Shortly after Madhav Kumar Nepal was elected chairman of the Constitutional Committee of the Constituent Assembly, in January 2009, he brought together some 25 Nepali lawyers for a meeting. As a consensus candidate agreed by the major political parties, he had been brought into the House as a nominated member to lead this committee, even though he had lost the election of April 2008 – and, therefore, access to the Assembly. After accepting the responsibility of leading the principal drafting body at the Constituent Assembly, the senior Communist Party of Nepal (Unified Marxist-Leninist) leader – and current prime minister – wanted to meet with the constitutional lawyers to discuss how to move ahead with the technical aspects of the constitution-drafting work, the primary purpose of the Constituent Assembly.
During the course of the meeting, he took the opportunity to discuss the process that had been followed thus far by the Constituent Assembly since it came into existence on 28 May 2008, as well as the process of drafting the statute and easing ongoing irritations. Some of the lawyers assembled were quick to explain how, in the history of constitution-making, some able individuals (such as James Madison or Alexander Hamilton in the US, or B N Rau or Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar in India) had been crucial to drafting the document, while involving others in the process. The immediate question from Chairperson Nepal, who is known for his simplicity, was "Tell me, jurists, from among all of you, or those in the Constituent Assembly, who could qualify to be James Madison or B N Rau for us?" Everybody smiled and looked at each other, but there was no answer.
Four months later, Madhav Nepal went on to become prime minister, and a jurist from the House, Nilambar Acharya, took over his position as chairperson. But the question remains unanswered. Indeed, the problem with Nepal's Constituent Assembly is not just that it has neither a technical team of experts nor elected legal or constitutional talents working with the drafting body inside the House; rather, the issue goes far deeper.
At the outset, it must be stated that the Constituent Assembly, tasked with writing a new constitution and fundamentally reshaping the government as part of the peace process, has already completed 21 out of the 24 months mandated for it to do its job. A body of 601 members – of which 240 were elected in a direct vote, another 335 came to join on the basis of proportional representation, and the remaining 26 were nominated by the government leading the transition – is no doubt a particularly inclusive, heterogeneous group, and one that is, the most representative assembly that Nepal has ever seen. It represents most of the country's political forces, from the revolutionary Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) to the regionalist Madhesi Janadhikar Forum, as well as a variety of fringe parties. As the first inclusive body to represent Nepal's multi-religious, -lingual and -ethnic communities, it is a mosaic of Nepali diversity and pluralism. "It is the House of peasants, the House of industrialists and the House of the marginalised people," The chairman of the Constituent Assembly, Subhas Nemwang, said to an international audience on 15 January. "It is set to work on the new constitution for Nepal as part of the comprehensive peace process that the country is passing through."