The Unresolved National (Jatiya) Question

By Mahendra Lawoti

Multiculturalism in the west primarily deals with identity issues. Identity search among minorities has come in the west after a long process of homogenization. Indigenous and immigrants groups’ quest to preserve their identity has spurred the study of politics of difference in democratic theory. In the non-west countries like India, multicultural debate revolves more around inequitable resource distribution among different groups of people or nations (please read ‘nation’ as a group of people with a distinct culture). In India the constitution and the polity have more or less accepted the existence of different nations within a single state. In Nepal, the multicultural debate concerns both the issues, the identity question and just and equitable resource distribution among different groups of people or nations.

Nepalko Jatiya Prashna (Nepal’s National Question) by Govinda Nuepane grapples with both the questions. The book’s thrust is that the national question in Nepal is not resolved yet because the Khas values, beliefs and practices do not equal Nepali culture, as much as the elite section of the ruling nation would like to believe. Neupane has boldly analyzed the problem of domination and inequality, culturally and resources wise, among different groups of people in Nepal. He argues that the marginalization of non-Khas groups is due to a long process of Khaskaran-Hinduization of the society with the active participation and leadership of the state. Such a process enhanced economic positions of the Khas group as well. For instance, the practice of donating land to Bahuns (Birta) and providing land to officials as income source (Jagir) raised the economic status of the Khas group dramatically. On the other hand, the state took away communal lands like the Kipat from indigenous groups like the Rais and the Limbus. Neupane believes that domination of Khas groups in political, social and economic spheres is the main cause of marginalization of other groups.

Historic formation of different nations, disparities in resource allocation, relationships between, and possibilities of sharing and accommodation between the nations are the main themes of the thirteen chapter book. The author divides the nations into five major groups: MangolKirant, Khas, Dalit, Newar and Madhesi. Some may not completely agree with this categorization but it is admirable that the author has attempted to distinguish common history and characteristics among the numerous caste and ethnic groups. It is surprising, however, why he chose to separate Newar, which has identified itself with the Janjatis, and with whom it shares many traits, as a group from the MongolKirant group when he has lumped culturally and religiously distinct groups like the Muslims in the Madhesi category. The dalits may also disagree with their numeric strength portrayed in the book (8.7%), possibly the result of counting the Terai dalits as Madhesis.

The book is strong in its analysis and presentation of inequalities among different nations in important public, private and civic arenas. For anyone looking for data on ethnic and caste representation in leadership positions the book will be a very handy reference. He presents disparities in leadership positions in several areas of governance such as the judiciary, executive, legislature, public administration, politics, industrial and commercial sector, education and so on. For example, there is not a single dalit justice, constitutional body head, minister, high ranking bureaucrat, army officer, police officer, lower house member, national party central member, industrial and economic organizational leader, intellectual association’s leader and so on. Performance of other groups, except the Newars, is also dismal. The surprising fact is that the gap has been widening since 1959, even after restoration of democracy!

Another strength of the book is presentation of the author’s personal experiences. Some of them are very touching, and in many instances these stories may convey the message more forcefully. The experiences are spread over the book in eleven boxes, and can be read separately. The first one describes his revolt against the Khas mentality and Bahun norms. He describes his difficult fight against the inbred belief of untouchability, impurity of women and so on, which facilitates dominance of other groups, as a Bahun. He honestly tells how he felt like throwing up the whole night the first time he had dinner in a Damai’s house, even after he had concluded that untouchability was inhuman.

Neupane believes that inequality among nations can be addressed by adopting federalism, which can foster partnership in governance between nations. He proposes 11 autonomous regions, based on linguistic and nationality presence and geographical viability. His proposal differs from others in its provincial viability concern. It has led him to propose bigger provinces for the nationalities whereas divide the Khasan region.

Apart from the difficult language usage sometimes, the book is quite readable and highly informative. The Marxist mode of analysis has allowed strong historical interpretation as well incisive critique of current inequality among nations. However, it is also the reason for the book’s shortcomings. Quote of Marxist thinkers can lay ground for sound normative reasoning but does not lead us to any successful empirical examples in Marxist societies. Federalism has been successful in ensuring cultural autonomy in countries other than communist countries, including the USSR.

Overall, the author has to be highly commended for producing an informative and relevant book on nationalities. A democratic Nepal has no other options other than to address the rampant inequalities among different nations. If we address the question now, the country can forge ahead with its socio-economic development process. If we delay, then we will have to deal with the issues later on with interest. The interests may be lost time, growth of inter nations mistrust and enmity, explosive phenomenon like separation and so on. In a society where Khas intellectuals either denounce multiculturalism or at the most accept the inequalities but do nothing, it is enlightened people like Neupane who will contribute towards producing a more just and equitable society. The country needs more visionary Bahun intellectuals like Neupane to write and fight for social justice issues. Everyone, especially the Khas intellectuals have to understand that equity and justice will integrate a nation whereas dominance will tear it apart.

