On Neighbourly Ignorance

By Pratyoush Onta

In recent weeks I have become semi-addicted to Kaun   Banega Crorepati. Do you also watch this show  regularly? If so, I am sure you will remember that superstar host Amitabh Bachchan asked a certain Ordetta Mendoza the following question on 9 October 2000: The parliament of which country is called the Rashtriya Panchayat? The answer options included Bhutan and Nepal and the contestant from Chennai, who was not 100 percent sure, guessed it was Nepal. She won rupees for that answer and ultimately went home with IRs 3,20,000. However, I was left wondering how this popular show in Indian television could have made such a mistake. You would think that the producers would at least know that Rashtriyat Panchayat ceased to exist in Nepal more than 10 years ago!

Ignorance about Nepal among educated Indians – the most telling evidence of which we have been seeing in the popular media over the past year – requires a detailed treatment. However, a brief explanation would include these points. Indian scholarship on Nepal has always been marginal to the main concerns of International and Area Studies in India. In recent years, even the quality of this marginal attention has gotten worse as the research ambiance has either stagnated or deteriorated for reasons discussed by various contributors to the two books under review. Ossified faculty expertise, intake of students who are more interested in preparing for the Civil Service Examinations while utilizing university hostel and library facilities, lack of proper academic jobs for graduates and the dwindling financial support for social science teaching and research in India are some of the underlying causes. Very few Indian researchers have spent quality time in Nepal partly because there is no support available within the university network for longer field stays. The ones who have come for short trips do not read Nepali (there might be an exception or two) as language competence does not get adequate stress in the training of an area expert. Given this mediocre quality of scholarship, academics have not been able to provide good input to Indian reporters about Nepal. If you add to this situation the Indian media’s complicity in disseminating South Block’s interpretations of Nepal, you end up with India Today equating madarsas in the Nepal Tarai with ISI activity and KBC thinking Rashtriya Panchayat is still alive!

Contributors to Area Studies Programmes in Indian Universities edited by Ankush B. Sawant (Professor of African Studies, University of Bombay) and International and Area Studies in India edited by M.S. Rajan (emeritus professor at JNU) help us come to a broader understanding of this ignorance. They provide us details regarding the history of International and Area Studies in India. They also describe the present not-so-optimistic scenario of the same from the point of view of practitioners and various theoretical concerns. The former is the result of a symposium held in 1996 while the latter is the result of a call by Rajan to his colleagues at large to reflect on the state of the subject in India. The first volume begins with an essay by Rajan (also included in the second book) in which he describes Indian expertise on area studies as "quite inadequate" and goes on to give his reasons for reaching that conclusion. While there has been a proliferation of area studies centers since the first program was started in mid-fifties (there are more than 20 such entities in India now), lack of priority on the part of the government, University Grants Commission (UGC) and the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) have stunted the quality of work they produce. The tension between area studies programs and traditional disciplines, lack of proper library resources and funding for fieldworks are some of the further reasons identified for the current state of affairs. In another essay, A P Rana regrets the fact that area studies in India is mostly a-theoretical relational studies between states and calls for greater theorization based on the traditional disciplines. Anirudha Gupta (a familiar name in Nepal) puts the blame on UGC for the current malaise and contends that area studies cannot develop in the universities! B Vivekanandan stresses that a mature India "needs more area specialists with micro-level understanding of other nations and their policies." A R Momin underlines that area studies programs in India suffer from "an inexplicable and unfortunate indifference towards anthropology and sociology." D N Patkar calls for the inclusion of experts from the sciences and technical fields in area studies programmes.

Rajan’s several essays in the second book are very useful for those seeking information about the history of this kind of study in India. Also interesting are analyses offered by Kanti Bajpai and J N Dixit, among others. Bajpai accounts for the thematic course of International Studies in India and calls for bringing theory back to such studies. Others make a plea for changes in the current state of affairs. However, it is unlikely to happen. In particular, it is likely that the conditions for the production of knowledge on South Asia in India will become worse in the years ahead. Given India’s IT romance with the US, we should not be surprised if subsequent Area Studies efforts in India are deflected heavily towards American Studies with possible financial help provided by the Indian Diaspora. After all, non-academic members of this ‘successful minority in the US’ have started arriving in conferences such as the one organized by the ICSSR in New Delhi earlier this month with nondescript messages of congratulations from various office holders such as the mayor of Chicago!

