Book Review Pages
The Kathmandu Post Review of Books
Vol. 2, No. 4
Issue Coordinator: Shizu Upadhya
Martin Chautari for
CSRD and The Kathmandu Post
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Essay
Reviews
- Annapurna Fantasy (Mani Dixit)
- People and the Protected Areas: Towards Participatory Conservation in India (Ashish Kothari, Neema Singh, Saloni Suri, eds.)
- Report 1997 (Amnesty International)
- Ethnizität und nationale Integration in Nepal: eine Untersuchung zur Politisierung der ethnischen Gruppen im modernen Nepal (Karl-Heinz Krämer)
Reservation for Nepal's Dalits
Hira Vishwakarma
On 23 May 1997, a meeting was organized by the Feminist Dalit Organization and the Dalit Welfare Organization, two activist NGOs. It was attended by several prominent Dalit leaders, one of whom openly accused Krishna Prasad Bhattarai's cabinet of 1990, which had been empowered to finalise the new Constitution, of a sell-out of Nepali Dalits. The draft Constitution had outlined firm provisions for a 3% representation of the Dalit community in Parliament (similar to the 5% provision eventually set aside for women), and reservation of Government employment through a quota system. That these draft commitments had indeed been made was later reaffirmed by the Chairman of the Constitution Drafting Commission and former Chief Justice, Bishwanath Upadhyaya, at an informal discussion with Dalit leaders at his residence in June 1995.
While the 1990 Constitution was being drafted, the Janata Dal Government in India under VP Singh had recently approved the Mandal Commission Report, promising reservation of 27 % of Government jobs to members of Dalit and backward communities. During the resulting (high caste) student agitations in Hyderabad and other North Indian cities in protest of the Government's ruling, several students committed suicide through self-immolation. These incidents were highlighted by Nepal Television and received wide coverage in the local print media. The events in India were also used to justify the ruling against inclusion of provisions for Dalit reservation in the final version of the Constitution, by the members of a specially constituted committee of Ministers, including Jhalanath Khanal, Nilamber Acharya, Achyut Raj Regmi and Sahana Pradhan. This rejected opportunity represents the sell-out of Nepal's Dalits by the Nepali state.
Arguments put forward by the members of higher castes against reservation, based on the supposedly negative reservation experiences of India, are not taking into account the entire picture. It is as a result of this same reservation policy, which originated under British rule, that India boasts a recently nominated Dalit President, KR Narayanan. The reservation policy has, further, transformed India's backward communities into some of the politically best represented backward communities in the world. The argument that reservation invariably promotes communalism is a vague one since definitions of what constitutes a communal movement are value-laden, and will differ from caste to caste.
Nepal endorsed and ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination on 1 March 1971. According to Article 1, Clause 4 of the Convention, "special measures taken for the sole purpose of securing adequate advancement of certain racial or ethnic groups or individuals requiring such protection as may be necessary in order to ensure such groups or individuals equal enjoyment or exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms shall not be deemed racial discrimination, provided, however, that such measures do not as a consequence lead to the maintenance of separate rights of different racial groups, and that they shall not be continued after the objectives for which they were taken have been achieved."
Nepal has been implementing "special measures" of this kind since the Panchayat era. However, contrary to the intentions of the above cited clause, individuals not in need of such protection, have been deriving "equal enjoyment" of designated privileges. Under the current education quota system, students from 18 districts that have been declared "remote", have access to scholarships. This system has been marked by malfunction and misuse, since its implementation has been weakly monitored. Moreover, the quota system does not allow for any priority treatment for students of low-caste.
The Dalits of Nepal constitute approximately 20 % of the country's population (the 1991 census figure of 15.57 % has been proven to be inaccurate). The civil code of 1853, the Muluki Ain, relegated Dalits to the lowest rungs of the caste hierarchy as so-called "untouchables" until 1963, when the code was officially abolished. Examples of its rulings included imprisonment of Dalits on coming into physical contact with members of higher castes, and severe punishment for inter-caste marriages. This kind of state-led prosecution against Dalits continued for over a century.