(Mahendra Lawoti is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh, USA)

Isn’t Nepal’s Democracy already up to USA Standards?

By Seira Tamang

Much has been said about the sad state of Nepali democracy - the antics of our elected political
goons playing a central role. The need to create accountability, efficiency, transparency in the model of the West has underlined the cries for the reform of the Nepali political system. Yet viewed from another angle, it may be that we are much closer to the Western - or at least American model than we are usually led to believe. Taking various examples from the American political arena as my case-study, I shall attempt to outline some salient points that might indicate Nepal’s parity in certain political activities.

Usually foremost in our analyses of Nepali political parties is the level of bickering and the jostling for power by a motley crew. While in bouts of nationalist pride we may want to claim monopoly of such dysfunctional, social misfits, it appears that Americans too have their share. The Reform Party of the US - a party formed as an alternative to the two existing major parties, the Democratic and the Republican - clearly can make strong claims on the title of disheveled and unruly political parties. The Reform Party at one point included among others: founder of the party millionaire Ross Perot - slightly eccentric savior of mankind by his own definition; the former professional wrestler and now current Governor of Minnesota Jesse "the Body" Ventura; Donald Trump who at one time was pondering adding the White House to the list of his building assets by running for President and Patrick Buchanan who in calculation for the Presidential nomination jumped from the Republican Party to the Reform Party.

If switching allegiance from one party to another for political gains sounds familiar in the Nepali context, so should intra-party feuds - Trump called Buchanan a "Hitler lover" (comments based on Buchanan’s book of which more will be said later); Ventura left the National Reform Party calling it "hopelessly dysfunctional" and an alliance loyal to Perot and Buchanan were instrumental in the overthrow of the Party Chairman in February of this year.

While much has said about the verbal gaffes of our elderly statesmen, one can say at least state that age was a mitigating factor. Consider in turn relatively youthful Governor Jesse Ventura’s statements in an interview with Playboy magazine (in itself worthy of a separate essay of dissection) that organized religion was a "sham and crutch for weak-minded people who need strength in numbers." Or Trump’s statement ‘to be blunt, people would vote for me. Maybe because I’m so good looking’ - intellectual depth personified. Consider also the social gaffe of Republican Presidential hopeful George W. Bush and his official visit to the Bob Jones University which at that time banned inter-racial dating - a ban lifted only on March 4, 2000 after the issue raised a national outcry following Bush’s visit. And consider Buchanan’s book which egged Trump so, "A Republic: Not an Empire", in which he argues among other things that the US should have concluded a separate peace with Hitler.

Lest any accuse me of partisan politics, I also include here a recent quote from a University of Texas journalism professor who is a close advisor to Republican Presidential candidate George W. Bush: "..I would vote for a woman for the presidency in some situations, but again, there’s a certain shame attached. Why don’t you have a man who is able to step forward?" (The latter almost compels me to beg USAID to take their gender empowerment funds and strategies back to the US; we’re willing to wait if it means enabling someone who may become the leader of arguably the most powerful nation on the earth, access to information that is not based on Neanderthal ethics.)

If the above examples lead us to bemoan the fact that our attempt to be number 1 at least in governmental incompetence, moral dysfunction, intellectually vacuity and political personality disorders appears to be thwarted, we may want to turn our attention to these political and social issues from another angle.

Foremostly is the very simple fact that it is quite clear that our political plights are not unique. For many, especially following the Clinton-Monica Lewinsky debacle and all the sordid anatomical and other details which polluted our information channels, the fact that other countries have their own political problems is not a revelation. However, what I want to note is the manner in which these political problems are posed and/or situated. For example, it would be difficult to find serious political analyzes that state that Ventura was elected Governor because America has a culture of wrestling. Nor would people directly connect Bush’s visit to the Bob Jones University to America’s history of slavery and propagate the theory that the move stemmed from latent desire in American culture for the days of outright racial structures of discrimination. While acknowledging the existence of racism in American society, they would be more likely to state that Bush opted for an ill-conceived and poorly calculated politically motivated strategy which obviously was meant to appeal to the more conservative of voters. Yet in portrayals of Nepali politicians’ maneuvers, accounts of "caste-ism", chakari or Nepal’s culture of "fatalism" provide the broad cultural traits that render complete all explanations. In other words, more often than not, it is a historical "cultural" explanations that are provided for what clearly are political problems.

Comparative analyses are not meant to render irrelevant specific socio-historic and cultural peculiarities. What they do enable is a de-emphasis on the "unique" and the "exotic" thereby allowing potentially more profitable avenues of inquiry into the issues of, in this case, political party systems and democracy, derived from the experiences of others. Seeing political problems in Nepal as political problems renders Nepal’s experience no less or no more strange, difficult and potentially changeable as that of any other country.

