Conflict Resolution through Governance Effectiveness in Nepal-II

Bihari Krishna Shrestha

2.2 The Social Structural Faultlines

Orthodox Hinduism has traditionally been the basis of state polity and inter-ethnic relations. As a result, even the casteless Tibeto Burman groups find themselves relating to the rest of the Nepalese populace as part of the fourfold hierarchical caste structure in which they find themselves just above the traditionally untouchable caste groups, now collectively identified as dalit i.e. the oppressed. Besides, the dalit groups themselves are not a homogenous entity. In a district like Bajhang in the western mountains, there are a total of 17different dalit groups, each observing untouchability against the others in a generally contested hierarchical order. However, the common denominator of these artisan castes, a factor that gives them a sense of mutual solidarity articulated by the term dalit, is that in most cases they own very little or no land. They render their caste-specific services (leather products, tailoring, iron implements, etc.) and general labour to the landowning higher caste households as necessary, and mostly live on the seasonal post-harvest payments of grain and other necessities mad3e by the latter to which one or more of the artisan households of various categories are tied in a traditionally perpetuating patron-client relationship.

Until a half century ago, the caste-based stratification, which is at the heart of Hinduism, had been a socially and ethically legitimate ideology and the state enforced it through laws that upheld it. During the largely authoritarian Panchayat regime (1960-90), there were some slow movements towards equality through legislation’s that banned untouchability and removed differential treatment of individuals by the state based on caste status. But the rigidity of the caste system continued to hold its sway. It was only after the constitutional guarantees of the freedom of speech and of organisation following the restoration of multiparty democracy in 1990 that there have been stirrings in the country against the caste system, particularly untouchability, and the inequalities that underlay much of the inter-ethnic relations.

The issue of discrimination against women too has become increasingly strident in the national debate. Primarily due to religious beliefs, women remain a major disadvantaged segment in all caste-ethnic and class categories of the disabilities. Education had been generally forbidden to them until recent decades, thus making them the largest illiterate segment of population (78% adult illiteracy as against 43% for the males in 1991). In work situations involving physical labour, they are paid less wages than men. In the households, they bear the major brunt of both domestic and farm work, and put in many more hours of work than men. In most cases, they do not own assets, are given less food to eat, receive less attention during their more frequent bouts of illness and often suffer harassment mostly in their married life at the hands of their relatives. Their mobility is severely circumscribed, and the household’s decisions involving money and external contacts such as politics, market, migration, and financial dealings exclusively belong to the men’s domain. Much of this results from discriminatory marriage and inheritance laws that themselves have been the manifestations of the lower status that orthodox Hinduism has imposed on them.

2.3 The Economic Faultlines

The two Hindu caste groups, Brahmin and Chhetri, have traditionally dominated the civil and military apparatus of the state and exclusively appropriated the authority to distributed public resources, mostly the agricultural lands, in the form of remuneration and rewards for their service to the state and royal households. This duo is, however, joined in also by the Tibeto-Burman Newar who are indigenous to the agriculturally fertile valley of Kathmandu, presided over the trans-Himalayan trading for centuries, and manned the civil bureaucracy of the state after the place became the capital of the country in late eighteenth century. These three groups together constitute the social, economic and political powerhouse of the Nepalese society. While there are no caste-disaggregated data on land ownership, it would be a safe conclusion that it is this caste-ethnic stratification that underlies the highly skewed distribution of land in Nepal. In 1990, it was reported that the top 5 percent of the people controlled 40 percent of cultivated land, and the bottom 60 percent only 20 percent of it (World Bank, 1990). This caste-based inequality is also reflected in the higher Human Development Indices (HDI) of the three groups. In 1998, the Newar ranked first with 0.457, Brahman second with 0.441 and Chhetri third with 0.348 all of which were higher than the national HDI of 0.325 (NSAC, 1998).

Another major economic faultline has to do with rural urban differences. While 81% of the country’s workforce depend on agriculture, it contributes only around 42 percent to the country’s Gross Domestic product (GDP) indicating its subsistence nature and low productivity. More than 40% of all holdings are under 0.5 ha in size and nearly 70% are under 1 ha. Due to unabated population growth the per capital land availability ahs been steadily shrinking over the decades and stood at 0.15 ha in 1998.

In terms of food security, only about half of the population in the rural areas grow enough to feed themselves all the year round. The World Development Report 2000/2001 reported that in the period between 1992-98 some 57 percent of children under 5 in Nepal were malnourished. The percentage of households consuming less than the recommended levels of food ranged between 47 percent in rural hills, 31 percent in the mountains and 23 percent in rural "Tarai" (World Bank,1994). The Nepal Human Development Report, 1998, observed that "the extent of nutritional deprivation among children is both pervasive and deep and is rooted in long-term inadequacies in food intake"(NSAC, 1998:68).