While history has marginalized them socially, economically and culturally, Dalits today continue to be isolated from the mainstream of the country, as the following examples reveal. Dalit representation in Parliament is currently restricted to 3 MPs. During the Panchayat regime, late Hira Lal Vishwakarma served as Minister of State for a number of years - under multiparty democracy, there is not a single Dalit Minister. To date, there is no Dalit representation at the higher levels of the bureaucracy. In education, there are a few Dalit lecturers but no professors. There are currently only two Dalit medical doctors and 15 Dalit engineers in all of Nepal.
7 years into democracy, in the fight for which 9 Dalits attained matyrdom (including Chandra Bahadur Pariyar from Kaski and Rekha Biswokarma from Butwal), state-regulated discrimination against Dalits continues in the Royal Army: Dalits are still denied recruitment opportunities as officers, being only eligible for minor, occupational army-based employment. Dalits, who because of their work as blacksmiths, cobblers and tailors, have historically formed the backbone of the economy, are today among the poorest people of Nepal (an unpublished working paper by Chakraman Viswakarma states that more than 80 % of the Dalit population presently resides in absolute poverty).
In 1992, Man Bahadur Viswakarma filed a petition against the Council of Ministers to protest against the passing of a parliamentary bill preventing Dalits from entering Hindu temples. More recently, the Vice-Chancellor of Mahendra Sanskrit University has presented a projected university budget of 68 million Rupees (from the Nepali taxpayers' pocket) to finance the studies of a mere 1200 students, at a university that continues to deny admission to Dalit students. Since both these rulings come on democratic soil, it is surely high time that we assess state commitment to the functionings of our democracy, which favours all on paper, yet which so far has very blatantly favoured only a segment of the population, namely, the members of higher castes. It is time to mobilize the parliamentarians and political party leaders around the Dalit Welfare Bill which makes adequate reservation provisions. In this assertion of their rights, Dalit activists, themselves somewhat unsystematic and divided in their cause so far, have nothing to lose.
(H. Vishwakarma is a Dalit activist)
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Annapurna Fantasy
Author: Mani Dixit
Publisher: Educational Enterprises, Kathmandu, 1997
Price: Rs. 175
A Fantastic Tale of the Real World
Ani Rudra Silwal
The Gang of Four, Dasaa Prakatam, Daastrias, Teen Ghante and the Fourth Devil, are out to besiege the land of Shangri-la by transmitting harmful rays through TV via a satellite disc that they have installed atop Mt. Everest. To save Shangri-la from devastation, Dolma and Nima, sister and brother, leave home armed with the magic potion given to them by the High Lama of Fingboche, to dismantle the satellite disc and destroy the four devils. In the end, Dolma and Nima succeed to their mission.
Thus goes the story of Annapurna Fantasy, an imaginary tale by Mani Dixit "for all those young at heart", as he so claims. Written in the tradition of Gulliver's Travels, this is a parody of the social and political ills pervading present-day Nepal, depicted in the story as Shangri-la. Dixit weaves his tale around girl-trafficking and the Bhutanese refugee problem, the mushrooming dollar-wallah NGOs and dhukuti karyakrams (although these are not so common nowadays). Much of his satire is directed at the ways of contemporary Nepali politics: "Mornings at A's place, afternoons at B's and evenings to be spent with C is what is the bottom line of all this," and "But should not one look to the well-being of one's own near and dear ones?"
In Annapurna Fantasy, Dixit cleverly brings together science and religion, connecting seeming unconnectables such as generic cloning and UFOs with Udan Khatola (the same old Pushpak Biman that Rawan used to hijack Sita in ancient times), and DNA hom with astras. The new words he creates, such as khukrang (a khukri that acts like a boomerang) and vitamrit (a cocktail of five vitamins) are also interesting. The fantasy resembles traditional Hindu legends of gods uniting to vanquish the demons that threaten their existence, when Dolma and Nima gang up with Bahadur, Ali Mohammed and Sandhai Rong, with the help of Swami Samundra, to win over the Gang of Four, thus releasing Shangri-la from the Gang's dangerous clutches.
The story's text is easy to follow (though it could have been proof-read a lot better) and is interspersed with plenty of Nepali terms such as marhanne khukri, banmar, dharmaputra, chamcha, netas, which is enjoyable for those familiar with the Nepali language. To its discredit, the story sometimes tends to drag on and on. Also, although it seems to be targeted particularly at high-school students, it is unlikely that they will be able to fully grasp the intention of the story's satire, some of which I too found difficult to decipher. Overall, however, I would recommend this book to friends of mine who enjoy flights of fantasy, from time to time.
