English - Support to Participatory Constitution Building in Nepal ...

The Remake of a StateIdeological contradictions and duality among different political and socialforces in understanding the society, change and development is the realityof Nepal’s past, present and immediate future. The tensions between thenew ideas and technology with existing systems such as in managing thenatural resources by the community themselves have yielded positiveresults in the past (see an instance of community forestry managementby Community Forest User Groups in Nepal in detail in Chapter 4 in thisbook). In some cases, contradictions have been the major source of radicaltransformation, such as the case of state restructuring vis-à-vis the issueof federalism. When UCPN (Maoist) put forward the demand of federalismto restructure the existing state, none of the other parliamentary partieswas ready to accept it as a viable option to transform the ongoing conflict.However, over the years with people’s pressure, peace negotiations withthe Maoists and uprising in Terai for autonomous federal state, theywere forced to accept the idea eventually agreeing to amend the InterimConstitution for federal structure of the governance in the future. It is seenthat when certain contradictory views or issues are aggravated to a greaterextent, those who were against such view(s) begin to start questioningtheir own norms and values or to maintain positions on certain issues.With time and pressure from the public, they ultimately come to agree onthe proposition through a negotiated settlement. There are several casesof such contradictions and duality being resolved amicably in Nepal bydifferent political parties and social forces.Contradictions on use of language (a case of Vice President taking oath inHindi instead of mother tongue (Maithili) or in Nepali) have been a majorissue in the current Nepali politics. Identity-based groups advocating forcertain languages have been divided over this issue. The Supreme Court,using the prevailing law, had made the oath-taking illegal and office of theVice President nonfunctional for several months. This issue was resolvedwith the provision of oath taking in own mother tongue and/or in Nepalilanguage by making the sixth amendment of the Interim Constitution-2007. Despite this consensus on agreeing to solve the language issuerelated to functioning of Vice President, numbers of issues regarding theuse of languages remain. Some Terai based parties continue to advocatefor making Hindi an official language stating that it is a link language formultiple ethnic and linguistic groups living in Terai. In contrast, otherparties and groups within the country are not in favour of this becauseof greater cultural invasion and interference of India as a big neighbor. Ascontradictions exist, this is going to be a crucial issue to be dealt by the CAwhile finalising the constitution.293