Untimely consensus

Forging a “national consensus” in the absence of national emergencies is an affront to multiparty politics.

The idea of ‘national consensus’ started taking shape when the political parties were in a collective fight against the autocratic monarchy in the aftermath of King Gyanendra Shah’s coup on February 1, 2005. Back then, the parties had a single goal: to bring sovereignty back to the people. When Shah subsequently announced the restoration of the dissolved parliament, the political parties again had no option to work together to chart out a new political course for the country. The unfinished business of the peace process that started in 2006 also gave them the impetus to keep working together. Then, in 2008, the country elected its first Constituent Assembly, whereupon there was still a need for the parties to collaborate in order to draft a new national charter and to see the peace process to its logical end. But Nepal turned a corner when it got a new constitution on September 20, 2015, even though the process of transitional justice, a crucial component of the peace process, remained incomplete. That was when the idea of national consensus should have died a natural death. The country had charted a definite course and it was now up to the political parties to compete to win public trust and govern on the basis of this trust.