(A.R. Silwal, a college student, is himself young at heart.)
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People and the Protected Areas: Towards Participatory Conservation in India
Editors: Ashish Kothari, Neena Singh and Saloni Suri
Publisher: Sage Publications, Delhi
Conservation: A Contested Field
Anil Bhattarai
The Indian conservation movement gathered momentum after the Wildlife (Protection) Act was passed in 1972. 521 national parks and sanctuaries have since been constituted, equivalent to 4.5% of Indian territory. The Act has helped halt the process of ecological destruction, which took off in India with colonization and continued after Independence in 1947. The protected areas have conserved diverse ecosystems, species and wildlife habitats, which may otherwise have disappeared in India's drive for modernization and development. However, protected areas have also resulted in conflict between local communities and state conservation authorities. Since the designation of an area as "protected" transfers the resource management rights of local communities to state bureaucracy, community members are deprived of their rights to meet subsistence requirements.
A workshop on Exploring the Possibilities of Joint Management of Protected Areas was organized at the Indian Institute of Public Administration, New Delhi, in September 1994. This provided a forum for activists, forest officials, scholars and wildlife experts to discuss issues surrounding participatory conservation. People and Protected Areas complies revised versions of sixteen papers presented at the workshop. The contributors explore legal, policy and institutional frameworks to assess the opportunities for people's participation in conservation practices currently being implemented in the protected areas. Based on the experiences of joint forest management (JFM) in India (G.Raju's paper in this book) and joint management of protected areas in some other countries, some contributions also put forward proposals for joint management of several of India's national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
The papers present diverse and sometimes contradictory perspectives on the solutions to people-parks conflicts. While conservation official S.C.Dey believes that population growth and local community encroachment pose the main threats to the protected areas, environmental activists argue for the restoration of local communities' rights to natural resource management. All papers, however, recognize the complexities of participatory conservation, and the difficulties involved in its realization. This is in itself a significant development, given that the official conservation line in India had hitherto unilaterally assigned the responsibility for wildlife degradation and loss of bio-diversity to local communities.
Ashish Kothari, one of the workshop convenors and book editors, argues in his introductory paper that the problem does not lie with conservation as such, rather, it has been the alienation of local people from their resource bases in the name of conservation that has resulted in conflict. In the past, he says, most local communities were good conservationists. Today, the main impetus for natural resource exploitation, including from protected areas, comes from the urban-industrial complex which is flourishing in an age of free trade and economic liberalization. Kothari argues that the only way to successfully conserve India's ecosystem now is by involving local communities. He recognizes, however, that this requires nothing short of a total change in the attitudes of official conservationists towards local people. Moreover, for the three million Indians residing within the protected areas, the issue is, in fact, not only that of sharing locally derived benefits, as some of the papers argue, but also of securing rights to ancestral land and livelihood opportunities.
This effort at exploring the possibilities of involving people in the management of India's protected areas is a good beginning. It is a pity that the book does not include the viewpoints of local people. Not one of the papers is authored by a protected area dependent. A further weakness is that most papers fail to explain which forces are prioritizing conservation in India, and why, and who will bear the costs involved. Still, the book makes for good reading for those involved in or concerned with people-parks issues.
As almost one-tenth of Nepal's land-mass is officially protected area, it can draw significant lessons from India's experiences. The conflicts revolve around the same issues, and Nepali conservation practices are as non-participatory as they are in India. Nepal should learn from its successful experiences of community forestry management and allow local communities to participate in conservation programmes, which are so far under the control of armed guards and an alien state bureaucracy.
(A.Bhattarai writes for the journal Bikas)
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Report 1997
Author: Amnesty International
Publisher: AI Publications, London,1997
Looking the Right Way
Chris Murgatroyd
"Don't look the other way." These are the words with which Amnesty International began a fundraising advertisement in a recent edition of the British satirical magazine Private Eye. The appearance of the advert was especially apt, for in amongst its topical parodies Private Eye helps to chronicle the daily abuses of human rights in Britain which might otherwise evade scrutiny.
Many societies do not have a tradition of satire. Some cannot even claim a free press. All too many labour under regimes - like those in China and Burma - are rightly notorious for violently suppressing ant expression of dissent, and resort to torture, mutilation and extrajudicial killing to silence those who are brave enough to speak out.