(S. Tamang is a student of International Relations)

At Home in Words

By Pramod Mishra

I have just finished reading Edward Said’s memoir "Out of Place" and am moved by the story of displacement Said depicts about the Palestinians through his testimony. Through hearsay I knew about Said’s born-with-a-silver-spoon childhood in Egypt, his Arab-Christian background, and his education in elite schools and universities. I had come to form over the past years an understanding of the tremendous transformation his scholarship has brought about, since the publication of "Orientalism" in 1978, in the humanities and the social sciences; but one couldn’t think of all the complexities of identity Said carried in himself: a man really out of place everywhere—family, faith, language, culture, nation, disciplines. Said’s narrative moves through these conventional routes and finds the narrator-protagonist in both physical and psychological conflict with these conventional forms of rootedness.

The book abounds in disjunctures. Said became an American citizen at birth in Jerusalem because his father had fled to the US from Palestine in adolescence and enlisted himself in the American Expeditionary Force to fight in Europe in World War I. Yet his mother could never become a US citizen because she never lived for the required number of years on the US soil. After 1947, when Palestine no longer remained an independent state, everyone but his mother in his family had a passport. She obtained one later, when Said’s father through his connection with the Lebanese ambassador, procured one. Despite being a Palestinian living in Egypt, his mother named him Edward after the Prince of Wales, creating, as Said says, two Edwards torn between two allegiances: one Western and the other Arab; one outer, public, aspiring; the other inner, concealed, without much cultural capital in the logic of high imperialism. But there was a precedence. Said’s father had himself changed his name from Wadie Ibrahim to William Said in order to negotiate the East-West contact zone.

Said grew up amidst the luxuries of maids, tutors, British and American private schools, and so in this sheltered environment never developed any political consciousness until he found himself sucked, despite being an academic at Columbia University, into the Palestinian-Israeli conflict of 1967. Nehru had a similar childhood, and he, too, found himself embroiled in the Independent struggle after his return from England. But in Nehru’s case, there was a colossal entity called India waiting for him to be discovered; but Said had to struggle for homeland from outside. Yet the book does not cover the political career of Said—his role on the Palestinian council, his political writings, clashes with Zionist zealots, his literary scholarship, numerous friendships with Jewish intellectuals.

For these omissions, Said presents the human side of twentieth century displacement. The book itself originates with Said’s premonition of death when he was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia in 1994 and ends with the same uncertainty about life and identity but, nonetheless, with the assertion of faith in the vocation of the adversarial intellectual and the power of the written word. So the words in the book become an account of an essentially lost or forgotten world of his formative years in the Arab world. But they also record the influences that have shaped one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century. From his father, whose network of stores and supplies called Standard Stationery Company, modeled on the American chain stores, spread all over the Middle East,

Said obtained his formal privileges. But his father ran Said’s life according to the Victorian script he had designed-the program of ideas and influences that would count in the imperialist world.

From his mother, Said got his softer side—love of music, the arts, sensitivity to the details of interpretation. The most crucial influence on Said was that of his mother with whom he always felt attached but whose unpredictable profession and withdrawal of love constantly kept him on tenterhooks. As a result, Said, despite being a good son and writing her every week after separation in adolescence, came to have an ambivalent attitude toward her.

Besides the human drama of a Christian family in the Muslim world caught between East and West, I found myself confronted with a couple of questions while reading the book. One, why is it that some people born in privilege choose to side with the dispossessed and the disempowered? Is it merely an epistemological opening-in vulgar language, the need to publish for tenure and promotion; or, is it something deeper that is the source of solidarity and compassion? Why did Said have to break away from his father’s script, ignore his advice to stick to literature and get involved not only in ground-breaking scholarship to expose the ideologies of orientalism but participate in the Palestinian struggle for homeland?

The other question relates to the emergence of a new configuration that Said has helped bring about. Will the emergence of various local histories be able to forge a macro narrative of subaltern knowledges in order to neutralize the global designs of colonial modernity? What we are witnessing now in the field of critical discourse in the Anglo-American academy, of which Said’s narrative is but a part—is it the beginning of a new Cultural Internationalism, of a critical cosmopolitanism in place of the self-centered, ethnocentric universalism?

In any case, Said’s narrative, with all its aches and pains and glimpses of hope, was a good read, even though Said, by habit and occupation critical and scholarly, is not like the creative writers—able all the time to show the forgotten world rather then tell about it. Said’s book is an important record, a testimonial, but not a masterpiece in the genre like Richard Wright’s "Black Boy" or Maxim Gorky’s three-volume autobiography. Nonetheless, writing "Out of Place" in order to defy death and dispossession has become for Said one way to be at home, and I must say Said has amply succeeded in finding it. The contemporary scholarship that goes as postcolonial bears his indelible imprint, and the Arab-Israeli peace talks, despite their numerous setbacks, find Said both a champion and a critic.