While the labour force itself is growing at the rate of about 250,000 persons per year, the capacity of the non-agricultural sector to absorb the excess labour in agriculture has been chronically limited. Manufacturing did not employ more than 2 percent of the labour force in 1991, and has been adding only 9,000 jobs a year (World Bank, 1990). And the fact that only about 20% of the jobs are unskilled in the manufacturing sector (World Bank, 1990:63) further constrains the prospect. According to an ILO-SAAT 1997 estimate, only 10% of the increased work force each year find work in the non-agricultural sectors (NSAC, 1998:100). Thus, much of the annual additions to the labour force are constrained to remain in the already overcrowded agricultural sector. According to the National Planning Commission the rate of unemployment stood at 14% in 1997 and the ILO-SAAT estimate of underemployment in the rural areas was 47.5 percent in 1995/96 (NSAC, 1998:102).

Most able-bodied men and women in the rural areas are now desperate, and looking for any option that come their way: migrating to towns, going to India as their fathers and forefathers had done; go to the Middle East or other overseas countries if they have the means for travel, or join the "Maoist" campaign if they meet its recruiting agents. It is this "push" factor that has also sent the village girls, knowingly or unknowingly to be sold to the Indian brothels, or more recently, also to join the Maoist ranks.

These inter-group differences in economic clout is now well on its way to breeding another major faultline with far reaching consequences in terms of further widening the divide between the haves and have-nots. Of the school-going children in the counrty, it is estimated that some 20 percent that belong to the uppermost socio-economic crust of the society attend private schools with better education, and the rest go to government schools (Dixit, Shanta, 2001) where there is hardly any serious teaching and where party politics rule the roost. As thing stand, 24 "educationally disadvantaged" caste/ethnic groups accounting for 45% of the population had an average literacy rate of only 28% in 1997. In the mountains, less than one in four persons and less than one in ten women were literate. The Tarai fared no better; 47% of men and less than 17% of women were literate (CERID, 1997).

2.4 Reinforcing the Faultlines

Despite these glaring differences in social and economic equipment, there is very little of vertical upward mobility for most disadvantaged people in the country. Excepting a few success stories here and there, the distribution of resources and opportunities have continued to follow the traditional lines which have historically favoured the high and mighty in the socio-economic structure of society. Thus, as in the past, Nepal largely remains a closed society with orthodox Hinduism and its four-fold stratified caste structure continuing to remain the implicit and overarching criterion in the distribution of society’s resources. Despite the restoration of the multiparty system in 1990 and the formal commitment of the policy to democratic ideals of liberty, equality and entitlement to decent human existence, the rules of the people from the three fortunate groups, Chhetri, Brahmin and Newar remain at the helm. In the continued traditional setting of our country, they alone have the social and economic wherewithal to achieve this. The forces at work are mainly ascriptive; there is hardly any significant need for them to be transparent and accountable.

Much of the political anomaly that is plaguing the country derives from the weaknesses built into this traditionally and remains antithetical to the practice of genuine democracy. As a result of the distortions in the distribution of societal resources engineered by these forces, al large proportion of voters in Nepal are poor, illiterate and uninformed. Instead of trying to educate the others politically, as the basis for gaining their support in elections, the candidates find it more expedient to use money directly or indirectly to buy votes. This, in turn, provides most mortals of the Nepali politics, the so-called leaders of the political parties, with a very useful cover to blatantly engage in corruption while in office or out of it. The result is that at present a successful politician in Nepal, in most cases, is necessarily a corrupt person. They preside over the mismanagement of state affairs on purpose. As a result, it took them just a decade of elective democracy to totally corrupt the political and bureaucratic machinery of the state and to alienate the people from anything political. Misuse and misallocation of resources remain widespread; governance has suffered severe setback, and the economy has taking a steady nosedive. The national development plans have been rendered nothing more than a medium term farce, played out every five years. Never before in the half century long history of elective politics in Nepal have politicians and political parties been so very abhorred by the people as at present.

This is, however, not to suggest that people in the villages do not align with the political parties. They do, and do so in large numbers. The reason is that the political parties in the villages are headed by the mutually competing traditional elites. Therefore, aligning with one or more of these elites in the villages is essentially a coping option for the village poor, as a fallback position during crises, maybe a collateral-free loan which normally carries exorbitant rates of interest or a protection against the hostile designs of neighbors from other camps. Remaining visibly neutral is not a luxury available to the village poor.