Amitabh Bachchan, in the meantime, might have to ‘phone a friend’ located in the other countries of the region if he wants to be confident about the questions he is asking about India’s neighbours!

(P.Onta is doing research on area studies.)

More on Poverty

By Shizu Upadhya

Not all is seen when observed from a distance; still less is heard. Being told a specified percentage of the population is "poor" reveals little as to who these people are and how they are surviving. Moving closer might help, but it is not until they are engaged in active discussion through our prodding, that we can even begin to understand their circumstances, what being poor might, in fact, mean. For some, it will be a livelihood of stone-crushing; for others, it’s about consuming red soil at regular intervals to keep the intestine moist. It could mean being ostracized to live on the outskirts of a community or being compelled to sell one’s body to strangers, several times a day. Searching for Poor People’s Voices is one such attempt at engaging with poor people to come to a better understanding of poverty.

The NGO Federation of Nepal came together with the Nepal Participatory Action Network (NEPAN) very rapidly for a month to carry out this research in a total of 16 rural and urban sites. The time pressure was because this was to input into the 20-country study commissioned by the World Bank for the World Development Report 2000/01. Site selection was based on availability of collaborating NGOs working in the particular locations to "ensure that the findings go back". On both counts, things did not work out as planned. The research report didn’t make it in time to be included in the WDR, and its translated version has yet to reach the communities concerned. But all is not lost, and those who will devote 2 hours to reading this report will no doubt gain some insights of interest.

Interacting with 480 people defined as poor according to participatory wealth-ranking exercises, apart from ethnic communities also groups of Kamaiya, Dalit and Badi women, the study reveals a total of 19 Khas Nepali terms that describe people’s circumstances. These include nimcharo and dukkha as well as bipanna, nirdhan and kangal and denote not just "a loss of desired qualities" but also "inevitable factors" which prevent improvement of livelihoods, the latter moving beyond physical attributes to feelings of fear and powerlessness in relation to hune khane and janne sunne, cultural discrimination and "the absence of social contacts and networks" that would allow people to ameliorate their deprivation.

Not that livelihoods are unchanged: in their quest for improved availability of food, employment opportunities and land access, poor people are finding various means of coping. Three such mechanisms that emerge are diversification of economic opportunity, reduction of consumption and reliance on mutual assistance networks. People recognize that elements of their poverty can be addressed through external assistance and some non-governmental programmes are cited as cases in point. However, and interestingly, their responses do not call for more radical measures, for example, redistribution of productive assets such as land, because, says the study, people understand the "structural" causes of poverty which will require whole-scale "transformation", not one-off programmes. And issues related to exploitation, domination and justice are viewed as being initiated primarily from within communities.

The study investigates on two specific dimensions of poverty: gender and institutions. It suggests the need to revisit the gender dimension in a future study that takes on more "innovative" means of analysis, since its own findings tend to subsume gender under the broader condition of poverty. These show increased women’s labour as a key aspect of household coping strategies, unaccompanied, however, with any increase in their decision-making input or physical mobility at the community level. On institutions, while those of the informal kind, including faith healers and priests, continue to provide people with some degree of moral support, formal bodies, including local government and even NGOs, are perceived of as being distant, elitist and largely irrelevant to everyday life.

This is an initial attempt at improving poverty understandings on the part of the NGO Federation (as the word "searching" in its title suggests). NEPAN, the study authors, recognize that future attempts that link up more rigorously with current social processes including marketization and people’s resistance to dominance, and methodologically better represent gender and ethnic dimensions of poverty, are required. But there are limits to the transformative potential of, simply, knowing more. For the recent uprising on the part of Nepal’s Kamaiyas, whose plight of bondedness had been well understood for at least a decade, happened in the final instance as a result of credible leadership, a sense of unity and risk-taking readiness come what may. It was not the outcome of any research, participatory or other.

