Conflict Resolution through Governance Effectiveness in Nepal

Bihari Krishna Shrestha

1. The Conceptual Framework

It is said, "Society is impossible without conflict. But society is worse than impossible without control of conflict" (Paul Bohannan 1967). While potential or imminent conflicts are many in any society, all well-governed societies provide institutions for restraining or resolving them well before they inflict much damage. Modulating processes work in nearly every society. The resources for societal integration are as varied as those for conflict: force, ideology, everyday practices, institutions, and so forth. A society’s integrative capacities are part of its resources for constituting, reconstituting and ordering itself. (Jayaram and Saberwal, 1996:499).

Karl Marx located the prime cause of social conflict in the skewed production relations between the employer and the employed and the resultant unequal distribution of wealth and resources in the urban industrial capitalist socio-economic formation which has been subsumed under the term, class conflict. The Weberain approach, in turn, addresses the larger societal centext as its frame of reference and has identified differences in wealth, status, and power as the major dimensions of stratification’s and the bedrock of conflict in society.

However, the severity of the consequences of conflict depends on the nature of the society in which it occurs, i.e. whether the societies are "open" or "closed" (Jayaranm N and Saberwal, Satish, 1996:8). In "open societies" the system of stratification is generally fluid and provides as greater scope for social mobility, i.e. movement up and down the hierarchy, and such movements actually do take place. Access to opportunities for the members of the society is not governed by ascriptive forces. In contrast, "closed societies" are characterised by rigid boundaries across various strata, and movement between them is extremely difficult, if not impossible. In other words, where mobility between different strata is possible and built into the processes of the social system, the conflict consequences of the conflict-generating factors are less severe than in closed societies where they are not. The presence or otherwise of machinery for resolving conflicts is crucial to the understanding of conflict in a given social system.

In this context, the nature of the political system plays a critical role in conflict resolution. Democratic societies by their vary nature and ideology accept free expressions of difference and dissent. In such a setting, it is relatively easy to enter into conflicts openly, and there is a greater chance that these would be resolved periodically, and not allowed to accumulate and intensify. Hence conflicts in democratic societies offer only limited scope for abrupt structural changes, such as can attend a revolution, specially in the short run (Jayaranm N and Saberwal, Satish, 1996:10).

Governance effectiveness, thus, is about the effective institutionalization of democratic governance in the country. It is about managing the transition from a "closed society" with traditional ascriptive systems allocating authority and resources to an "open society" which is modern and secular and allows for social mobility between strata without creating stress and strain in the process. Good governance is about building inclusionary and participatory social processes consistent with the basic democratic ideals of equality of and entitlement to opportunities for decent human existence. Under these conditions, all the people irrespective of their caste or creed get to participate effectively in the decision-makings to allocate society’s resources. Such participatory democratic processes possess the built-in safety-valve functions so that intolerable inequalities can be corrected without letting the ensuing stresses and strains to pile up and explode, threatening the very fabric of society.

2. Conflict Faultlines in the Nepalese Social Structure

Managing Nepal should be one of the most daunting of tasks for our political leaders, planners, policy makers or otherwise national thinkers and social workers. Our society represents the coming together of a wide variety of mutually divergent social and economic forces that together have found a mutual accommodation to subsist as a nation, although at considerable pain to its disadvantaged constituents. However, the history of Nepal as a nation state has been one of a long succession of the existing, imminent or potential dissent or conflicts even as the situation for the deprived and disadvantaged steadily worsened. The voicelessness and powerlessness of the poor and the disadvantaged precluded any attempt at facing up to the state and its repressive regimes to force them to address their age-old predicament. So they kept on with their traditional coping options: indebtedness, pauperisation, under-feeding, de-stabilizing the environment through cultivation of marginal lands, and above all, out-migration to the Indian sub-continent. For those at the helm, however, this posed little problem, a fact that is glaringly manifest in the sustained mismanagement of the national economy and continuing failure of our plans and policies during the past half century.