3. From Faultiness to Battlelines

It is this continued failure of the state that has now lead to the drawing of the battlelines where otherwise the faultiness for conflict only potentially existed. The first such battlelines is being drawn between the collectivity of Tibeto-Burman ethnic groups, now generically known as Janajati or "the ethnic people " , versus the Bahun-Chettri combine who are accused of "conspiring" to appropriate most of the nation’s resources including the job opportunities in the government. Their battle cry now includes demands for regional autonomy based on ethnicity (Nepal Janajati Mahasangh Parisad, 1997), and reservation in educational institutions, government service and political appointments.

Similarly, the so-called untouchable groups, now generically referred to as dalit or "oppressed", too have made a common cause of their state acute poverty. Their deprivation is even more aggravated by the limitations that their "untouchable" status impose on them in their search for coping options. Stories abound that people would not but milk from a dalit with the result that he is unable to recoup his investment in the purchase of the buffalo. Given such shared sense of acute deprivation, the occupational caste groups have organized themselves into several Dalit organizations which have now been working as pressure groups for an end to un-touchability and for a more proactive action for equality of status and of access to political and economic opportunities through reservations in government jobs and educational opportunities has devoted in the Ninth Plan of the country (1997-2002), and has created separate development bodies to look after their issues namely , National Janajati Development Committee and National Dalit tatha Upekchit Development Committee in 1997. But, given the inefficiencies and distortions to which government decision-making is prone, these measure seemingly intended only to placate the increasingly strident outbursts of the Dalit and Janajati leaders, have done little to effectively address the grievances of the people whom the latter are trying to represent. In the meantime, these continuing deprivations have increasingly been used as a "combustible material for class, ethnic, human rights, and civil society radicalism nationwide often resorting to anti-state discourse.

3.1 The Maoist Insurrection

Six years after the 1990 restoration of the multi-party system in the country, the Communist Party of Nepal(Maoist) decided, in 1996, to initiate an armed struggle through terrorist activities. Early on, they had laid out a 41 point agenda that mostly dealt with the issues of general development, welfare and distributive justice. But the list also included such extreme demands as the declaration of Nepal as a republican state, dissolution of government and parliament, and formation of interim government leading to the radical reformulation of the Nepalese polity. In a span of only six years, the movement has been able to establish its stronghold in almost a third of the country, although not in terms of a separate territory they rule over.

While the Maoist leaders are operating with the distinct advantage of a safe haven in India, the fact remains that the movement has been able to spread like wild fire across the country. They are able to find recruits, although often through coercion, from among the unemployed young men and women, particularly from the dalit and Tibeto Burman ethnic groups. For them wearing a battle fatigue, carrying guns, wielding power in the village and drawing a regular salary have been a dream come true. The ease with which the Maoists have been able to spread in so much of the country in such a short time results from the default that the successive governments have been guilty of in the post-1990 period. The security apparatus no longer has access to reliable intelligence from the people who no longer have faith in the ability of the government to defend them against the Maoist excesses.

3.2 Two Earlier Conflicts

Not that there were no violent episodes in the past along the ethnic and distributive faultlines. Immediately, after the inception of democracy in 1951 in the country, many rich Bahun exploiters in eastern Nepal, mainly in the Dhankuta region, were rampaged by ethnic Rais and Limbus for their age-long sins of exploitation, and many of the former had to flee for their lives. Senior police officers were sent to the region to successfully quell the campaign.

Similarly, there was a large scale Hindu-Muslim rioting Rautahat and Bara districts in 1971. A muslim in Rautahat district, with a view to average himself against another Muslim went to a Hindu religious fair nearby and inflamed them by the news that the latter had just killed a cow and buried its skin. An agitated Hindu mob went to the site and in the melee that followed the Muslim was killed. Now. To save organized a large scale rampage against the Muslims in general to show that they were acting on behalf of the government to punish them for their sacrilege of killing a cow in a Hindu state. More fuel was added to the flame when the then CDO, challenged him. The mob leaders used this indiscretion on the part of the administrator to mastermind another rumour that the government allowed them a full week of license to punish the Muslims in whatever way they could. More Hindus joined the rampage be3cause they also benefited materially by looting the belongings of the Muslims. Soon a separate mob was plundering the Muslims in the adjoining district of Bara too. to bring the situation under control, King Mahendra dispatched an army contingent and it took only the first few shorts in the air to bring the whole affair to an instant end. A team of senior officials from the Home Ministry presided over a process of reconciliation for a few days and succeeded in bringing the leaders of the two communities to a tearful mutual embrace. The episode ended leaving no trace of flayed emotions for the future.

Upon hindsight one could argue that the government enjoyed the necessary legitimacy and the basic trust of the people based on which it could successfully attend to the task of quelling those riots and restoring law and order in those areas. The people themselves were not so alienated from the government as at present.

 (Concluded)

Headline | 5 Question  | Editorial | 2nd Impression | International | Past