Nepal, Jan. 27 -- The country's democracy is a mirror, reflecting the dilemma of democratic deepening in unequal societies The slow, arduous labour of democracy rarely announces itself with the fanfare of constitutional moments. It proceeds instead through committee rooms, ward meetings, half-attended assemblies, the awkward choreography of speech and silence, and the everyday compromises between aspiration and constraint.

The book Nepal's Federalism and the Pursuit of Deliberative Democracy attends precisely to this unglamorous terrain. In it, Vishnu Kumari Tandon does not ask whether democracy is desirable - an already settled question - but whether it can be made to think, to listen, and to endure under conditions of inequality, hist...