deployment of violence before concessions were made – not negotiated, which
might have helped to lead to more realistic, therefore more lasting, solutions. The
major parties repeatedly rejected well-tried strategies for dealing with divisions and
disagreements in peace- and constitution-making. They squandered the opportun-
ities opened up first in the drafting of the IC and then in the CA process. Having
committed themselves to consensus building and power sharing, they both tried to
exclude the newer players, and continued to fight each other. Ultimately they were
not really inspired by the new vision of Nepal which animated the people. Perhaps
the fundamental problem was that Nepali politics had revived before a suitable
constitutional framework had been put in place.
At the end of 2013 , Nepal is still without a constitution. The Interim Constitution
is still in force. Endless negotiations between the major political parties which have
controlled the entire political and constitutional process since the 2006 ceasefire
agreement led to an agreement on the formation of a multi-party government,
curiously under the chief justice of the Supreme Court, to remain in office while
elections were held for a new CA to adopt a new constitution. To accommodate
this, and various later developments, the Constitution has been amended by
presidential decree (with Cabinet approval) several times. The elections, eventually
held in November 2013 , produced results which were very different from those in
2008 : the Maoists, the Nepali Congress and the UML remain the largest parties,
but the Maoists came well behind the other two in both the FPTP and the PR
races. The CA promises to be significantly less inclusive than its predecessor. Only
ten women, sixty-three Janajatis and two Dalits were elected to FPTP seats as
opposed to thirty, seventy-four and seven in 2008. After some persuasion, the
Maoists agreed to participate in the CA, but, it seems, not to form part of
government (supporting the government by remaining in opposition, it was
reported). The main parties reached a ‘four-point agreement’, one point of which
is to complete the Constitution within a year. This agreement out of the way, the
parties say they can finally proceed to identify the individuals to occupy the PR list
seats, and presumably to form a government headed by the Congress, and the CA
will be summoned – provided a new source of disagreement is resolved: whether
the IC should be amended again to provide that the president rather than the prime
minister will do the summoning. Meanwhile a splinter group of Maoists, with no
seats, is saying that the CA should be dissolved to make way for a people’s
revolution, while the major Maoist party (UCPN-M), disconcerted by the realisa-
tion that the two other big parties hold well over two-thirds of the seats, is reported
to be preparing to reconsider its 2006 commitment to peace. So little or nothing
seems to have changed. Jockeying for position and status, or ‘power games’,
continue to dominate the public sphere. Nepalis have reason to wonder whether
they will have a new constitution, prepared by an inclusive and consultative
process, any time soon.