January 26, Kathmandu. By Kushal Basnet
The ruling coalition of Nepal secured 18 out of the 19 vacant seats in the National Assembly. The National Election Commission conducted the polls and counted the votes on Thursday.
From the ruling coalition, Nepali Congress won 10 seats, CPN (Maoist Centre) won five seats, CPN (Unified Socialists) won two seats, and Janata Samajwadi Party (JSP) won one seat. The chief opposition party CPN (UML) secured only one seat in Koshi Province.
The Constitution of Nepal 2015 has provisioned a bicameral legislature for the federal democratic republic. The House of Representatives is a body of 275 representatives elected directly by the people for five years. The National Assembly is a body of 59 representatives elected by the provincial assembly members along with mayors and deputy-mayors of local governments with a hierarchical voting weightage. One-third of the National Assembly seats get vacated every two years.
In early January, the coalition indulged in an infighting. PM Pushpa Kamal Dahal held dialogues with the opposition CPN (UML) on the possibility of getting the Transition Justice Bill approved through the parliament. The opposition in return would get some National Assembly seats. But there was a dissent from CPN (Unified Socialist), a breakaway party of CPN (UML). As a result, the trade-off did not happen.
Koshi Province, where CPN (UML) won a seat, has raised peculiar troubles for the ruling coalition. In October, 2023, Kedar Karki, a dissident from the coalition’s Nepali Congress, became the Chief Minister after receiving support from UML. Indra Bahadur Angbo, from the coalition’s CPN (Maoist Centre), had also filed his claim on the leadership position. The Provincial Assembly would constitutionally move towards a dissolution followed by a midterm election if UML did not back Karki. Karki secured a majority of 47 out of 93 Assembly members in his support, including eight from Nepali Congress and 39 from UML.
Dr Shekhar Koirala, who lost to Congress President Sher Bahadur Deuba in the party General Convention, was instrumental in forming the Karki government. Koirala has criticized the coalition, asking for resignation from PM Dahal on multiple instances.
Although the divisions in the coalition have contributed to the loss of a seat, the presence of CPN (UML) in the Assembly plunged from 17 seats as the biggest party to 9 seats as the third-biggest.
The bumpy road of transition
A decade-long Maoist war caused death and destruction of scales. A 2012 report from the UN Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR) states that 13,000 people died and 1,300 went missing as a result of the war. However, many other sources have contested the figures with death estimations as high as 17,000. A peace agreement, signed in 2006, ended the war, setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) and the Commission of Inquiry on Enforced Disappeared Persons (CIEDP) to investigate the war crimes from both sides–the Maoist Army and the government security forces.
Enforced Disappearances Enquiry, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Act, 2014 established the two commissions, but the law did not empower the commissions enough in solving the wartime issues. In 2015, the Supreme Court directed the government to amend the bill in line with the international standards, including classifying violence as serious and non-serious and worthy and unworthy of amnesty, depending on their severity.
The coalition government, led by PM Dahal, registered a bill to amend the 2014 Act, often referred to as the Transitional Justice Bill, in the House of Representatives in March. Representatives from Rashtriya Prajatantra Party (RPP) and Nepal Workers and Peasants Party objected to the bill.
Victims of the war have repeatedly cried foul in the transitional justice process. International observers such as the United Nations agencies, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International also criticized the amendment bill for not meeting the international standards of transitional justice.
As Human Rights Watch notes: The bill in its current form provides amnesties for “murder”; “sexual violence” not amounting to rape; “beating and mutilation”; “abduction”; “arson”; “forced displacement”; “illegal detention”; and “any inhuman act[s] that are against international human rights and humanitarian law.” As a result, perpetrators of certain serious human rights violations and violations of international humanitarian law amounting to crimes against humanity or war crimes, including arbitrary killings by government forces, would enjoy an amnesty from prosecution.
All parties and their representatives are not on the same page regarding the amendments, as reflected in the inconclusive deliberations in the parliamentary committees.
Last December, Dhanraj Gurung, the federal law minister, stated that a bill to amend the Act will be presented for approval before the parliament in its winter session. President Ram Chandra Paudel has called for initiation of the session on February 5, but things have changed since the election eve in December.
Like the negotiations for National Assembly seats, KP Sharma Oli, the chairman of UML, has used transitional justice as a pressure point for manoeuvering Dahal in the past as well.
Krishna Prasad Sitaula, former home minister who declared an end to the war with Maoists, has now been elected to the National Assembly on the Maoists’ support. He was a key figure in shaping the peace agreement that paved a path for the transitional justice process.
UML’s post-election take on the Transitional Justice Bill is yet to unfold. But, as the winter session of the parliament approaches, Oli is upset with PM Dahal, while Koirala from Nepali Congress is building pressure around the coalition. The path to the approval of the amendment bill is uphill.
Photo: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nepalese_Constituent_Assembly_Building.jpg