English · Chapter 42
Study notes aligned to the official NEB syllabus.
Power and Politics is a Language Development unit of the Grade 11 Compulsory English textbook. Its theme is power: what it is, where it comes from, how it is divided among institutions, and how its holders are made to answer for its use. Politics is the activity by which a community settles the questions it must settle together. The unit trains comprehension on a reading about government and public life, builds the vocabulary of civics and administration, teaches the grammar used to judge past actions, and puts both to work in debate, speech and essay tasks. NEB questions reward the student who defines the key terms accurately and argues a position with a reason and a concrete example.
Confirm the exact title and author of this unit's reading text against your own copy of the textbook, because these notes develop the substance the unit's reading treats rather than a particular title.
Power, at its plainest, is the capacity to make things happen: to get a decision taken, a road built or a rule obeyed. It is not confined to government: a head teacher, a landowner, a contractor and a household elder all hold power resting on law, wealth, knowledge, numbers or custom.
Authority is power that is recognised as rightful. The officer who refuses an application and the thief who takes a purse both exercise power, but only the first has authority, because the office and its limits were fixed in advance and can be checked. This recognition is what the unit calls legitimacy, and it rests on three grounds: legality, so that the holder came to office by the procedure the law prescribes; consent, so that the governed have had a genuine say and can withdraw it; and performance, so that the duties of the office are discharged. A government that has lost all three keeps only force, the most expensive way of ruling and the least stable.
Sovereignty names the supreme authority within a state, and in a democracy it is said to rest with the people, who lend it to representatives for a fixed term rather than surrendering it. The constitution adopted in 2015 declares Nepal a federal democratic republic and distributes power across federal, provincial and local government, so that decisions are taken nearer to the people they affect. It also separates functions, giving the legislature the making of law, the executive its enforcement and the judiciary its interpretation. Periodic elections and the universal right to vote give the people a peaceful means of changing those who govern them.
Politics is how such arrangements are worked in practice, since wants always exceed resources and a community must choose. Parties contest for the chance to govern; where no group commands a majority a coalition is formed by agreement; and the opposition's task is to scrutinise and to offer an alternative, which makes it part of good government rather than an obstacle to it.
Accountability is the machinery that keeps power answerable: elections, questioning in the legislature, audit of public money, an independent judiciary, the right to information, a free press and an active civil society. Corruption, the use of public office for private gain, grows wherever that machinery is weak, and its cost is paid in unbuilt schools and unsafe roads.