankfully, he has now stepped down and a parliamentary probe against him has been started. What we want is an impartial investigation and if he is found guilty, legal measures befitting the crime. At the same time, the tax and excise rates that appeared in the national budget at the insistence of vested interests must be changed in the interest of the people. This wonderful opportunity to set a strong precedent for Nepal’s present and future rulers must not be lost.

It’s a genuine fear. With nearly 70 percent of Nepali households still reliant on agriculture for their livelihood, an acute shortage of fertilizers in the plantation season spells trouble for those in the government as the country heads into national and provincial elections. Ensuring timely and adequate supply of fertilizers should be de rigueur for the government of an agriculture-dependent country. Yet the ruling parties seem to have sprung into action only when they realized that widespread anger among farmers, the traditional vote banks of political parties, could hurt them electorally.

The country is worryingly short of chemical fertilizers, urea especially, this plantation season. The government has been trying to import more chemical fertilizers from India, China, Indonesia and every other possible place. It isn’t easy. The war in Ukraine has resulted in food shortages and high inflation around the world, making countries limit the exports of vital commodities like medicines and fertilizers. Nepal is having a hard time importing enough fertilizers for its farmers in this global climate of shortages and supply bottlenecks.  

Yet things in Nepal should not have gotten so bad that many farmers now see no option to looting whatever little fertilizer there is, as happened in Dhading recently. Many pieces of the fertilizer shortage puzzle are askew. Our antiquated procurement laws unnecessarily lengthen the import process. Following much criticism, the Cabinet decided to sidestep these laws and import fertilizers from India on a government-to-government basis. But it is still unclear how imports from other countries will be dealt with. 

Inexplicably, even as the country’s need for fertilizers has soared and foreign goods have become costlier, the new budget allocated a paltry Rs 15bn for fertilizer import—less than half the needed amount. This was shortsighted. In the foreseeable future, the only durable way to meet domestic demand is to produce more chemical fertilizers inside the country. Relying on foreign governments and companies is no longer a safe bet as the country inches closer to a full-blown food crisis resulting from low volumes and high prices of food-related imports.