(S.Upadhya is member of the Citizens’ Poverty Watch Forum)

Intrigue and Suspense

By Priya Dixit

Jack Higgins’ The White House Connection is an exciting thriller which moves from the United States
to Britain, as a team of people try to stop Britain’s most wanted terrorist from disrupting the fragile peace process in Northern Ireland. It starts with a prologue in which a woman saves a young girl from being raped. We learn that the woman was planning on killing a Senator who belonged to an extremist group wanting to destroy the peace process. In the first few pages, we also learn that the would-be assassin was Lady Helen Lang, whose son had been murdered by terrorists in Northern Ireland. These terrorists belonged to the extremist group called the Songs of Erin and were headed by Britain’s most wanted terrorist—Jack Barry. This starts off a chain of events which lead to requests by the heads of state of Britain and the United States to their respective secret service people to find and destroy the Sons of Erin.

In the United States, the President calls Blake Johnson and asks him to take care of the problem. In Britain, Brigadier Charles Ferguson and his team of Detective Chief Inspector Hannah Bernstein and an ex-terrorist Sean Dillon get called in to protect the peace process. They realise that someone is killing off the members of the Sons of Erin but do not know who and it’s a race against time to find the killer. Of the two surviving members of the Sons of Erin, one is Jack Barry and another is a traitor within the White House who is only known as "The Connection" but has information that can destroy the peace process. Dillon is the only person who can identify Jack Barry and is one of Barry’s biggest enemies.

Within a few chapters, Dillon and his colleagues also realise that the killer of the Sons of Erin is Lady Helen but are not able to prove it. After a thrilling chase moving to and fro from London to Northern Ireland to Washington DC, Lady Helen discovers the identity of the Connection and discloses it to Dillon and Company before killing him in full view of everyone including the President of the United States.

In the end, after lots of chases, shootings and crossings over the Atlantic, Lady Helen then entices Jack Barry to her estate in Britain and waits to kill him there but Barry also comes prepared to kill her. There is a final showdown where Dillon prevents Lady Helen from killing Barry but then kills him himself. Lady Helen dies happy that her son’s killers are all dead and both the British and the American governments breathe sighs of relief that the peace process can go on.

Overall, this book follows Higgins’ previous one The President’s Daughter in which the daughter of the American President is kidnapped. Familiar faces from previous books include Dillon who used to be a terrorist before being persuaded by the British Special Forces to work for an elite team which handles operations of great political importance. Detective Bernstein is also a regular and balances Dillon’s Irish charm with a practical competence. There is also a Nepali connection since one of Brigadier Ferguson’s workers is Kim, an "ex-Gurkha". As thrillers go, this is a fairly good one and holds the reader’s interest. The language is easy to read and follow and the plot is fast-paced, with the action moving from place to place and from continent to continent. For the chilly nights ahead, this is a good book to read for pleasure and for escapism. The White House Connection is an entertaining read with well-presented characters and plenty of action.

(P. Dixit thrives on fast-paced fiction.)

The Flourishing Business of Slavery

By Mukunda Kattel

A common truism holds that human beings are superior to other creatures. Their ingenuity to think
and their conscience to adopt ‘rights’ and condemn ‘wrongs’ place them above others. Put to test on the dynamics of slavery, this truism, however, turns to a misnomer, a lie. Human beings appear to be the worst of all. Dr. Kevin Bales, a leading expert on contemporary slavery in the world, gives an account of this alternative face of humans in Disposable People. The book builds on the author’s research work in India, Pakistan, Thailand, Mauritania and Brazil.

In legal terms, slavery may be non-existent in all countries, developed as well as least-developed. But it exists everywhere, "in London, New York, Zurich, Los Angeles, and across the world." One of the oldest of social institutions, slavery comes in many forms across societies, and is adapting fluidly to the process of social change. Each time, the enslaved have served their masters and have suffered in return.

The author unveils that none of us are untouched of slavery. My decency, yours too, may have a nexus with slavery. Remember, "slaves in Pakistan may have made the shoes you are wearing and the carpet you stand on. In India they may have sewn the shirt on your back and polished the ring on your finger. They are paid nothing." Such is our humanity that lives off the sleepless labour of those trapped into bondage!

