Floods in Nepal and the Terms of Political Trust

The reports from Nepal are stark in their simplicity. A landslide in Chumnubri village blocked the Budhi Gandaki River; the backed‑up waters broke through and rushed downstream, sweeping away about a dozen houses, several suspension bridges, and damaging a hydroelectric project, carrying its construction equipment off like twigs. Around fifty people along the riverbank in Gorkha district were rescued by the army; two women and three men are missing. Heavy rains in late September had already brought floods and landslides that killed at least twenty‑one. And all this comes downstream of an earlier glacier collapse in August, whose flood killed well over a thousand and left thousands of souls unaccounted for. Nature here is not gently instructing, but violently examining, the commonwealth.

In my Second Treatise of Government, I defined political power as a right of making laws, with penalties of death and lesser penalties, but only for the public good; and this power, I added, is held on trust, to secure people’s property, in the wide sense of their lives, liberties, and estates. The people of Nepal, like any people, are not bound to any man or office because he calls himself ruler, but only so far as it is reasonable to suppose they once consented, or could have consented, to a form of government likely to preserve them better than the uncertainties of the state of nature. Floods and landslides do not suspend that trust; they are among the very hazards for which men quit the state of nature and seek a common authority in the first place.

We must therefore distinguish carefully. First, no government can forbid rain or restrain a mountain by edict; to blame rulers for every mischief of the elements is unreasonable and would make civil society impossible. Secondly, though, when floods recur, when a hydrological station is reported swept away and data lost, when houses are built or permitted along dangerous riverbanks, questions properly arise. Did the authorities know, or ought they to have known, the risks of such building and such works? Did they warn in time? Have they set standing rules, known in advance, as to where men may safely build and how waters must be managed? Or do they govern here by after‑the‑fact indulgence and excuses? Ignorance may excuse a single accident; it cannot excuse a settled neglect.

There is also the matter of prerogative, that is, a power in the executive to act without a rule, or even against the rule, when the public good manifestly requires it and the law has not provided. When a river is rising in hours from two meters to near nine, and a torrent is washing away a highway bridge, no wise man demands that rescuers first search their statute‑books before they move villagers to safety. I wrote in the Second Treatise that such prerogative may be necessary, but it is always revocable, and remains legitimate only so long as the people plainly benefit. The test is not whether officers can move swiftly in an emergency, but whether that swiftness hardens afterward into arbitrary power that answers to no known law and no impartial judge.

This double test—of foresight before disaster, and of revocable prerogative during it—marks the line between government and mere power. If the Nepalese authorities have diligently mapped risks, forbidden or fortified unsafe building along the Budhi Gandaki and its tributaries, maintained instruments, and warned and evacuated people in due time, then some losses remain the sad portion of a world where men are not gods. The trust is kept, though not perfectly performed. But if it should appear, over time, that houses are suffered where any reasonable understanding sees danger, that hydroelectric and road works are pushed without regard to downstream lives, that warnings are late, or that those most exposed are least heard, then the case changes. A long train of abuses may be composed of many small neglects.

I have argued elsewhere that when legislators, or those who wield executive power, invade the property of the people or subject them to arbitrary government, they in truth make war upon their own society, and dissolve the political bond from their side. To apply that stern doctrine to these floods would require more evidence than these brief reports supply. We hear of rescues as well as ruin, of orders to evacuate as well as of missing persons; we are told that experts judge this torrent smaller and slower than the August catastrophe, which may show some learning. Yet we also hear that instruments were lost and data absent just when they were needed. The next questions are not for me but for Nepal’s people: who is accountable for what was known, what was done, and what will be different before the river rises again?

I do not counsel that every disaster become a trumpet for insurrection; that would render stable government impossible, for in this world misfortunes will come, even under the wisest care. But neither do I admit the plea, so often whispered by those in authority, that fear of disorder should bind men forever to an arrangement that manifestly fails to guard their lives and estates. The dissolution of a particular government is not the dissolution of society; a people, bound together by mutual aid in floods and landslides, have already shown they can act in concert. If they should one day judge that the powers set over them have not merely erred, but persistently failed the very trust for which they were set up, they will know that the ultimate appeal, as always, lies not in any office, but in heaven and in their own united reason.