Popular Struggles and Movements and Development of Democracy

Presentation by : Rahul Chhatrapati

MOVEMENT FOR DEMOCRACY IN NEPAL

• Nepal witnessed an extraordinary popular movement in April 2006.The movement aimed at restoring democracy, it was aimed at regaining popular control over govt. from the king.

History• Nepal a third wave country, had won

democracy in 1990.• King was formally the head of the state but

the real power was excerised by the elected representatives.

• The king Birendra, was the one who accepted this transition from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy, he and his family was massacred in 2001.

• King Gayendra the new king of Nepal was not prepared to accept democratic rule, on feburary 2005 he dismissed the Prime minister and dissolved the popularly elected Parliament.

The Popular Revolt• All the political parties in the parliament

formed an alliance--Seven party alliance--SPA and called for four day strike in Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal.

• The protests turned into indefinite strike in which Maoist and various organizations joined hands.

• People defied curfews and took to streets.

• More than lakhs of people gathered almost everyday to demand retoration of democracy, on 21 april they served an ultimatum to the king and the leaders rejected the halfhearted concessions given by the king and struck to their demands.Main demands were—

restoration of parliament,power to an all party govt.new constituent assembly.

Result• On 24th April , the king was forced to concede

to all the demands• Girija Prasad Koirala was chosen as the new

PM of the interim govt.• The SPA & Maoist came to an understanding

as to how new Constituent Assembly was to be elected.

• Parliament passed laws taking most of the powers of the king.

It was known as second movement of democracy in Nepal.

BOLIVIA'S WATER WAR• Bolivia is a small and poor country in Latin

America.The WorldBank pressuried the govt. to give up its control of municiple water supply.

• The govt. sold off these rights to an MNC.The company immediately increased the prices four times.

• In January 2006 a new alliance of labour, human rights and community leaders organised a sucessful strike for four days in the city and the govt. agreed to negotiate but nothing happened. Police resorted to brutal repression when the agitation was started again in Feburary.

• Another strike was there in April and govt. imposed martial law.

• But the power people forced the officials of MNC to flee the city and made govt. to conceed to all demands of the protesters.

• The contract with MNC was cancelled and water supply was resorted to municipality at old rates.

This was known as Bolivia's water war

Development of Democracy in India

• In India. In the mid-nineteenth century, under the growing influence of British colonialism, the British government formally took charge of India.

• This government displaced the British East India Company, which had steadily expanded its influence and its ability to govern between 1757 and 1857.

• But in 1857, there was a significant uprising against British rule.

• British colonial historians have referred to this as the Great Indian Mutiny, and Indian Nationalist historians refer to this as the First War of Independence.

• The underlying structural reason for the uprising against British rule was the penetration of India by British mores, customs, beliefs, and cultural practices, which were all seen as an assault on Indian cultural life. 

• It was a social revolt more than anything else.

•  This nineteenth century emergence of Indian nationalism was very different from that which ultimately brought India independence in 1947.

• The Indian nationalism of the late nineteenth century, which was given a voice when the Indian National Congress was formed in 1885.

• The monarchs were allowed to do essentially what they wanted, except that the British controlled three critical areas—defense, foreign affairs and communications. 

• In the 1920s and early 1930s, under the Congress party, the Indian National Congress, which had been formed in 1885, came under the tutelage of one of the most remarkable men of the twentieth century: Mohandas K. Gandhi.

• Gandhi recognized that the only way to oust the British was to mobilize all of India’s population.

• Gandhi decided in 1931 to break a simple law, the so-called “Salt Law.”

•  The Salt Law fell disproportionately on the backs of the poor Indian peasants, and thereby Gandhi managed to mobilize the peasantry, to give them an understanding that this was an unjust law and must be broken.

• There were staunch socialists in Congress at one end, and diehard free marketers at the other.

• One of the great advantages of this diverse Congress was that its members were forced to negotiate, to debate, to argue and above all to learn the art of compromise

• It became deeply imbedded in Indian political culture that you would live to fight another day, because that’s the nature of democracy.

• You may lose this election; you gird your loins again, and come back and enter the arena.

• India managed to forge a democratic constitution by 1950, and it drew heavily from the American Constitution, the Irish Constitution, and, of course, from British Common Law.

• The Constitution created a bicameral legislature, an independent judiciary, a federated state with significant powers located at the National Center. 

Conclusion• Today in the world, there are

parliamentary democracies like ours and there are presidential democracies, like the one in the Russian Federation or the United States of America.

• Whatever their type is, there are some conditions that a democracy has to satisfy in order to be classified as a democracy:– equality,– the rule of law,– liberty and– work in the general interest of the

people