Nepal’s Media Control Legislations Reveal Substantial Tendency of the NCP’s Further Democratic Erosion
Course: POLSCI 264S-01 Democratic Erosion, Duke University
Instructor: Jason D. Todd
Peer Editors: Leona Lu
Despite its relative political freedom and civil liberty compared to other communist states, Nepal has demonstrated alarming trends of accelerating suppression of free press and strengthened control over social media. It creates grounds and potentiality for extensive information blockage and monopoly. The Freedom House has lowered their ranking score for Nepal’s media and information freedom condition in the year of 2019 due to a series of legislation that undermines Nepal’s press freedom, marking it one of the largest and quickest indicator of the democratic erosion taking place in Nepal. Influenced by both internal and external factors, the trend of continuous loss of information and media freedom is imminent.
Roads to Dystopia Being Paved
The controversial amendment of Nepal’s criminal code passed in August 2018 granted the communist government with legal grounds and punishing capacities to restrain unfavorable information, reports, and coverage from traditional medias. It abolishes the media’s rights to record and publish conversations without consent, photograph and publish other people without consent, and use satires with disrespects to other people. It also utilizes broad and vague languages, making the government capable of willingly convicting a quite broad range of behaviors. The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists strongly objected the enactment of those newly amended articles, insisting that it threatens Nepal’s freedom of press and its own journalist industry.
“These new laws have created an environment of fear for the journalists and more and more of them are now practicing self-censorship,” said Taranath Dahal, the leader of the Freedom Forum, a Nepal-based media rights group.
In response to the controversies caused by the broad and vague languages of and the intensions behind these articles, the Nepalese government claimed to form a committee to change the wordings in these articles, according to the Associated Press. Yet, until now, such rephrasing has not been accepted or implemented by the authorities.
More ironically, the Nepalese federal parliament proposed another bill that further restrict the freedom of information in May 2019. The proposed bill requires that only social medias permitted by the government are allowed to operate in Nepal, and that anyone who use or post on unallowed social medias would face fines and even imprisonments. According to the report of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the bill would greatly enhance the communist government’s authority to punish the non-abiding medias by fining or criminalizing, meanwhile expand the restriction on the tradition medias to the more accessible and flexible social medias.
These articles would bring up negative precedents for Nepal’s political freedom and civil liberty. Given that both the judiciary and the bureaucracy are tightly controlled by the NCP, the communist government would exercise unbounded capacity to punish dissidents and political opponents as well as to yield absolute control over its domestic information flows. As a result, their political authorities could be stabilized, and their accountabilities be avoided. Furthermore, the rigid constraint over social medias displays the NCP’s ambition of totalitarian rule over general social and life aspects.
Authoritarian Bloods Deep Inside
As a Marxist-Leninist and Maoist political party, the NCP is authoritarian in nature, as the “People’s Democratic Dictatorship” proposed by Mao Zedong, derived from the Marxist-Leninist ideologies. The totalitarian supremacy of the communist party, in the field of media and information included, is the key feature of such authoritarianism. It is claimed by the Marxism-Leninism and the Maoism that medias should be under direct control of the communist party, which represents the general wills of the people. Opinions and reports that disagree or disobey the party line would be regarded as “adversarial actions” and the medias would face criminalization or even untrailed political punishments.
All other communist-ruling states have rigid media and information flow control legislations or decrees. The regimes are empowered with virtually unbounded authority to criminalize unfavorable voices and individuals. Therefore, the regimes’ accountabilities to their policies and enforcements could be eliminated and their powers be maintained unchecked and unbalanced.
Both Larry Diamond’s Thinking About Hybrid Regime and Ozan O. Varol’s Stealth Authoritarianism give proof to the Marxist-Leninist and the Maoist ideology of media control. They argue that media control especially seizure or repression of independent, free press plays an essential role in the authoritarian powers’ efforts of eroding democratic institutions and practices. The restriction on free press or the complete control over the majority of media sources could generate considerable information blockage. People would have no information from the opposition side and the independent watchdogs, thus losing the capacity of mobilization in order to challenge unwanted policies or governance of the regimes. This largely increases the stability of such authoritarian regimes by eliminating potential challengers and oppositions.
Illiberal Mentors All Around
In addition to the ideological roots and political schemes, the NCP is quite possibly under direct influence of its counterpart in the other five communist states as well as other non-democratic regimes around the globe.
As an outstanding instance, China has long-standing legal frameworks and practices of heavily restricting free press and information flow in social medias. Mainly through the Internet access obstruction system called the “Great Firewall of China”, many foreign news outlets and social media platforms including the New York Times, Reuters, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram are entirely blocked within China. Other permitted media outlets and Internet sources are either directly or indirectly owned by the Communist Party of China or controlled by pro-CPC editors and administrations, leaving the Chinese people with no access to opposition voices and some facts purposefully concealed by the authorities. Similar mechanisms or practices are also observed in non-democratic countries like North Korea, Vietnam, Iran, Russia, and Uzbekistan.
Given the fact that India has been distanced by the NCP since its victory in the parliamentary elections and that India also revenged by closing the border and cutting Nepal’s many sustenance resource accesses, the NCP eagerly seeks for the aids and economic influxes from China, which is a major strategic opponent of India. The Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Nepal on 12th and 13th October. That was the Chinese president’s first state visit to Nepal for over 20 years of history. The gifts brought to Nepal by Xi’s visit not only include huge investment and infrastructure construction projects, but also ideas and strategies of authoritarian control. It is observed primarily in Africa that the presence of Chinese capitals and societal contribution requires or generates increased political control and decreased civil liberty. Such trade-off is plausibly part of the reasons of the NCP’s increasingly rigid information control.
Despite some oppositions from international civil societies and media coverage in the west, the global society, especially the primary international institutions and major democratic countries, show no adequate attention to and intervention with the growing suppression of free press and social media in Nepal. We cannot keep turning our backs on these indicators of democratic erosion, no matter how minor or insignificant it may seem, as we still have some chances to overturn it at least for now.
