Submit your Article

The party-less Panchayat regime had adopted a policy of attracting educated men and women into politics by reserving four seats in the Rastriya Panchayat for university graduates. In the 125-strong parliament, 90 would be elected from zonal panchayats and 15 from class-based organizations. The king used to nominate another 16. At least four more of the elected MPs would be bachelor’s
degree-holders.

In its early days, the Panchayat system had four tiers of government: villages/towns, districts, zones, and the Rastriya Panchayat at the top. Holders of bachelor’s degree would contest direct first-past-the-post elections, whereas others fought indirect elections or were nominated for the post. For the graduate seats, not only the candidates but the voters were also required to have a bachelor’s degree from a university or similar
educational institution.
A total 105 members of the Rastriya Panchayat were indirectly elected, after going through the successive village/town, district, and zone levels. Only members of zonal panchayats qualified to be Rastriya Panchayat members. So elections for the Rastriya Panchayat was held among the limited members of zonal panchayats. This provision also applied to the class-based organizations.
But the bachelor’s degree-holders were allowed to contest direct elections. A month prior to the poll, an election officer was appointed, also a bachelor’s degree-holder. The officer would supervise, control, and direct the preparation of voters’ list. The officer would also designate a polling station. Salaried government employees did not qualify as candidates but they could cast a vote as government employees above the officer level were also university graduates.
The graduate provision was a unique experiment in the Panchayat system. The indirect elections for 105 seats didn’t ignite much excitement. Only the loyal Panchas were involved there. On the other hand, politically conscious enthusiasts entered the fray for university graduate seats. The contest gave a different vibe to national politics.
There used to be only limited voters in the zonal panchayats. The contestants were chosen on the orders of the zonal administrator who took orders from the palace. Votes had to be cast as ordered. For the graduate contestants, neither the palace nor the zonal administrator had much influence. While other contestants made rounds to the zonal administrators to curry their favor, the graduates toured the country accompanied by educated men and women. They visited different districts for a month looking for university graduates, meeting them, and handing out election
manifestos and pamphlets.
One sad thing about the provision was that the prospective candidates had to pledge ‘allegiance to the party-less system’ while filing their candidacy. After signing the candidacy paper, they were considered to have come into the party-less fold. Upon election, they had to take oath of ‘complete loyalty to the king and his successors’.
The graduate elections were held thrice—in March 1963, August 1967 (the April elections were postponed), and May 1971. The constitution was amended and the fourth elections did not happen. Panchayat supporters had by then concluded that the anti-Panchayat elements were misusing
this provision.
The first graduate elections in 1963 were held to little fanfare. Nepali Congress members were not interested as the party was pursuing armed revolt at the time. However, Nagendra Prasad Singh, who was close to Nepali Congress, contested the election. Advocate Krishna Prasad Dhungana, who was close to the communist party, had also filed candidacy. There were only a few other contestants. The candidacy of Singh and Dhungana got some attention due to their political backgrounds. The first time, Kumar Das Shrestha and Ramji Prasad Sharma got elected besides Singh and
Dhungana O
Next week’s ‘Vault of History’ will discuss emergence of some pro-democratic and pro-republic leaders through graduate constituencies

 “In the beginner's mind there are many possibil­ities but in the expert's, there are few,” says Shunryu Suzuki in his 1970 master­piece Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. With his remarkably ordi­nary but penetrating wisdom put out in under 120 pages, the Zen master goes deep into the minds of the readers and enables them to have a very simple but profound perspective of living.

Anyone who has a begin­ner’s mind has the most beautiful mind. It is a mind with infinite possibilities. It does not have assump­tions. It does not belit­tle things and say—“Oh, I know it already. I have already accomplished that." Instead, it sees things anew each time.

You may be seeing your friends or kids for a hun­dred times, and each time your recognition of them may build on the memory of the last time you saw them. So you are not seeing them alone; you are seeing them as well as the memories that you have in the mind. And there are other impressions of the past that compound your vision.

It’s also the case with a new person or thing that we hav­en’t seen before. Oftentimes when we see them, we have a skeptic’s mind. As we aren’t familiar with them, we feel the need to be critical right from the beginning. So we see them as they are, plus our suspicions of them. While such seeing is sometimes helpful in protecting us, we miss the entire point most of the times.