The book is divided into 7 chapters, 2 appendices and a section citing notes to each chapter. The first chapter opens with a heartrending story of Seba, a newly-freed slave, just 22. Born in Mali, she was brought to Paris as a little girl by a woman known to her family, in promise of education and training in French. In return, she was to take care of her children. Instead, Seba was made a household slave, her life immersed in brutality of the kind depicted in the following quote: "…they striped me naked, tied my hands behind my back, and began to whip…I was bleeding a lot and screaming, but they continued to beat me. Then she rubbed chilli pepper into my wounds and stuck it in my vagina." Seba is not the only victim; there are a reported 3,000 household slaves in Paris, the city of romance.

Modern slavery, it is said, is even more heinous now than in the past. Then, the owner had legal responsibility for maintaining the slave. Today, ownership is illegal, but the business operates from underground. "There is," therefore, "no reason to protect slaves from disease or injury—medicine costs money, and it is cheaper to let them die." Where social order has broken down, slavery has emerged. The police themselves become partners in crime, says this chapter, as has been the case in Thailand, India, Pakistan and Brazil. Elsewhere, slavery has been linked with religion. The devadashi women of India have for centuries submitted their lives to appease local gods and temple owners. Temples double-up as brothels, and devadishis today are the same as forced prostitutes. In Ghana, girls and young women, virgins, are gifted to local priests as slaves to atone for sins committed by family members. The girls will cook, clean and farm for the priests, and serve them sexually.

The second chapter reveals the lives of bonded prostitutes in Thailand. Village girls are sold by their parents through agents, in some cases police officers, bureaucrats and school teachers, and lured by the promise of good jobs with good pay. Once in the city, they are sold into brothels and prostitution. Siri, aged 15, was sold by her parents a year ago. As she explains, the soreness in her genitals reminds her of the 15 men she had sex with the night before. The horror of life! Thai men of repute—sirs and excellencies—thus satisfy their carnal appetite on the fledgling bodies of 35,000 girls just like Siri; girls who are disposed of by the time they reach their late teens.

Chapter three explores slavery in Mauritania, where slaves make up 40% of the total population, though slavery has been abolished there 3 times already and most recently in 1980. However, the Mauritanian economy and social prestige of the ruling Moors is based on the sweat and toil of its slaves, most of whom are engaged in construction and household work and a few work in shops. The Koran allows masters to sexually utilize their female slaves. And Mauritanian slavery flourishes on the ignorance of the religiously-inclined slaves; to revolt would be to displease the gods.

The fourth chapter takes the reader to Brazil where people are enslaved in charcoal- making camps—the batteria. As labourers are required, people are promised regular work, a good salary, good food, then tricked into slavery. The gatos, the recruiting agents, lure people miles away from their homes and dump them into batteria. Within a short period, the slaves become ill from oven-work day and night. Once ill, it becomes more cost- effective for masters to discard them for fresh workers. People are thus taken up, then disposed of. The charcoal that is produced in this way is consumed by Brazilian businesses and international giants including NestleŽ and Volkswagen, companies that operate from countries where slavery is illegal.

Chapter five and six dwell upon debt bondage in Pakistan and India, which is slavery practiced in brick kilns, agricultural as well as religious institutions. Whole families are tied up as bonded labourers: they are born, marry and die in bondage. We can reflect on the similar case of the Kamaiyas in west Nepal.

The seventh chapter discusses practical issues for slavery research techniques. The appendices provide suggestions on how individuals such as you and I can fight slavery from our respective positions, and international instruments dealing with slavery. These serve as a useful reference.

Bales’ well-researched work is a single volume with a great amount of information. It provides a sociological interpretation of slavery from around the world, exposing the ways in which old rules and relationships of exploitation are being replaced by new ones. It is a must-read book for human rights professionals, academicians and activists in particular. This is despite the fact that the writing seems to have been rushed towards its fifth chapter. Certainly, there remains room for further research on the subject matter. The author himself realizes this, as he withholds allegations implied against a Pakistani activist.

(M. Kattel is Director of INSEC.)