It is not just governments though, which abuse human rights. Opposition groups sometimes fail to observe even the most basic principles in pursuing their causes, and whilst armed insurgencies (like ETA, the IRA and Maoist groups around the world) provide extreme examples, the members of any political party who are prepared to threaten or assault others to stop them exercising fundamental freedoms are just as responsible for denying human rights.
And it is these individual acts of deliberate brutality which, ultimately, are at the heart of the issue. For until a society accepts that all individuals have a responsibility to respect the rights of others, no individual will be free from the fear that they may be denied their basic freedoms. Education is a vital part of the process of engendering respect, but equally important is the need to face up to the fact that abuses occur.
For the last 36 years Amnesty International has taken a lead in encouraging people to face up to these abuse. Its work draws no distinctions between different sorts of abusers or victims, and as the frontispiece to its 1997 Report makes clear it "does not support or oppose any government or political system. It is concerned solely with "the protection of the human rights involved in each case, regardless of the ideology of the government or opposition forces, or the beliefs of the individual".
Amnesty's Report 1997 (which covers its work during 1996) is rigorous in exposing human rights' abuses around the world, and is as consistent a piece of work as any of its predecessors. To readers hardened by the sensationalism of the popular press, its no-nonsense style (as when describing the massacre of 500 refugees in Zaire and the summary execution of a Priest caught up in the event) can at times seem sureally flat, but it is this integrity which gives Amnesty's voice its authority.
The 1997 Report is in three main sections: an introductory section on Amnesty's work, Country Entries and Appendices. A major essay on refugees in the introductory section succeeds in explaining that whilst the causes of refugee crises may be varied the uniformly isolationist attitudes of (mainly rich, western) governments do much to exacerbate already impossible situations. A subsequent review of activities during 1996 contains discussion of the fundamental role of education in protecting human rights, and includes mention of an initiative in Nepal to make such education a part of the formal curriculum.
Country Entries make up the bulk of the report and the reader is left feeling that no incident, however small, and wherever it occurred, has gone unreported. Indeed, one of the many achievements of the Report is that it so amply illustrates that human rights' abuses are universal: from the apparently orderly states of the European Union, to the chaos of the Great Lakes region of Africa, abuses are identified and exposed with impressive force.
In the context of such an authoritative piece of work, three minor interrelated deficiencies stand out. The first is that the sources of much of the information contained in the report are nowhere cited. A degree of caution in identifying sources is both essential and desirable, but the weight of the matters digested in the Report might be reduced if it were felt that they could not easily be verified.
In the Country Entry for Nepal, for example, the Report says," Many of those arrested in the context of the "people's war" complained of torture, including rape, and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment by police. They particularly complained of falanga (beatings on the soles of the feet) and belana (rolling a weighted bamboo cane over the thighs of the prisoner)". It seems likely that these complaints were made to members of the Amnesty International delegation which visited Sindhuli and Rukum districts in November 1996 but this is nowhere stated. A more direct link between reported incidents and the sources of the information used (with appropriate care taken to respect confidentiality and to ensure that witnesses were not placed in danger) might have been useful.
A related problem concerns Amnesty's description in the Report of its own work in different countries. Cross-referencing to relevant Country Entries allows readers to understand some of what must have happened during the visits listed in the 1997 Report's Appendices but more detail (on what exactly was put to governments and what was said in response, for example) would have been instructive.
A final concern is over the extent to which the Report should have encouraged readers to act. The Report does contain a list of addresses for Amnesty Sections around the world but more could, perhaps, have been done to explain how readers can follow up individual cases with Amnesty and others, how they can request copies of documents mentioned obliquely in the Report, and how they can get involved within their own countries and beyond. With the growth of the Internet - including an Amnesty International website - and global communications generally, the Report might also have done more to discuss (with due caution) the ways in which individuals can make responsible use of transboundary media to highlight human rights' issues.
These are minor matters, though, and should not detract from the overall impact and value of the 1997 Report which, amongst its many other positive features, emphasises that individual acts of inhumanity - by government, opposition groups and others - are at the root of all human rights' abuses. If the Report has one central message, it is that such abuses will continue as long as people are content to look the other way.
(C.Murgatroyd is a freelance legal consultant.)
