Absence of State the Major Condition
Market prices in Nepal are beyond prediction. Tycoons, who have personal ties with political power elites, decide the percentage of price hikes. Drinking water and essential food commodities have prices that prove how disguised democracy tortures the majority of working class people in Nepal. The profit margin range in Nepal's markets is 100 percent to 1,000 percent, depending on the nature of goods and services. Almost no businessperson is prepared to adhere to the theory of maximum 20 percent margin in essential goods and services. The burning truth in Nepal's business sector is that the essential goods and services have the highest prices, demoralizing and depressing the poverty-stricken masses, whose per capita income in general is about US$470 per annum.
Moreover, the market prices being imposed by the business community on the overall population make one feel that profit-making and investing classes are above the constitution or state's control mechanisms.
Since corruption has become an all-pervasive competitive culture in the country, it reinforces ill-governance that ultimately makes states' law application and adjudication mechanisms defunct from public perspective. However, crimes become lucrative opportunities for such defunct mechanisms. Thus, corruption gland appears to have infected the whole nervous system of state. This must have provoked profiteers to multiply prices, making their business activities almost tantamount to crimes against humanity.
The current price hike in rice--one of the essential commodities in Nepal--is about 100 percent. The hike in fruits ranges from 100 percent to 200 percent. There is no justifiable factor for it. Impunity has become a formula to run the country. Individuals with access to state power can do whatever they like, be it right or wrong, so long as they support the status quo.
While hundreds of glossy reports produced by non-governmental organizations, national and international, debate about people's multidimensional rights as defined in the major international human rights treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and political Rights (ICCPR), the International Covenant on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR0 and others, millions of Nepalis live getting malnourished due to deficient calories. The majority of working class Nepalis live a life far from the adequate standard of living as envisioned in the Article 25 of the Universal Declaration of human Rights (UDHR) and the Article 11 (1) of the International Covenant on the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Utterly unmatching with the Nepali workers' income status are the ever-climbing market prices never deliberated by dozens of Nepali political parties, which spend most of their time on preaching democratic rights and people's happiness.
The existing gap between the workers' income status and the unbridled market prices, alarming in reality, compels them to live a life below the minimum standard. The obvious living conditions in the Kathmandu Metropolis define the standard of the majority of Nepalis' life. Inadequate housing, lack of hygiene and sanitation, lack of water, and extremely poor quality food not only speak about the actual conditions of the Nepalis in general but they also tell us volumes about the political character of Nepali democratic leaders, who generally live luxurious lives.
Since the Nepali society lacks transparency regarding political leaders' income source, no one can exactly state how they afford luxurious and expensive lives. However, the suffering masses spontaneously link leaders' luxuries and wealthiness to the market prices catapulting off geometrically.
One wonders why the market prices rocket up by dullifying the minds of nations' doctoral economists, dumbing their tongues and de-sensitizing senses.
Should curious international socio-psychologists generate primary data on the condition of formally educated Nepali minds, they unfailingly will find as a major outcome that the majority of them have knowingly or unknowingly become quick-rich dreamers, who are mentally prepared to sacrifice all kinds of human ethics for the sake of hoarding money and other properties. But the researchers will have to use tactical and diplomatic psychological detectors of serious coherence to overview the general phenomena of psycho-social behavior of the formal degree-holders in Nepal.
Quick-rich dream, now in vogue overwhelmingly, has further propelled the business community, mainly molded by profiteering mindset, to indulge in raising prices in a damned-care manner. They hugely benefit from the de facto absence of state in the country.
Understandably, in this context, market prices define the nature of democracy in Nepal, state being present for the haves, the well-fed and the well-clad while being absent for the have-nots, the ill-fed and the ill-clad.
Nepal government members may legally represent Nepal in the international for a while having lost their moral validity within the country. Nevertheless, they insist on being in power for ever. What an instance it is!