What happens if we start seeing with a beginner’s mind—unclouded, unprej­udiced, and free from what we already know? What hap­pens when we put aside the ‘I’ and ‘know’ parts when seeing things? We see people and situations exactly as they are. We have a real appre­ciation of them. It widens our vision. It develops our wisdom. It enables us to do many things—understand things precisely, become better prepared to respond to situations, love people, develop compassion, con­serve environment, and keep ourselves out of trou­bles. In a sense, we can live fully.

In this space, I wish to dis­cuss things that resonate with our everyday lives, from a beginner’s perspective. If whatever I talk may sound familiar, I humbly ask the readers to try to see it with fresh eyes, discard the things that do not make sense, and if anything remains, let it remain.

 It is clear that the city of Kath­mandu cannot depend on drinking water ferried on fossil fuel tankers, even though the cur­rent government seems to have embraced this model as a perma­nent one. Not only do the millions of trips made per month foul the already polluted air, it also adds hugely to poor people’s water and health bills. Nepali parliament must pass a resolution that makes it mandato­ry for landlords to provide water to residents before they rent a room. In Kathmandu, landlords are rapidly putting up buildings with no running water, kitchen, toilets, or electricity provided. These rooms are rented from Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 each. The women renting them are often single mothers whose husbands are in the Gulf. The women man­age their finances and run their household by holding down small jobs. They do domestic work, construction, laundry, and other part-time work while taking care of school-going children. Trying to source water from tankers or plastic canisters can be a big bur­den on women who are already overworked with loans, house­work, cooking, laundry, and care responsibilities.

It is unethical and wrong of rich landlords to force poor sin­gle mothers to carry canisters of water five floors up to their rooms. Often the landlord hasn’t provided water not because they don’t have the money—these busi­nessmen own multiple buildings and are cashing in lakhs in month­ly rent—but because they believe their tenants are from the villages and therefore can manage with­out running water. A pump may be provided in the yard which pumps up groundwater. These water sources are inadequate or they do not provide clean water. Tenements of this nature have sprung up freely without govern­ment regulation and control all over Kathmandu and other cities of Nepal since the Loktantric gov­ernment came to power.

The government does the hard­working citizens of Nepal a dis­service if it doesn’t put regula­tions in place which ensures no ghaderi or apartment building can be rented out till the landlord has put in essentials, including a water-harvesting system, toilets with adequate water, electricity connection, and gas canisters, in place. Any building with more than three rental families should be legally mandated to have a water harvesting system with a filter. The government must sent a health inspector to ensure such a system is in place before they give permission to rent. The gov­ernment must also train ward offices to install these systems in a cost-effective manner, with a technical team there to deal with maintenance issues.

A Housing Agency which keeps track of all tenants in Kathmandu, along with a database of landlords, must be created. This ensures that the government can keep track of water harvesting com­pliance. Any complaints about toilets, electricity etc should also be addressed through the agency, which should act as a mediator between landlords and tenants. Tenants are at the mercy of land­lords at the moment. They have no recourse to justice and are liv­ing in what in Western countries are 19th century tenement style buildings with very poor infra­structure. As with the past, these conditions are not inevitable, but a consequence of greed by those who are setting up large build­ings with the explicit intention of cramming as many tenants as possible into small spaces while providing them with the least number of amenities. This kind of exploitative business model is unacceptable in a democratic sys­tem where citizens have rights, including rights to safe housing, clean water, and human dignity.

Meanwhile, by 2025, all water in Kathmandu should come from water harvesting systems and revival of traditional gravity-fu­eled wells. Fossil fueled water tankers must be phased out. Not only are we losing huge amounts of foreign currency earned abroad on ferrying water into the cities, we are also giving this money right back to the oil-rich Gulf states where our citizens are currently working in near bond­ed conditions, and to India which continues to control Nepal’s economy with a vice-like grip.

Australia is on fire. Who is to blame for the millions of acres burnt to cinder, the lives lost and properties destroyed, the almost half billion animals killed?Australia is a major producer and user of fossil fuel. Australia Energy Update 2018, from Austra­lian Government’s Department of Environment and Energy (ener­gy.gov.au), says coal, oil and gas accounted for 94 percent of Aus­tralia’s primary energy mix in 2016-17.