(Pramod Mishra is interested in studying East-West cultural relations)

Unpacking the Enron Saga

By Anil Bhattarai

The Indian state followed a policy of economic liberalization in 1991, and part of that included the opening up of the power sector for private sector investment. Following the signing of a $35 billion contract in 1993 with Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) backed by a guarantee from Maharashtra State Government and a counter guarantee from the Government of India, the Enron Corporation of the USA, with a subsidiary company in India, became the first private corporation to be involved in that sector in India. And the story of its involvement is nothing short of a saga. Abhay Mehta’s book "Power Play" depicts the saga as it unfolded in the past and as it continues to presently unfold.

This saga is about how a big multinational corporation strode through the political and bureaucratic system in India to win one of the largest single contracts awarded to a private party in the world history. The contract, awarded to build and operate a power plant in Maharashtra state with an installed capacity of 2000 plus MW of electricity, is also among the most controversial ones.

In this book, Mehta takes us through the sequence of events surrounding this project: the signing of the contract between the Maharashtra State Electricity Board (MSEB) and Dhabol Power Company—the Indian Subsidiary of Enron; the political, economic, environmental and legal controversies; the political debacle that the then ruling Congress party had to face as the BJP-Shiv Sena alliance won the election of 1995 fighting solely on the issue of possible malfeasance in the project; the unilateral canceling of the contract by the BJP-Sena government; the ‘renegotiation’ after Enron chief Rebecca Mark met the Shiv Sena Supremo Bal Thackery; and the signing of the contract again in 1996.

Using documents that are marked as ‘Secret’ or ‘Confidential’ from various sources of the Indian government, the government of Maharashtra and even from within the Enron corporation, Mehta exposes the astounding discrepancies in the project, and the process through which it came into being. The way the whole project came into being smacks of total secrecy, non-transparency and extraordinary haste. For example, the memorandum of understanding was signed between MSEB and Enron and General Electric Corporation on the fifth day of their setting foot in India. But, " there is no explanation on record or otherwise as to why a decision that involved the largest series of payments in India’s history was taken so quickly," writes Mehta. He also points out that there were extraordinary deviations from the normal practices in such cases the world over— on issues regarding the pricing, on the cost of the project, on the return on equity, on foreign exchange implication of the project, among many other things.

Despite oppositions from various quarters, from political parties and environmentalists to ex-bureaucrats, the project was simply pushed through. Enron chief Rebecca Mark’s letter to the then Chief Minister Mr. Sharad Pawar is particularly revealing as to how politicians were sought to expedite the clearance process. On 26 August 1993, she wrote to him, "The remaining concerns seems to reside with Mr. Beg, Member, Planning for Thermal Projects (the CEA). He continues to hold up project approval based on the question of demand for power in Maharashtra. No one from the Ministry of Power in Delhi has given direction to Mr. Beg to move forward on the issue."

The open disdain that the corporation showed towards Indian law is also no less intriguing. At one time the Government of Maharashtra wrote Enron asking it to provide the break-up of the project costs and the expected return on equity, as was required by the prevailing Indian law. Enron replied, "....we would advise you against auditing project costs and predating return on equity". Despite the fact that there was a legal ceiling of a maximum 16% rate of return on equity, the project provided for 26% on the fifth year and about 52% in the 15th year. Given that the cost of project was actually highly inflated, Mehta speculates, the return effectively turns out to be around a few hundred percent —and guaranteed in dollars—for the 20 year period of the contract.

The saga has not ended. In fact, Mehta says, the show has just begun. Just look at what happened in August 1999. Mehta writes, " the measures that the MSEB has undertaken to absorb the electricity from the Dhabol Power Company border on the criminal. These include not buying between 200 and 250 MW of power from the Tatas at Rs. 1.80/unit and backing off some of its own units at Chandrapur at Rs. 1.20/unit. The direct loss to MSEB on this account amounts to Rs. 460 crore a year."

This book has particular relevance for readers in Nepal in many ways. Of late, the debate as to whether Enron should be involved in the power sector in Nepal or not has been based on a very shallow level of knowledge and information regarding Enron’s actual operation in other parts of the world, as was evident in an article by Mr. Puran P Bista in The Kathmandu Post on 3 March 2000. This book will provide an astounding level of details to enrich that debate. Also, if our politicians find time to go through this book, unlikely of course, this book will provide them with what might be the possible political, economic and legal implications, if a multinational like Enron gets involved in the power sector. For the general public, this book will provide the kind of information that our politicians and bureaucracy would probably rather not have us access to.

(A. Bhattarai is concerned with issues of social justice and environment)