Perspectives on Environmental Management

By Bhushan Tuladhar

Environmental Management - An Indian Perspective is a collection of 15 essays written by prominent Indian experts in the fields of environment, economics and management. Although, as the name suggests, the book looks at the issues through Indian eyes, the wide range of topics covered such as water resource planning, environmental accounting, subsidies, gender and international debates, does give a flavour of current discourses on environmental management. In doing so, the book tries to look at issues from a management perspective rather than the traditional approach of looking at environment from scientific or technical points of view.

Although the papers seem to be a randomly arranged collection of diverse and complex dimensions of environmental management, the Introduction does an excellent job of connecting the different topics into one paper and analyzing them as a whole. It also summarizes each of the papers, thus making it easy for the reader to go from one chapter to another and be selective if necessary.

Overall, most of the papers conclude that equity in resource use and decentralized management are the key elements for effective environmental management. As long as people are not empowered to control the resource base, neither the market economy nor centralized state planning and implementation can achieve sustainable and efficient use of natural resources. Although the volume raises many unanswered questions and exposes many complex issues, it also provides examples of places like Maharastra and Ralegaon Siddhi to present a basis of optimism.

The first paper by Ramachandra Guha traces the historical and social aspects of environmental movement in India and describes three eco-sociological groups: (i) the omnivores – people who have the capacity to draw upon resources from all over, (ii) eco-system people – those who draw upon resources from their vicinity and (iii) ecological refugee – people who have been uprooted and have taken shelter in slums. He stresses the need for creating a more equitable society by enhancing the social power of the ecological refugees and ecosystem people. The nexus between economy, ecology and equity is further elaborated by the next two papers by J. Mohan Rao.

Two papers on water management, which may be of particular interest to Nepali readers, highlight the need for decentralized planning and local efforts. Ramaswamy R. Iyer analyzes the large vs. small dam debate and calls for a shift from water resource development to water resource management. In the next paper, the Pani Panchayats of Mahrashtra, which share some similarities with our own farmer-managed irrigation systems, have been used to demonstrate people’s participation in equitable distribution of water.

In contrast to the views of most of the authors, the paper on forest management by Deepak Sarmah and S. N. Rai stresses the need for a prominent role of the central government in protecting forests. The authors argue that as the real causes of deforestation are population density and poverty, it would be unrealistic to assume that a mere change in management approach will have long-term impacts. Although Sarmah and Rai do mention a need for a management model somewhere in between state-controlled and community managed forestry, they neither provide concrete suggestions nor conduct a through analysis of the social & community forestry program which has a history of over 20 years in India and neighbouring countries like Nepal. In fact, the value of the book would have been greatly enhanced by adding a paper on experiences of community managed forestry in India and neighbouring countries. The editors comment that Sarmah and Rai’s paper shows how the government thinks about environmental management, and note that its job is not to administer but to empower local people.

Poornima Vyasulu’s paper on the Gender Perspective defines concepts of gender and highlights the need for considering gender in environmental projects. Although the paper is a good introduction to gender issues and its relationship to environmental management, its recommendations only mention the use of planning tools such as gender assessment studies, logical framework and SWOT analysis and stops short of incorporating gender in all other aspects of management.

One of my favorite essays is Vinod Vyasulu and Madhav Gadgil’s "Subsidies, Controls and the use of Natural Capital in India," which explains types and impacts of various levels of state intervention and analyses subsidies on fertilizer, power, irrigation and bureaucracy to conclude that most subsidies tend to encourage inefficient and exhaustive use of resources. Given the abysmal levels of poverty in India, the authors recommend decentralized control over resource base and subsidy on outputs rather than inputs.

Overall, the volume will be of interest to academicians, and students of advanced level courses in environmental management. As environmental conditions and management systems in India are in many ways similar to those here in Nepal, Nepali readers will be able to relate to most of the cases presented in the papers. Furthermore, as the book also discusses some of the dimensions of environmental management that have not yet been given serious thought here, it should encourage and assist scholars in exploring issues such as environmental accounting, carrying capacity, gender and impact of global environmental issues. The journal-like appearance and complex theories used in some of the papers may, however, discourage casual readers, beginners and decision- makers. The challenge to Nepali scholars will be to use the Indian experiences provided by this book to bridge the gap between bureaucrats and researchers over here.

(Bhushan Tuladhar is an Environmental Engineer)