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Ethnizität und nationale Integration in Nepal: eine Untersuchung zur Politisierung der ethnischen Gruppen im modernen Nepal
Author: Karl-Heinz Krämer
Publisher: Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart,1996.
The Construction of Nations
Shizu Upadhya
90% of the debate surrounding the formulation of the Constitution in 1990 reportedly revolved around the characterization of Nepal as a Hindu state. Representatives from non-Hindu ethnic communities used their recently granted rights to free speech and an uncensored media to persuade the members of the Constitutional Drafting Commission against inclusion of this clause. That it was retained in the final version of the document, might for some have been a foregone conclusion. This notwithstanding, coming together in loose coalitions to challenge the Hindu ideal was one indication of the changing identity, or what Karl-Heinz Kramer terms, politicization of Nepal's ethnicity.
It is when the leaders of ethnic communities challenge state-imposed symbols of nation and begin to look within their history and culture for symbols of unity, around which the community is mobilized, and against which the community represents itself, that ethnic groups become political entities: nationalities, which bargain with the state for increased social, political and economic rights of their nationals. Nepali janajati today are legitimizing their bargaining position by pointing to "a history of subordination, landtheft, slavery..." at the hands of the ruling elite. Foremost in their demands is, in fact, an official rewriting of (currently one-sided) history, for it to testify the high price they have been made to pay in the construction of the Nepali nation.
Kramer's historical approach to the understanding of ethnic politics in present-day Nepal is, therefore, apt. Historical processes of adjustment between regional ethnic systems and the politics of a centralizing state, he argues, need to be examined in order to position ethnic communities within the Nepali nation today. These processes of adjustment between the reality of Nepal's multi-ethnicity, on the one hand, and the centre's need for national integration, on the other, have not been very successful. Top-down Hinduization politics of the nineteenth century followed military unification in 1854, but never resulted in the cultural unification of Hindus with non-Hindus that had been intended. King Mahendra's anti-Indian nationalism may have mobilized the support of the pahadi middle classes for panchayat politics, yet it prevented the desired process of integrated development. Panchayat era state preoccupation with neutralizing the political elite and preventing ethnic influences on politics, in turn, is to blame for the historical neglect of the Nepali janata's economic well-being.
History teaches that nationalism, in Nepal and the world over, triumphs over state-led integration politics based on suppression, exclusion and intolerance. This is because a civil society's culture is more resilient than its laws. This lesson appears to have escaped the makers of the 1990 Constitution: though the Constitution acknowledges for the first time Nepal's multi-ethnic and multi-lingual nature, in article 112, paragraph 2 it denies political organization of any kind along lines of caste, tribe, community or religion. Kramer points to the thus far somewhat selective application of this clause, denying electoral registration to the Mongol National Organization in 1991 and 1994 (Buddhist and labelled "communal"), for instance, while allowing the Nepal Sadbhavana Party (Hindu) to run for office.
As a result of this clause, it follows that the directions of janajati politicization in the immediate future rests on the initiatives of the existing parliamentary parties. It remains to be seen what concessions a system still largely coloured in Hindu values will make regarding the promotion of ethnic languages and rewriting of ethnic history. Kramer indicates the difficulties involved in this particular task, given the dearth of available written sources, and appeals for innovation of the part of historians in accepting alternative forms of evidence, particularly myths and legends. There is no doubt, further, that the evolution of state-nation relations will determine the reach and depth of Nepal's unfolding democracy.
Ethnicity and National Integration in Nepal is the outcome of Karl Heinz Kramer's more than twenty-year immersion in Nepali history, politics and ethnology, up until the end of 1995. Its magnitude and insight is commendable, indicating that serious scholarship on Nepal continues to appear in the German language (this particular volume of the University of Heidelberg, Germany). Though he makes clear his favouring of the post-1990 political strategies of the UML under man Mohan Adhikari, as well as his hopes for the Nepal Janajati Mahasangh, to which he dedicates his work, his imagination of a new Nepali nationalism which takes pride in its multi-ethnicity, its cultures and languages is more visionary than practical, and now needs to be contextualized against five-year plans and annual budgets, parliamentary bills, party manifestoes and Supreme Court petitions, i.e., the nuts and bolts of contemporary governance.
(S.Upadhya is a policy researcher.)
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