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Can the Nepali Congress hold its 14th general convention on the scheduled 19-22 Feb 2021 dates in the middle of a pandemic? Perhaps not. And can the Grand Old Party elect a young leadership? This is even more doubtful. The young leadership referred to here is not just in terms of their age but also in terms of their ideas. As Nepali Congress gears up for the convention, vying for party president will once again be the incumbent, Sher Bahadur Deuba (73), his chief rival Ram Chandra Poudel (75), and/or an aging scion of the Koirala family. Most of the voting public has little appetite for the first two and very limited appetite for the third.

It is a common consensus, both in and outside the Nepali Congress, that the party leadership must go to a third-generation leader like Gagan Thapa or Biswa Prakash Sharma if the party is to be electorally competitive against the Nepal Communist Party. The likes of Deuba and Poudel, we are sorry to say, just don’t inspire hope. They have been repeatedly tested and found wanting. Deuba is standing for president again, despite his party’s 2017 electoral drubbing. Poudel, meanwhile, thinks he “deserves” to lead the party once. 

This, we hear, will be the last time one of the old leaders is elected, and the subsequent general conventions will be contested strictly between third-generation leaders. But can Nepali Congress afford to wait for five more years? What will be the cost to the party of conceding consecutive national elections to the communists? In the current state of constant political flux in the country, five years is a long time. 

The old leaders claim to have repeatedly ‘sacrificed’ their comforts for the cause of democracy and say they still have a lot to contribute to the country. Unfortunately, that is not how the voting public sees things. If they really cared about the democratic system they helped establish, they would know that periodic churning of political leadership is vital for its health. The best they could do right now is leave the scene for the third-generation leaders. These new-generation leaders, meanwhile, could conceivably turf out the old brigade if they could present a more united front. Yet they are as badly divided between different factions as their older colleagues. This again leaves the fate of Nepali Congress as an electoral force contingent on the performance (or lack thereof) of its communist opponents. This is no winning strategy.

Multiple community-level transmissions of Covid-19 virus in Nepal are now a real possibility. With the nationwide lockdown all but lifted and most carriers of the virus showing no symptoms, epidemiologists fear the worst. Demanding more government accountability and reliable and widespread testing, three ‘Enough is Enough’ campaigners even sat on a fast-unto-death, which they ended on June 7 after an agreement with the government. But based on its track record so far, the government will struggle to follow through on its commitments.

If things were not bad enough, the ill-timed power games in the ruling Nepal Communist Party could make them worse. The country could have done without this distraction. Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the pandemic at this point is a shortage of reliable testing. Recent studies suggest the virus may be airborne, and if so, a stricter lockdown is in order. Yet people are fed up with the idea of locking themselves up in their homes for months on end while the government cannot do even the bare minimum to widen the scope of testing. Many people are venturing out without masks, have ditched hand sanitizers, and are visiting restaurants and malls. Others have given up all preventive measures as they think they are destined to get the virus. Accompanying this is the belief that they will not be among the tiny minority of those infected who show serious complications. 

Examples from abroad suggest caution. The countries that initially witnessed few cases have seen infections suddenly shoot up; the same with those that eased their lockdowns prematurely. The WHO continues to warn that Nepal remains in grave danger. As the number of asymptomatic carriers of Covid-19 increases, so does the risk of the elderly and others with compromised immune systems getting serious complications. 

As we have repeatedly noted in this space, the government has done a poor job of taking people into confidence. They trust it with little these days. And when there is no trust, people are also unlikely to heed official advice on masks and social distancing. With so much about the virus still unknown, the best strategy is to minimize its spread. People should not be lulled into a false sense of security that just because they don’t see it it’s not there. Or that it’s innocuous enough not to affect them too much. 

Saying the Covid-19 pandemic and the resulting lockdowns have devastated the studies of Nepali school- and college-going students is no overstatement. Many have been forced into online learning overnight, after having done nearly all their learning up to that point in physical classrooms. The impersonal e-classes over patchy internet connections have put off countless students. If conducting online classes has been hard, examining student learning over the internet has been tougher still. Yet, overall, those who get to study over the internet are still lucky. 

That is not an option for most Nepali students. Many may have no laptops, nor reliable internet connections in their homes. Their parents, many of them uneducated, wouldn’t be able to help them much with online education even if it were an option. Over the past three decades, the Nepali education system has discriminated against those attending under-funded and under-staffed government-run institutions. Most of the manpower produced by these institutions is not ready for the 21^st century labor market. By contrast, the students who attend expensive private institutions enter the workforce with distinct advantages: better grades and skills, better handle of English, and confidence given by quality education.

The pandemic is deepening the gulf between these two sets of students. Another problem is that even the teachers who have taken to online teaching are poorly equipped for it. There is a need for the government, the education providers, and those coming up with innovative online learning tools to develop a broadly applicable model of education, perhaps a calibrated blend of online and offline learning. As it is hard to forecast the end of the Covid-19 crisis, a revamp of our education system has become essential. 

There is up until now no clear model for home schooling. What kind of practical skills can children be taught at home, for instance, skills they can later use in their lives? What is the role of the parents in this? How do we ensure the cognitive skills of the students are not depleted while they are out of their schools and colleges? The cancelation of the SEE this year was an ominous portent. Millions of Nepali youths could permanently damage their chances at gainful employment if they can’t soon be reengaged in meaningful learning. 

How do you identify someone as a Nepali citizen? Do they have to look a certain way, carry certain surnames, speak certain tongues, and have certain biological attributes? Why do we so easily embrace Prashant Tamang (an Indian national) and Dibesh Pokharel (now an American one), yet shun another equally talented singer Preeti Kaur, who has not gotten Nepali citizenship despite being born in Nepal four decades ago and despite being married to a Nepali national? Perhaps she was born into the wrong gender, came with a wrong skin tone, and bore the wrong surname. Not that Tamang or Pokharel are now Nepali citizens or Kaur can’t ever be one. It’s more a question of the mindset of our lawmakers. 

An amendment to the citizenship law stipulates that a woman married to a Nepali man must live in Nepal for at least seven years to be eligible for citizenship. With a Nepali woman married to a foreign man, the latter has no chance of ever getting a Nepali citizenship. True, nearly all countries have restrictions on citizenship, including cooling-off periods. A person who has identified as a citizen of one country all her life cannot shift her loyalty to another country she marries into overnight. But why seven years? The common answer is that India has the same provision. This is dubious. Most of us who identify as the most patriotic Nepalis are also often the most strident anti-Indians. Yet when drafting the country’s most important laws, we nonchalantly borrow from the south. 

Seven years is a long time. If we are a progressive country, why can’t our ideal be, say, Canada (three years for naturalization) rather than India? It is also misogynistic to dissuade, even implicitly, Nepali women from marrying the men of their choice. Whatever gloss they may try to put over it, this is a sign that our predominantly male parliament still believes in inherent superiority of men over women and is thus looking to preserve the age-old patriarchal privileges. The proposed amendments to the citizenship law are in violation of the constitutional norm that proscribes discriminations based on caste, gender and ethnicity. Nepal has made some progress in gender equality in recent times. But it is far from an equal place for men and women.