Nepal, Aug. 27 -- While comparing the omnipotent ruler of imperial France with the "Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States," the early 19th-century French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville observed: "The French, under the old monarchy, held as a given that the king could do no wrong." Americans, Tocqueville concluded, held the same opinion about the will of the majority-it could do no wrong.

If majoritarianism produces a government as powerful as an omnipotent sovereign, it stands to reason that it doesn't take long for an ethnonational democracy to turn into a "tyranny of the majority". The experience of Nepal has been no different after 2015, when a controversial constitution was steamrolled upon protesting Madheshis. ...