However, with the restoration of multi-party democracy with its attendant guarantee of freedom of speech and organization, among others, silencing the aggrieved with the threat or actual use of force became less and less of a possibility, so, the societal wounds that otherwise remained superficially hidden all these years have now been opened for real. But our post-Janaandolan leaders themselves failed to be inspired by the ideals of the new polity. While the actors at the helm changed, the rest was business as usual. Even as they overwhelmed the voters with populistic rhetoric, they indulged themselves in widely publicised acts of boundless corruption. While individual politicians could be faulted for their acts of omission and commission, a process is now beginning to get under way with the Commission for the Investigation of Abuse of Authority swinging into action against corrupt politicians and bureaucrats, the basic problem in this regard is built into the very socio-economic make-up of our society. Despite our apparently democratic structure and forms, the compulsions for the politicians to be transparent in their dealing and accountable in their behavior and largely absent. The aspirations of the people continue to be disregarded with impunity, even as the politicos regularly come back to them for their votes, invariably with sackfuls of money. In a span of less than a dozen years, Nepal turned into a nation totally disenchanted. The country now finds itself deep in the throes of a Maoist insurrection, and for a large segment of the disadvantaged population, joining the Maoist rebels has emerged as the newest coping option.

2.1 The Faultlines of Conflict: Spatial

The country is comprised of three east-west mutually distinct geographical and cultural belts. The cultural tradition of the sparsely populated mountain region in the north is essentially an extension of the Tibetan civilization and is characterised by the observance of Tibetan Buddhism and comprises various Tibeto Burman ethnic groups such as the Sherpa in the east and Humli Tamang or Byasi in the west.

The southern out-wash belt, the Tarai, too has been traditionally mixed. While the Tarai plains east of Koshi river has traditionally comprised the "home" territories of a large number of indigenous ethnic groups such as Rajbanshi, Dhimal, Koche, Meche, Sattar and Tharu, the region west of it all the way to the western frontier has been inhabited mostly by the Tharu of different clan and language categories. However, these ethnic groups share the region, mainly between Koshi and Karnali rivers, with a cultural area characteristic of the Indo-Gangetic civilization – predominantly Hindu settlements with an elaborate caste system but interspersed also by Muslim communities. The ethnic plurality of the region has been further accentuated in recent decades resulting from the sustained south-bound migration from the hill following the control of malaria in the Tarai.

While the ethnic groups east of Koshi – a region adjoining the West Bengal state of India – speak a Bengali dialect as their mother tongue, three major languages of the Indo-Gangetic plains are spoken in the rest of the Tarai region, maithili in the region west of the river, Bhojpuri in the central Tarai and Avadhi in the west. The Tharus, however, speak their own with mutually distinct dialects across the Tarai. While Hindu was commonly used as the lingua franca of the Tarai until about two decades ago, Nepali language has now largely replaced it.

The cultural landscape of the middle hills, which is the largest of the three geographical belts, is characterised by the co-existence of the Nepali speaking Indo-Aryan Hindu caste groups and the casteless Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups with their own distinct mother tongue. While the hill region caste groups, the region east of it, some three-fourths of hill Nepal, is dotted with various ethnic "homelands" ranging from the Magrat (the Magar region) in the west to the Limbuan (the Limbu region) in the far east. While 61 different casteless ethnic groups representing some 39 percent of the population (1991) are reported to exist in the country, most of them belong to the various regions along these middle hills. Besides, these "homeland" regions are not ethnically exclusive. While the Hindu caste groups, comprised of the high caste Bahun (the hill derivative of the term, Brahmin) and Chhetri and traditionally "untouchable" occupational caste groups of Kami (blacksmith), Sarki (leather worker), and Damai (tailor/musician) are to be found all across the hills, the members of most of these ethnic groups too are found in just about all the districts along this belt east of Karnali, although devoid of their mother tongue capabilities. Endogamy, distinctive kinship structures, and food habits further distinguish the various caste/ethnic groups in the country.

Overall, Nepal is a land of minorities. While only tow groups namely, Brahmin (13%) and Chhetri (17%) numbered more than 10 percent of the total population in 1991, fundamental intra-caste differences exist even among them based on whether they are from the hills or the Tarai. Furthermore, even among the hill Bahun and Chhetri a fairly large number of criteria determine the levels of purity between various sub-groups making commensality and exchange of brides achievable only under extraordinary circumstances. While the Dalit represent a significant 12% of the population, the term is coined and useful more for political and advocacy purposes, because intra-dalit hierarchy and mutual untouchability continue to remain strong.

( Text Courtesy: Conflict Resolution and Governance in Nepal, a NEFAS/FES publication)

(To be Continued)

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