On 19 February, even while the Congress and UML lawmakers were beating each other up in Parliament, across town at the Russian Cultural Centre three social scientists were charting the course to get the country back from the cliff-edge it is teetering on. Social scientists Dipak Gyawali, Stephen Mikesell and Pratyoush Onta spoke at a programme organised by NT's sister publication Himal Khabarpatrika titled, "How to pull the country back from the brink?" Excerpts:
Nepal is "on the edge," "going over the brink". How do we understand why things have come to such a pass? There's a Hindu concept that describes power as a triad of forces-tamasik (raw physical force like military power), rajasik (the power of social institutions) and satwik (all that matters beyond brawn and bullion, i.e. moral force). Our current malaise comes from failures in all three areas.
The Maoists "Peoples' War" has exposed the contradictions in the way the new dispensation planned to channel the tamasik power of society (Articles 118 and 119 of the Constitution, with their ambiguity about who controls the army). The government cannot use its armed forces and is now in the process of creating a new tamasik force. As Gandhi said, an eye for an eye will only leave the whole world blind. One way is to seriously think about a draft army with conscriptions, such as the Swiss and the Scandinavians have, in which everyone has to serve (and in the process acquire at least saleable vocational skills). We had something similar in the 1970s with the National Development Service. This option is no longer a hypothesis: the Maoists have already started a volunteer army, and when (and if) peace comes, this force will have to be demobilised through absorption into the Nepali army, just as the Mukti Sena of the 1951 movement had to be accommodated by creating the Nepal Police.
The failure in the management of our rajasik forces is seen in the role of unaccounted-for or dark money, which drives multiparty politics. This makes parties loyal not to their voters but to their paymasters. Nepal's economy is essentially informal and in the last few years, remittances from the Gulf and other places have added up to more than the government's revenues. Because of the nature of our comprador bourgeois politics, the government has not bothered with managing this money, let alone taxing it. It has essentially been left to the Maoists to levy taxes. However, with the assassination of Ramesh Dhungel, the Maoists must also realise that the rajasik shakti of dark money can destroy them just as it did the Panchas in the past and does the parties in parliament today.
One way to curb this is by limiting the terms of political office, and making sure office-holders return to their professions once their term is over. Professional, career politicians must be replaced by those who enter politics for public service, with a sense of volunteerism. If this is done, the clamour to "hand over power to the younger generation" becomes a non-issue. Another means to this end is to genuinely devolve power, not only to other government bodies, but also to other forces like the market and voluntary activist groups. It's time to ask if Prithvi Narayan Shah, who unified Nepal with tamasik power, would not have been a greater king if he'd managed to bring the baise and chaubise alliances together in a federation similar to the Swiss model with the use of rajasik force. Prithvi Narayan may have had no other option in his time, but Nepal's future leaders will seriously have to think along these lines to mitigate regional, ethnic and linguistic tensions.
The Hrithik Roshan riots were a wake-up call. In the two days of burning tyres and (un)coordinated violence, there seemed to be no government. Nor was there a leader with the moral spine to stand as a bulwark against the madness. Part of the responsibility is ours: those we elected haven't lived up to our expectations, but isn't it said we get the government we deserve? So while talking about Nepal being on the brink and how to bring it back from there, we need to include ourselves as part of the equation. Our biggest failure has been in the satwik realm with the loss of moral authority. There is no shortcut, and the only way to go is engaging more in issue-based activism. We need to start more Paropakars and throw up more Daya Bir Singh Kansakars. Citizen's groups will have to start boycotting corrupt politicians instead of feting them in public functions. They must be questioned, made accountable to their voters, and if necessary, recalled through "people's power". And when the rift between the speech and the action of political parties becomes glaringly large, someone must challenge them publicly.
Otherwise we will continue to share the blame for our mess.
Stephen Mikesell
Violence in Nepal is seen by many as having started with the Maoist insurrection in 1996. However, I have seen, especially in the countryside, that there is a theme of symbolic or threatened everyday violence underlying the organisation of society itself. This everyday violence breeds an insidious frustration and anger that can be harnessed for various purposes, constructive and destructive. We saw the potential for communal violence in the recent controversy over a statement never made by a movie actor. Seven times more Nepali hill women are abducted to brothels in India every year than people have been killed in the entire Maoist war. This seems to me a great violence.
The People's War is one fact of violence in Nepal, but it's relatively controlled and directed compared to what's being done on a daily basis to the rural population. However, since it is seen as a direct challenge to state institutions and a personal threat to the elite it causes much official unease-enough to mobilise military forces against. The Maoists would say the social cost of guerrilla warfare is much less than letting the growing societal violence go unchallenged. Strategically, state violence plays into their hands by highlighting the violent character of the State and undermining other roles it might play. I was told before the People's War started that because concerned people were unable to expose the real character of parliament by working to bring out its contradictions from within, war was the only choice in the face of growing desperation of the rural population.
Looking from the outside-and I could be affected by the bias of the press-I sense the Maoists strangely combine the strategy of the pre-1949 Chinese anti-colonial struggle-setting up base areas, surrounding and isolating cities-and the highly sectarian post-1967 Cultural Revolution dogma. I've been told "no other alternative works"-other than armed insurgency-but I don't think the Peruvian Shining Path, to which Nepal's Maoists feel some kinship, has been overwhelmingly successful.