Sixty-three percent of elec­tricity was generated from coal. Out of this, 11 percent was from brown coal, a source of energy environmental activists have long opposed due to its harmful health and ecological effects. Coal min­ing releases methane, a potent greenhouse gas that is one of the main causes of global heating.

Scott Morrison, Prime Minister of Australia, brought a lump of coal to Parliament in 2017. He sang the virtues of coal and its links to Australian prosperity, and said: “Those opposite have an ideological, pathological fear of coal. There’s no word for ‘coalo­phobia’ officially, Mr. Speaker… but that’s the malady that afflicts those opposite.” Morrison, who critics say also cut funding for fire­fighters, was later seen enjoying his holiday in Hawaii as Australia went up in flames. Volunteer fire­fighters died trying to contain the massive fires.

Economic “growth” almost always leads to more stress on the environment, leading to worse economic conditions for people in the long run. The Australian economy grew by two percent in 2016-17 to reach $1.7 trillion. Ener­gy consumption was 6,146 peta­joules in 2016-2017 for 24.6 mil­lion people. To compare, Nepal with a population of 27 million consumed 428 petajoules in 2010. Assuming two million Nepalis are working abroad at any given time, and the population being roughly equal in size, an average Austra­lian citizen uses 14 times more energy than a Nepali.

It is clear Nepal needs to increase its energy use if we are to run industries and be self-suffi­cient in articles of daily consump­tion. But does Australia need to reduce its energy levels? Is there a balance between the First World and Third World that could be struck, which puts us somewhere in the middle?

Australia also has large tracts of industrial farming lands which are saturated with glyphosate, a herbicide first created by Mon­santo and now sold by Bayer. Glyphosate is used to desiccate crops after they’ve been cut. This means it’s an agent that dries out organic matter. Now imagine mil­lions of acres full of grain and stalks saturated with this sub­stance, drying out the land across an entire continent. How could it not catch fire?

Then there’s Bolsonaro’s Brazil, encouraging cattle farmers to set the Amazon on fire. Australia and Brazil are both in the Southern Hemisphere. In the map, they appear to be separated only by an ocean. In other words, they are upwind and downwind from each other. Without doubt, hot winds of Brazil’s Amazon fires played a hand in temperature increas­es in Australia. The firestorms look more like tornados than for­est fires, which suggest heated air currents.

Last but not least, there’s euca­lyptus. Although the literature assures us that eucalyptus is native to Australia, are there plantations that have been put together in neat rows by human hands which have dried out groundwater? In Nepal, this tree was introduced in the 80’s by the Australian aid agency. It quickly became known for depleting groundwater levels for miles around. A similar situ­ation developed in India where eucalyptus had been planted in plantations. Is there human agen­cy behind the reshaping of seem­ingly virgin land which created conditions perfect for water table depletion and drought?

Poignant photographs of chil­dren staring at dead koalas and kangaroos are making their rounds on Twitter. Many species of animals, birds and insects may never recover their population and go extinct after this cata­clysmic event. For those who are children or in their teens, there is a sense of a world lost which can never be recovered.

Which is why it was enraging to see this tweet from Exxon Mobil Australia: “Stay safe and have fun this new year, from all of us at ExxonMobil Australia.”

One person responded: “Jesus Christ this is pure evil.” Another said: “Exxon needs to be prose­cuted for crimes against human­ity. Blood is on your hands. #GreenNewDeal now.”

And this may be the only way to respond to this apocalyptic fire which has devastated an entire continent. Can ecological crimes finally be taken to the World Court of Justice, as another Twit­ter respondent suggested? Are the actions of big corporations not leading to genocide in many places, with people being affect­ed in mass numbers by climate triggered events?

In Australia, people are shifting out of homes and neighborhoods they may never return to in their lifetime. It will take decades for forests to revive and restore. Where will all these fire-affect­ed people go? Who will help them rebuild their lives? Surely it won’t be the fossil fuel cor­porations who made billions of dollars in profit, but paid zero tax to the country.

A sobering note to begin the new decade with, but we must remember Nepal is one of the most climate change-af­fected countries in the world. Our people are also being dis­placed, through the slow deplet­ing of glaciers, ice and spring melt in the Himalayas. Who is to blame?