From what has been reported in this daily, one can find some faults in the report. It squarely blames 30 percent of the collective minority of Brahmins and Chhetris (BC) for all the historical ills—cultural, social, political and economic—facing women, Dalits, Janajatis, Madhesis and Muslims (the collective majority). It portrays the 30 percent minority as oppressors and the rest as the oppressed, projecting the Brahmins and Chhetris as the biggest stumbling blocks to progressive agenda. Lumping all Brahmins and Chhetris under the rubric of ‘hill elites,’ while those actually responsible for the status quo (if any) were perhaps the few Kathmandu elites who ruled the roost in state polity, it tries to cover-up the sufferings of the Brahmins and Chhetris.
To define elitism and what constitutes it is not as easy as the report makes it out to be, for there are poor and vulnerable across castes. While one may find Brahmins and Chhetris working as porters on Kathmandu’s streets, there are Janajati groups like Thakalis, Gurungs and Mananges living relatively well-off lives in the hills. And above all, the report has taken a side while almost the entire country is deeply divided over the issue of ethnic federalism, adding credence to the belief of the skeptics that ethnic federalism is not a home-grown idea but a donor-driven agenda. Against this background, the emotive response to the report was not unexpected.
Notwithstanding, this is no time to be reactive. The best course would be to understand why DFID, or any other agency like this, sponsors such reports and how we should respond to it.
As a British development agency, it is not strange that it should serve the Janajatis’ cause. Ever since the provision of British Gurkha started in 1817, many Janajatis have served the British cause risking their lives during the First and the Second World War. Even today, Gurkhas are staking their lives in the frontline of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Besides, development agencies like DFID and World Bank, in their pursuit for inclusive agenda, have virtually swept the development and economic agendas under the carpet. As Nepal expert David Seddon says in an interview, anthropologists, not economists, are dominant in these agencies. And they have contributed to the dominance of discourse that focuses on caste and ethnicity (Nepali Times, Aug 24-30). Given this, it is not surprising that DFID should choose some anti-Brahmin-Chhetri intellectuals to work on the report.
What is unnatural is the silence from the political and intellectual class over the report’s biased content. Had it the report been prepared, say, by the Indian embassy, there would perhaps have been street protests, and political parties would have made it an issue. But fifteen days since this daily published the briefs of the reports, hardly any politicians—not least the ones belonging to NC and UML, the parties blamed of promoting status quo and hill elitism—have spoken out against it openly. It is not difficult to figure out why.
One, despite the flaws, development agencies serve as human rights and law and order watchdogs in Nepal, besides contributing about 70 percent of our development budget. This leaves Nepal’s political class with no option but to bear with some of their shortcomings.
Second, development agencies (and diplomatic missions) are more powerful than government agencies. It is hard to challenge their positions and quell their rising influence. At times they seem more effective in checking lawlessness and corruption than domestic agencies. For instance, in February 2010, the then education minister Ramchandra Kushwaha’s corrupt acts were reported in the media. Kushwaha was said to have sold thousands of teachers’ quotas to his party cadres. The media decried this and demanded Kushwaha’s resignation. But Madhav Kumar Nepal, the then prime minister, could not muster enough courage to sack him. The turning point came when the European Union (EU) donors and World Bank warned that all donations would be stopped and funding for School Reform Plan (SRP) would be cut if the corrupt minister stayed in office. Kushwaha’s tenure was soon terminated.
To give another example, on May 26 last year, the American Embassy in Kathmandu decided to take tough action against the organizers of banda, threatening to put them under visa watch. Following this, two of the political organizations, Rastriya Prajatantra Party-Nepal (RPPN) and Nepal Federation of Indigenous Nationalities (NEFIN) issued clarification stating that their protest programs were not violent and forceful.
We cannot expect international organizations to cede their vested interests and work purely for Nepal’s welfare. As western agencies, they have their own agenda to pursue. As the former World Bank economist William Easterly puts it in his bestseller The White Man’s Burden, they are the “modern reincarnations of the infamous colonial conceit.” This is the reason why we should respond to narratives like the ones created by DFID, with a counter-narrative, by writing back, seeking evidence of their narrative, and responding to it by creating our version of truth from acknowledgements and inconstancies of their own report. This is how we can compensate for, what post-colonial theoretician Gayatri Spivak calls, “epistemic violence”—violence in knowledge, reality and truth.
Thus, it is important to question cultural and political credentials of those who prepared the report. It is important to know how many Brahmins and Chhetris, if any, were the respondents of the research and how many of them were ‘elites’.
The silence from political/intellectual class over the biased DFID report seems odd. We need to respond to such narratives with a counter-narrative.
Next, it is important to look into the acknowledgements and question the inconsistencies that underlie the report. For example, the report acknowledges that there has not been enough open discussion about what underlies the Madhesis’ and Janajatis’ demand for federalism and why the proposal for federal units based on various rational economic and geographic characteristics is unacceptable to Madhesis and Janajatis. This admission leaves enough space to create an alternative discourse of federalism. The report admits that the decentralization project of the 1990s could not materialize. It says the territory-based solution is not a good fit for the country with a highly intermixed population. The report sheds light on the need to reduce the power of Kathmandu.
These are the areas on which even those critical of the DFID reports may agree. Thus, we have to build our narrative from such positions. As people have started responding to DFID’s report with reason and facts, perhaps a counter-narrative is in the making.
mbpoudyal@yahoo.com
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