Armed struggle legitimises much greater violence in response. I believe struggle must expose violence in society and delegitimise that violence, rather than create conditions that excuse its intensification. I sense the Maoists are so sectarian they don't appreciate the need for complementary initiatives. In Peru, the Shining Path termed all unarmed initiatives by communities to confront oppression as revisionist and attacked them, losing many possible allies. In pre-Revolutionary China, the Red Army's strategy was to build wide alliances, so that their enemy would be confronted by a broad front.
Sectarianism seems to characterise the entire Left, if not all the parties, here, and pits local people against each other. The overarching forces of oppression are the large multinational corporations and banks, many with budgets and control over resources larger than many countries. Nepal's present parliamentary democracy is a product of current corporate strategy, abandoning support for absolute dictators in favour of parliamentary democracies. Parliaments and elections provide an appearance of legitimacy because getting people involved in the fight over parliamentary seats creates a semblance of democratic self-rule. You buy off politicians relatively cheaply once they're elected, as there are no mechanisms to ensure that they remain accountable to their constituents, especially when they are divided and unorganised. The German sociologist Max Weber observed a century ago that elected officials are not representatives of the people but "their chosen masters". These "masters" in their turn are beholden to the sponsors of their parties, since it's the party that got them their positions. Every party will have its Lauda, and changing parties won't solve anything.
There are examples of common people frustrated with political parties creating new alternative parties democratically controlled from the bottom. For example, the Labour Party in Brazil developed out of years of community organising under the military regime in power from 1964 to the mid-1980s. Urban neighbourhoods in cities all across Brazil created neighbourhood committees, which in turn elected representatives to popular councils. Council members had to continue working in their local committees, ensuring against the development of a political elite. And committee and council members were subject to recall if their neighbourhood was dissatisfied with their work. When civilian rule were re-instituted in the 1980s, this organisation of committees and councils formed a Labour Party to contest in official elections. The Party has gained control of over 30 municipalities, including Rio de Janeiro. Most importantly, the councils continue to have recall power over their representatives even when they're elected to government office, and policies and decisions are made according to the wishes of the constituent councils.
That could be the roadmap for a future, truly democratic Nepal.
Pratyosh Onta
The failure of the political leadership and our own inability to make them accountable has created a vacuum that has been taken up by those who believe that only with force can change be brought about. That the Maoists could occupy the space that was left free by political institutions has showed us two or three things. One is that the Maoists have shown that besides the two power centres in Nepal, Narayanhity Darbar and Singha Darbar, there can also be a Darbar in Rolpa. Two, they showed that they did not need a huge mass of people to hijack the national agenda. And three, assuming there is no foreign resource involved in the Maoist movement, they have shown that resources within the country can be mobilised to meet their goals. No matter how we view the Maoists, these three lessons will remain with use even after the end of the Maoist movement.
For now, despite the government's stated position that it is open to talks, there is reason to question whether it is serious about finding a solution. Some time ago, there was the Deuba-Girija charade over talks with the Maoists. Then there were the discussions initiated by Padma Ratna Tuladhar but that went nowhere. Since then the government has not declared the channel through which talks can take place. We may have reason to believe that in the way the budget to contain the Maoists has increased (to over Rs 7billion now), and with no accountability for the way the money is spent, the government is dragging its foot on the issue.
There is the question of using the army against the Maoists, although the past one year has been devoted to discussions on who controls the Nepali Army, the king or the prime minister. As confusion reigned it provided the palace with an opportunity to dwarf the leaders of political parties. That may have helped the image of the palace in the short run, but I fail to understand how the palace stands to benefit ultimately. The attack on the chief justice, and we need not debate whether it was intentional or not, shows that we can expect more of these attacks in future. And it is only a matter of time before the armed police and/or the army are deployed. Once that happens, there will be restrictions on some of the fundamental rights we were guaranteed by the constitution. In many parts of the country, those rights may be totally withdrawn. We may be able to live with that, but experience shows that when formal forces are sent to tackle guerrilla forces, civilian casualties increase. That again shows we are in for a long innings of violence.
There is another scenario developing. Anyone with even the slightest knowledge of Nepal's communist movement can be quite certain that when the Maoists become more powerful than they are today, there will be a formal or informal split among them. That would mean that regional camps will use the weapons they have accumulated against themselves. There will be a lot of casualties in crossfire and there is no knowing who will be caught in it. The other danger is that if people begin to believe that no one listens when you talk in a civilised way and need to resort to violence, to settle old feudal scores, there could be use of more sophisticated weapons and again an increase in violence. And the source of the violence may not necessarily be the Maoists.
All of us, those in the media and the analysts, are partly to blame for the pass we are in. We did not question political chicanery while it went on since we were concerned about making our own arrangements. And now when the country has reached to this stage, we want solutions fast. That, I think, is because we all have an authoritarian streak in us that has us believe in some benevolent dictator (and all of us privately believe that we ourselves are best suited for that job), even though it is not articulated in public. Self-reflection of this sort alone cannot save us. We need self-reflection without being stooges of the forces that have brought us so far. By not being stooges, I mean, for instance, people who can point out what the Maoists have done right, but at the same time also say where they have gone wrong.
We have a lot of seminars, but we have not had a dialogue so far. It is always the same kind of people talking, and the small voices always get lost. We have to find a way to begin a dialogue. We have to put our efforts into building institutions that can be useful in the long run and that can be done by building institutions, and increasing their credibility and of individuals associated, by making them transparent in their work. This applies to all the sectors-from literature and the arts to NGOs. Instead of running small fiefdoms, we can help regenerate some hope, by working along those lines.
