Global South Asia. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2018. xxiv, 249 pp. (Table, map, B&W photos.) US$30.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-295-74308-0.
Student activism has a complex history in Nepal because of its symbiotic relationship to political parties. Student activists in the country have been both dismissed and embraced as party foot soldiers, revolutionaries, opportunists, and idealists in different contexts. Snellinger’s book provides a compelling analysis of this fractured but integral aspect of the struggle for multi-party democracy in the country. Drawing from Karl Manheim’s theory of fresh contact, Snellinger contends that student leaders’ activism is part of the process of what she calls “political regeneration,” whereby “each generation interacts with the world anew based on their accumulated socio-cultural history” (20). More importantly, Snellinger shows how in doing so over time, the young activists also become part of the system they had sought to change, albeit bringing about incremental change.
Snellinger’s study is based on extensive multi-sited ethnographic research conducted as part of her PhD studies and beyond to cover a period between 2003 and 2015 in Kathmandu and 25 other districts in Nepal, and on archival research in Delhi and Varanasi, India. Although her analysis is drawn from participant observations and interviews with over one hundred participants, the book focuses on the narratives of five elite student leaders who have come-of-age during a decade of the Maoist insurgency (1996–2006), street protests for democracy (2003–2006), the Madhes uprisings (2007–2008), and the ousting of the monarchy to establish a federal democratic republic. These student leaders’ political lives take different trajectories as they move from street-level revolutionary politics to adapting to a party system, exercising “judicious opportunism” (4) along the way into national-level politics.
Chapter 1 starts with a rich historical background to student politics in Nepal during the Rana and Shah regimes, as well as the anti-colonial movements in India, relating this history to student leaders’ conceptualization of their own identities in chapter 2. Ever since the Panchayat government’s ban on political organizing in the 1960s, political parties in Nepal have depended on student organizations in indoctrinating new converts and in sustaining their mission. Complimenting this, student leaders also depend on the patronage of their mother parties, which provide them with a route into mainstream politics. For these leaders, struggles for material reform and fundamental rights are the ideological claims that justify their opportunistic moves (11). In other words, the end justifies the means. More often than not, there is little distinction between the two.
The rest of the book presents an agentive picture of youth leaders who have seamlessly reconciled their political ambitions as a necessary part of their samaj seva, or social service, with varying effects. One example Snellinger provides is of their conceptualization of the category of youth as a “malleable designator” (89) in Nepal, especially post-1990, where multiple generations have been collapsed into each other. Snellinger shows how leaders of the older generation who have designated themselves as youth under the National Youth Policy 2010—which defines youth as anyone between the age of 18 and 40—have internalized the “endemic mistrust in young people’s abilities” (94) and have inadvertently recreated the status quo. As Snellinger points out, responsibility is never given to the youth by the previous generation, whose members are themselves stuck between the stages of adolescence and adulthood in their political careers. In Nepal, the youth cohort continues to wait its turn to emerge into adulthood and to be given responsibility.
The ensuing frustrations and strategies to circumvent them are further emphasized in the remaining chapters. Chapter 4 shows how leaders’ political ideologies and individual interests inform their practices, which in turn shape the institutional culture in which they operate and negotiate their own positions. In chapters 5 and 6, Snellinger addresses the important issue of the limitations of activism through party politics in Nepal. She discusses how high-caste dominance is maintained in Nepal’s politics through hegemonic leadership within the political parties. She further points out that this paternalistic approach to seva has also been internalized by leaders who come from historically marginalized groups.
Snellinger touches upon how there is little incentive for minorities to join party and student politics. However, there is limited exploration of this important aspect within the context of student politics except in relation to gender and, briefly, in relation to ethnicity. While Snellinger is not hesitant in pointing out how elite student leaders’ subjective class and caste positions often informed their activism, the reader does not get to hear much of the voices from the margins of such activism. This is mainly due to the book’s focus on elite activists, which is perhaps one of the main drawbacks in what is otherwise an important and interesting read.
The attention on individual actors also provides a limited scope for critical inquiry into the role of student activism in Nepal for the benefit of students themselves. Two contemporary cases in point regarding the student unions that form part of Snellinger’s study are the retaliation by Tri Chandra campus student unions against multiple public allegations of sexual harassment by lecturers that surfaced in 2011 (“How Nepal’s oldest university let students down after a sexual harassment case,” The Kathmandu Post, 9 April 2019), and the inaction of Tribhuvan University student unions on similar allegations against a professor that surfaced in December 2018 (Bhrikuti Rai, “Tribuvan University lecturer sexually harassed female students for years,” The Kathmandu Post, 20 January 2019; Pranaya SJB Rana, “Manushi Yami Bhattarai: There’s a lot of hypocrisy in Nepali society,” The Kathmandu Post, 13 October 2019), though this second set of allegations came after the period covered by Snellinger’s study.
In addition to this, Snellinger’s book also does not elaborate on the complex relationship between activists and their allies, instead presenting foreign donors and transnational networks as mere tools that student leaders have been able to capitalize on. It would have been interesting to hear more directly from other actors who might together help shape the parameters of activism in Nepal. Despite this, the book presents a persuasive analysis of the relationship between idealism and opportunism in political activism in the country, and how this relationship has changed during Nepal’s volatile transition into a federal republic. The book is a useful resource for those interested in Nepal, youth studies, and social and political movements in South Asia.
Kumud Rana
University of Glasgow, Glasgow