‘Ask not what your country can do for you’

Nepal has the democracy it collectively enables, not the one it claims to want nor the one it imagines.

US President John F Kennedy famously said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” It is cliched and is often dismissed as irrelevant idealism and the sort of rhetoric that only applies to rich, orderly societies. But that mindset is what gets things backwards in the first place. Our chronic failure to internalise this idea in Nepal explains more about our democratic malaise than any single constitution or conspiracy.